A Podium and the IT Revolution
There is a distinct, sharp flavor to the air at 7:00 AM on a race morning. It is an eclectic mix of adrenaline, Icy-Hot, and the squeak of synthetic race bibs. But last weekend, standing on a wooden riser an hour after the start with two other finishers, the air felt a bit different. For the first time in fourteen years, I was back on the podium.
At age 70, standing there with an age-group award hanging around my neck, my mind did what it always did after decades spent in operating systems, development and design--it looked to the Dev process, and the Prod result. Fourteen years is an eternity in the technology sector. Fourteen years ago, the cloud was a novel corporate transition, deep learning was mostly academic, and the smartphone was just beginning to corral us all into interpersonal isolation.
I spent my career trying to ride the rocket of overwhelming technical information or, at least, watch where it was headed. But as I caught my breath and looked down at my silver medal, I realized that the grueling, quiet process of training for a 5K road race at seventy is perhaps the most perfect metaphor we have for coping with the relentless acceleration of modern information technology.
When you are 25, you can run a 5K on raw talent and a bad diet. I did. You can sprint, redline your heart rate, and force your way to the finish line through sheer kinetic stubbornness.
When you train at 70, sprinting is a fast track to a torn quad or a zillion other structural failures. You learn to respect your physiological redline even if it is maddeningly slow. You focus heavily on pacing, aerobic threshold, and efficient energy expenditure. You make the effort and run as hard as you ever might have run --you just don't go as fast anymore.
The tech world operates in a state of permanent sprint. Every week brings a large language model, a new framework, or an interface that threatens to render yesterday's skills obsolete. If you try to sprint after every single shiny object in the tech ecosystem, you will suffer cognitive burnout. Coping with tech acceleration requires us to embrace our aerobic base of lifelong learning--choosing a sustainable pacing strategy over frantic, reactive sprinting.
In my IT days, I spent time on optimization--making sure old code could run on new infrastructure, new code could run in a legacy environment, or that software upgrades didn't brick any of those resources.
Training a 70-year-old body is an intense exercise in refactoring. The joints are stiffer, muscle mass naturally declines, and recovery loops take twice as long. The default settings of your youth are, at best, just an annoying memory. You have to actively invest in mobility work, strength training, and strict recovery cycles just to maintain baseline performance. Your stopwatch now records time more like a calendar.
Navigating modern IT infrastructure requires us to consciously refactor our mind. The user interfaces of today don't look like the command lines or desktop environments we grew up configuring. To be functional, we have to deliberately loosen our rigid mental models, accept that our personal processing speed has changed, and invest in assistive technology in our environments.
Fourteen years ago, my running report card was inside a cheap Casio runners watch. Today, my wrist is strapped to a device that tracks VO2 max, heart rate variability, stride power, and sleep architecture. In training mode, this unrelenting device excoriates me out loud for being "Too Slow," "Too Fast" (really rarely that one), or "Pace within target range" as I lumber along.
The data is only useful if you know how to filter the signal from the noise. If I noticed every minor dip in my training metrics, I would never lace up my shoes. I had to learn which data mattered for long-term durability and which data were just distractions.
The acceleration of technology has created an information flood. We are bombarded with notifications, algorithmic opinions, and an endless stream of digital noise. Coping doesn't mean disconnecting entirely; it means developing strict personal filtering protocols. It means knowing which metrics actually improve your digital life and ignoring the rest.
Standing on that podium, I looked at the younger runners finishing behind (the few) and ahead (the many) of me. In running, as in technology, it is easy to look at the speed of the world around you and feel a creeping sense of obsolescence. Endurance sports, though, reveal a beautiful truth: the race is both intensely communal and deeply solitary. You are running with the pack, and share their energy--but you are ultimately executing your own race plan.
The tech revolution can leave older generations feeling like technology spectators as younger digital natives zoom all around them. But my return to the podium reminded me that experience compounds. Fourteen years of absence didn't mean I lost the ability to compete; it meant I had fourteen years of accrued wisdom regarding pacing, emotional resilience, and consistency fighting against old-age decline.
We don't need to write the algorithms to benefit from them, nor do we need to build the networks to find meaningful space within them. We just have to stay on the course, run our race, and remember that if you stay consistent long enough, the finish line will provide its own rewards.
Recent college graduates face technology conscription: the expectation to feed, train, and validate the very AI models designed to automate their future career paths.