The Pace We Keep

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

Welcome to our newest subscribers!

If you've been reading for a while, great to have you back.

Last Sunday, two men completed a marathon in under two hours in London, England.

A wall that has stood for the entire history of the sport came down twice in just eleven seconds.

Remarkable.

That's where we're starting this week.

Exploring the people who raise our game just by being around us, why the company we keep shapes more than we realise, and what happens when someone outworks every expectation placed on them.

Rachael Blackmore did exactly that on her way from a dairy farm in Tipperary to making Grand National history.

There's also an album I've been choosing for over a decade and a simple idea about jars and rocks, that might change the way you plan your morning.

Let's go.

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

Staying behind on tech trends can be a career killer.

But let’s face it, no one has hours to spare every week trying to stay updated.

That’s why over 200,000 engineers at companies like Google, Meta, and Apple read The Code twice a week.

Here’s why it works:

Join 200,000+ engineers who read The Code to stay ahead of the curve.

There are records in sport, and then there are walls.

Records exist to be broken.

Walls are different.

A wall is the barrier we've been told the human body will never cross.

Until, one ordinary Sunday morning, somebody crosses it.

And that same wall, having stood for the entire history of marathon running, fell again eleven seconds later.

Last Sunday in London, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya crossed the finish line of the London Marathon in 1:59:30.

The first man, ever, to officially run a marathon in under two hours.

Eleven seconds later, Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia crossed in 1:59:41.

Two men.

Under two hours.

On the same morning.

For decades, "sub-2" was a phrase the running world used the way engineers once spoke of the sound barrier.

A theoretical limit.

An idea more than a number.

Something we'd been told the human body might never reach.

By Sunday afternoon, it had happened twice.

I've run three marathons in my life, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that 42.2 kilometres is not a casual distance.

It tests every system in your body and every story you've ever told yourself.

Somewhere around the 30-kilometre mark, your legs become unfamiliar to you.

Your mind starts negotiating with the asphalt.

The thing that always pulled me through, every single time, was the community of other runners.

A stranger holding my pace.

A friend a step ahead of me.

A woman in her sixties refusing to walk and making me feel ashamed to even consider it.

Every distance runner knows this feeling.

The subtle lift that happens when someone slightly faster than you pulls into your peripheral vision.

You don't need to talk to them.

You don't need to know them.

You lock onto the back of their shirt and realise you can run a little quicker than you thought.

That, in essence, is what Sawe and Kejelcha gave each other on Sunday.

A back to chase.

There's a story in the running world that anyone old enough to read this newsletter has likely heard.

For years, doctors and scientists declared the four-minute mile to be physically impossible.

Some warned the body simply couldn't sustain it.

Then on a windy May afternoon in 1954, a young medical student in Oxford named Roger Bannister did it.

3:59.4.

The ceiling fell.

The part that always lands for me is what came next.

Forty-six days later, an Australian runner named John Landy ran the mile in 3:58.0, breaking Bannister's brand-new record.

By the end of the next year, several others had done it.

Today, the best high schoolers in the world do it.

What had shifted was the human mind rather than the human body suddenly evolving.

The barrier had never lived in the legs.

The moment Bannister proved it could fall, the floodgates opened for everyone else who'd been waiting.

Sunday's race in London felt like that same moment, except watched live by the world.

A wall came down.

And it came down for two people at once.

The people we surround ourselves with set our pace.

That's true of running, and it's true of every other corner of our lives.

The friends we share dinners with, shape what we eat.

The colleagues we trade ideas with, shape how we think.

The voices we let into our home, shape what feels normal to our kids.

We rarely notice this because the influence is gradual, the way water shapes stone.

But over enough years, it shapes everything.

A body of psychological research, going back to Solomon Asch in the 1950s and continuing through the work of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, keeps confirming the same uncomfortable truth.

We become more like the people around us than we'd ever care to admit.

Which is good news, depending on who's around us.

If those people are aiming higher than we are, we'll find ourselves raising our gaze.

If those people are settling, we'll settle right alongside them.

Often without realising we ever made the choice.

This is why "rivalry raises the bar" is more than just a sports idea.

It's a rule of human life that happens to be most visible at the front of a marathon field.

Take a moment with what Yomif Kejelcha did on Sunday.

He ran a marathon in under two hours.

He ran what was, until that morning, the fastest legal marathon in human history.

He did it in his first marathon ever.

And he finished second.

By eleven seconds.

That has to sting in a way most of us will never experience.

To break a wall that nobody before you has ever broken.

To run a time that humanity, until that day, had been told was impossible.

And to finish your race watching another man's back disappear into the cheering crowd ahead of you.

I hope, more than anything, that he is allowed to feel proud of what he did.

Because if he can hold the right perspective, his time will come.

Sebastian Coe finished second to Steve Ovett in the 800m at the Moscow Olympics.

He went on to define the next era of middle-distance running.

Iron sharpened iron on Sunday morning and now the iron knows what it's capable of.

What a gift to carry into your next race.

A few simple ideas to carry with you this week:

Audit who sets your pace: Think about the five people whose voices you hear most often during your week. Are they pulling your standards up, or quietly letting them slide? You won't always like the answer, but the answer matters.

Get into harder rooms: Spend time in spaces where you're not the most accomplished person in the room. The discomfort of feeling slow is the same discomfort that makes you faster. It's the back of someone else's shirt that lifts your pace.

Read and listen above your level: Pick up writers, podcasts and conversations that stretch your thinking, not just confirm it. Curiosity is a muscle that responds well to good company.

Cheer the people running near you: The lift in a marathon goes both ways. The runner you encourage today might be the one who pulls you through your hardest mile next year. Generosity has a long return horizon.

Be the shirt someone chases: You don't need a world record to set a pace for somebody behind you. Live with the kind of intention that quietly raises the standard for the people in your peripheral vision.

My Takeaway

What got me about Sunday wasn't the times, even though they are extraordinary.

It was the silent agreement between two strangers at the front of a marathon field.

Each of them choosing, by their effort alone, to pull the other into a place neither of them could have reached on his own.

That's what the best human company has always done for us.

It pulls us into rooms our quieter self would never have walked into.

It runs us into times our quieter self would never have believed.

It refuses to let us settle for the version of ourselves we've already met.

We’re all running, in our own ways, our own marathons.

Some of them have finish lines we can see.

Most of them don't.

What we can decide, every single day, is who we run with.

The friends. The mentors. The colleagues.

The strangers a step ahead of us whose pace we choose to chase.

Pick well.

Pick people who care about something more than approval.

Pick people who haven't given up on the impossible.

Pick people who make you better just by being there.

Because the time you run is shaped by the company you keep.

And every once in a while, on a perfectly cool Sunday morning in London, two of those people will pull a wall down with their bare legs and remind the rest of us what we've been built to do.

If you want to better understand just how (mindbogglingly) fast these two were going, checkout this video:

🌿 Six Ordinary People Took On Big Oil — and Won The Goldman Environmental Prize — often called the Green Nobels — this year honoured six grassroots heroes who halted fracking in Colombia, won the first youth-led climate litigation case in Asia, stopped a mega-mine in Alaska, and more. No armies. No billions. Just people who decided something was wrong and didn't stop until it changed. If you ever wonder whether individuals can actually move things, read this. Read more →

👁️ Scientists May Have Found a Way to Reverse Age-Related Vision Loss Researchers at UC Irvine have identified that targeting the ELOVL2 ageing gene can restore vital fatty acids in the retina — potentially reversing vision decline that was previously considered a one-way street. It's early days, but it's the kind of finding that quietly changes what we thought was possible. Read more →

😊 The World Is Getting Happier — and the Numbers Are Clearer Than You'd Think The 2026 World Happiness Report found that since 2006, nearly twice as many countries have experienced significant happiness gains as losses — 79 countries versus 41. It's not a perfect picture, and it doesn't mean everything is fine. But it does mean the story of relentless global decline isn't the full story either. Read more →

📈 The Midlife Happiness Dip? A Major New Study Says It's More Complicated Than That For decades, pop psychology has leaned on the idea that happiness bottoms out in midlife before recovering later. A major new study has challenged that curve in some genuinely interesting ways — and the findings are more hopeful, and more nuanced, than the original theory suggested. Read more →

🏡 Blue Zones Revisited — the Real Story Behind Where People Live Longest The famous longevity hotspots — Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria — have been celebrated and debated for years. A new study has gone back in with fresh eyes, and found that the real picture of why people in these places live longer is more nuanced than the lifestyle branding suggested. And more actionable, too. Read more →

On April 10th, 2021, Rachael Blackmore crossed the finish line at Aintree on a horse called Minella Times becoming the first woman to win the Grand National.

182 years.

That's how long the race had been running.

Only 19 women had ever competed in it and the best any had managed was third place.

Due to COVID protocols there were no spectators to witness it as the stands were empty.

Meaning one of the biggest moments in the history of the race, happened in near silence.

Blackmore dismounted, gave a couple of interviews, deflected the obvious questions about gender, and got on with things.

That's pretty much how she's approached everything.

Rachael grew up on a dairy farm in Killenaule, County Tipperary.

Her mother was a teacher and her father a farmer.

Their family had no ties to racing, no history in the sport, and no advantages.

She got her first pony, Bubbles, at age seven, joined the local pony club and even began riding in hunts.

One of her earliest pony race wins came in Cork, beating a field that included Paul Townend, who'd go on to become one of the top jockeys in Ireland.

She completed her studies in equine science at the University of Limerick while also competing as an amateur.

Her first win under rules came in February 2011 on a horse called Stowaway Pearl.

In 2015, Rachael turned professional.

By then she'd already spent years doing the thing that would come to define her entire career.

Showing up, saying very little and letting her riding speak for itself.

2021 was extraordinary for Rachael, even by the standards of elite sport.

At the Cheltenham Festival, Blackmore became the first woman to win the Champion Hurdle, riding Honeysuckle, a brilliant mare she'd partner in all 19 of her races, winning 17 of them.

She finished the four days with six winners, taking the leading jockey title.

Another first.

Weeks later, Aintree.

The Grand National.

The race Charlotte Brew had been the first woman to ride in, forty-four years earlier.

Blackmore and Minella Times started off at 11/1, passed the post six and a half lengths clear of the next horse, and rewrote the record books.

By December, she'd won the BBC World Sport Star of the Year.

The following year, she became the first woman to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup, riding A Plus Tard to a fifteen-length victory.

Rachael Blackmore finished with 575 career wins by the time she was done.

Every major race in National Hunt racing, ticked off.

Reading about her childhood on the farm takes me straight back to my grandparents' property in Australia.

I spent a lot of time there as a kid, and the thing I loved most was the horses.

Riding around the property with my Pa on my horse, Piccolo, is one of those core memories that has stayed with me ever since.

I was ten.

Piccolo was north of thirty, an old soul for a young rider.

The closest I ever came to horse racing was the day something spooked Piccolo and the old fella bolted back to the property with me hanging on for dear life.

I'd never seen him move like that, it scared the pants off me.

That was my first and last experience with horse racing.

Safe to say Rachael Blackmore and I took very different paths from the saddle.

In September 2024, a fall at Downpatrick left Blackmore with a broken bone in her neck.

As a result, she’d miss the next three months of racing.

When she returned for the Cheltenham Festival in March 2025, something had shifted.

She later said that leaving the course that week was the first time she'd thought the end might be close.

On May 12th, 2025, she announced her immediate retirement.

At the age of 35.

"My days of being a jockey have come to an end," she said.

"I feel the time is right. I'm sad but I'm also incredibly grateful for what my life has been for the past 16 years. I just feel so lucky to have been legged up on the horses I have, and to have experienced success I never even dreamt could be possible."

A month later, she announced she was expecting her first child.

She married her long-term partner, fellow jockey Brian Hayes, in January this year.

And just weeks ago, on April 9th, she was inducted onto the Grand National Legends roll of honour at Aintree.

A bar at the course now carries her name.

There's something about Rachael Blackmore's story that I keep coming back to.

The way she rode out of a dairy farm in Tipperary without fanfare, spending years in the amateur ranks where nobody was watching.

Perfecting her skillset and outworking the competition.

Letting the results pile up until the record books had no choice but to make room for her.

She never once asked to be treated differently.

She never campaigned for recognition.

When the cameras arrived, she talked about the horses.

I think a lot of us carry something we've been steadily building that hasn't had its Aintree moment yet.

The temptation is to wonder if anyone's paying attention, or to chase the noise just to feel like the effort counts.

Blackmore's career is proof that it counts whether anyone's watching or not.

575 wins.

A place in history.

Her name on the wall at Aintree.

And she walked away on her own terms, at 35, with her integrity completely intact.

Not bad for a girl from a dairy farm in Tipperary.

What's the thing you've been working at that deserves a little more trust?

A little more patience?

Because the loudest voice in the room rarely belongs to the most accomplished person in it.

The one who's been putting in the work, day after day, with no fanfare, usually is.

If you’d like to hear about Rachael’s life from her proud mother, check out this brief video:

Seeing the Coachella festival take place in recent weeks has reminded me of two things.

That festivals are an incredible way to find and experience new music and how grateful I am to have attended when the focus was the music.

I wasn't looking for a new favourite band that day.

I was simply wandering between stages, half-listening to something drifting from the next field over, when a sound stopped me dead.

That's how I stumbled across Foals.

I caught the very start of their set by accident having never heard of them.

There was something in the sound that made me stop walking and start moving closer.

I worked my way toward the front and stayed there, glued, for the entire hour.

I didn't know a single song.

That didn't matter.

Yannis Philippakis is one of those frontmen who makes the crowd feel like it's all happening just for them.

He throws himself into it completely, guitar slung low, voice raw, every song delivered like it might be the last one they'll ever play.

I left that show as a fan.

And Holy Fire was the album they released after capturing my full attention.

Released in 2013, Holy Fire was Foals' third studio album, and the one that really announced them to the world.

It hit number two on the UK charts and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.

But stats don't tell you much about how an album actually feels.

What I can tell you is that from the first seconds of the opening track “Prelude”, all tension and build, this record makes you sit up straight.

It's designed to be listened to at full volume, ideally with nowhere to be.

Produced by Flood and Alan Moulder (the team behind records by U2, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins), Holy Fire has a sound that's precise without feeling clinical.

The guitars are rhythmic and driving.

The synths are doing their thing in the background.

Everything sits together in a way that rewards a proper listen.

"Inhaler" is the centrepiece, and it earns that spot.

It opens with a riff that does something to your nervous system before your brain has caught up, coiling slowly before it releases into something huge.

The first time you hear it fully open up, it's difficult not to physically react.

It's a rare song that feels just as massive in your headphones as it does on a festival stage.

"My Number" is their sunnier moment and a track with real warmth in it, built around a guitar line that just swings.

This became their biggest hit, and you can see why.

It sneaks into your head and stays there throughout the day.

Then the album shifts.

"Milk & Black Spiders" slows everything down into something darker and more intimate, and by the time "Moon" closes things out, the energy of the dance floor has fully dissipated and all that's left is reflection.

That arc, from tension to euphoria to introspection, is what makes Holy Fire worth so much more than a casual listen.

A few ways to get the most from this great album:

Listen to it in order: Holy Fire was made as a complete piece, and the sequencing matters. Let it run from "Prelude" to "Moon" without shuffling. The emotional shift across the full runtime is part of the experience.

Don't bail at the halfway mark: A lot of listeners stick to the first four or five tracks. Don't. The mood shift that starts around "Milk & Black Spiders" is what gives the album its real depth, and "Moon" as a closer is worth the whole journey to get there.

Come back to it: I've been reaching for Holy Fire for over a decade. What surprises me is how different it sounds depending on my headspace. Some days "Inhaler" comes on and I have to turn it up immediately. Other days it's the stretch of "Late Night" that lands. Give music room to keep surprising you.

Watching some Coachella performances on YouTube over the past couple of weeks, I kept being pulled back to that first Foals show.

It’s one of the clearest memories I have from a festival.

The moment you realise you've discovered something you're going to love for a long time is one of the best feelings music can give you.

One minute you've never heard of a band.

The next, you're standing close to the front, being absolutely floored, already knowing you'd be following them for years.

Holy Fire has been that album for me ever since, and those that precede and follow it are of similar quality.

I reach for it when I want something with real energy, real weight, and a track list that earns its runtime.

If you've never listened to Foals, this is the place to start.

Press play on "Prelude", let it build, and then just see what happens when "Inhaler" kicks in.

I'll be surprised if you make it through the first 30 seconds without turning it up.

Oh, and if you ever have a chance to see them live?

Don’t hesitate.

This video captures the precise moment I became a fan, the presence of the crowd (and lack of phones) was phenomenal:

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

You know those days where you're busy from the moment you wake up until the moment you collapse on the couch?

You answered every email.

Ticked off a dozen small tasks.

Ran errands.

Replied to messages.

Kept the wheels turning.

And yet, when you look back at the day, something feels off.

You were productive, but not on anything that mattered.

There's an old demonstration (often credited to Stephen Covey) that explains this feeling perfectly.

A professor stands in front of a class holding an empty glass jar.

He fills it with large rocks and asks, "Is the jar full?"

The students say yes.

He pours in pebbles, which settle into the gaps.

"Full now?" Yes again.

Then sand, which fills the smaller spaces.

Then water, which soaks into whatever room remains.

The class is impressed.

Then he makes his point.

If you put the sand in first, the big rocks will never fit.

The rocks represent the things that genuinely matter to you.

Your health, your family, the relationships you'd fight to keep.

The work that gives you purpose.

The pebbles are important but secondary.

Career goals, projects, friendships that need attention.

The sand is the filler.

Emails, scrolling, errands, admin, busywork that feels productive but rarely moves the needle.

And the water? That's the truly trivial stuff.

The noise that seeps in wherever you let it.

Most of us don't consciously choose sand over rocks.

We just start the day reactively.

Inbox first, notifications first, other people's urgency first.

By the time we look up, the day has been spent on pebbles and sand.

The rocks never got touched.

Not because we don't care about them, but because we gave everything else a head start.

There's a principle called Parkinson's Law that describes this well.

The idea that tasks expand to fill whatever time you give them.

Hand a small task an open morning and it will happily consume the whole thing.

Meanwhile the important conversation, the exercise, the creative work, the quality time?

They keep getting pushed to "later."

Later rarely comes.

Rocks first, every morning: Before you open your inbox or check your phone, ask yourself: what are the one or two things today that will still matter next week? Those go in the jar first. Everything else works around them.

Name your sand: Most of us know what our rocks are. We're less honest about what our sand is. The habitual scrolling. The meetings that could be emails. The tasks we do because they're easy, rather than important. Name them and you'll start catching yourself mid-pour.

Protect the rocks fiercely: Time with people you love, your health, your creative energy. They don't announce themselves as urgent. They're also easy to reschedule and easy to shrink.

I think about this jar more often than I'd expect.

Especially on weeks where the days blur together and I reach Friday wondering where the time went.

It's almost never because I wasn't doing enough.

It's because I filled the jar in the wrong order.

These days, I structure my mornings around this idea without even calling it that.

Anything that requires real thought, like writing and this newsletter, that gets my best hours, roughly 8:30 to 11:30, before my brain starts losing its edge.

The emails, the admin, the smaller tasks?

They come after lunch and after my workout.

It's a simple shift, but it means I almost always reach the end of the day feeling like I moved something meaningful forward.

The rocks went in first.

Everything else found its place around them.

The jar is the same size for all of us.

Same hours and same finite energy.

The difference is what goes in first.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

🌟 What's Inside:

Ready to embrace the power of gratitude?

Click here to order a copy now!

New to this newsletter? - Subscribe for free and join the Brighter Side!

Follow on Threads & Instagram & X for daily insights from the Brighter Side.

Follow on Medium for longer form content - @TheBSofE