June 25 - The Latest

What’s up everyone! I’ve been in hiding for quite a while now, so I’m about due to poke my head out and discuss the latest goings on. Thank you all for joining me - I’m sorry it’s been so long.

General Stuff

Okay…so it’s June 25. Let’s start with something simple. How has life been?

Day to day, my life has been pretty fun lately. The warm weather arrived. I’ve been averaging between 6 and 7 miles walked per day over the span of the last 10 weeks. 10 weeks is a pretty long stretch to maintain that much walking, but hey, I love walking.

On topic of walking, for the first time in his life, this spring / summer I’ve allowed my beagle Podo to start choosing where we go on our walks. So nowadays I just take him out and he leads me to wherever he wants to go. He’s five and a half years old at this point, so the kid knows where he’s going for the most part.

This period of letting Podo lead has radically changed what it’s like to go on my 2-3 dog walks per day. They average like an hour now as long as the weather is nice…that’s a big part of how my miles per day is getting pushed so high. It increasingly feels like he knows every small business owner in the 3 mile vicinity. One of his favorite spots for treats right now is the Soft Spot, a new favorite place of mine as well. It is self-described as a sapphic-centered, sober, queer space. If you’ve never come across it, sapphic is a term denoting women or non-binary people attracted to women. They have homemade slushes.

A second favorite spot of his is Silky’s Pub. While the front door of Silky’s doesn’t obviously have treats, savvy pups know that the cooks and other staff like to keep the side door open while they work, and this is the door you need to hit up if you want a treat. He has been to Silky’s so many times at this point that they actually put a sticker of a beagle up on the door in his honor. I don’t have a picture of it but I should really try to grab a picture for y’all it’s very cute.

A third spot he regularly hits is the Morrow Triangle - a patch of green space near the large hospital nearby where you can regularly find a guy grilling hot dogs and sausages to sell to the people of the area. Podo got a free hot dog from this guy once…and believe me, he filed that information away.

He’s also dragged me into some neighborhoods I’ve never been to. In the six years I’ve been living here, I’ve never once walked up the enormous hill that takes you into Garfield. Once Podo started leading the walks though, he ventured up there within the first few weeks. I get it - you never know what might be up there (no disrespect to Garfield residents, but there’s nothing up there lol).

Podo has even been expanding his social media presence. As readers of this blog know, speedrunning runs in the McLepke bloodline. Podo broke onto the scene with his first speedrun last week; here’s the video in case you missed it:

I kind of want to get a better camera to continue filming dog speedruns…

The Return of Fitness

My life often feels like it’s just looping. I get into good grooves, and then I remember why those good grooves happen. Then I lose the groove, and I flounder until I eventually realize I need to get back into the good groove I had been in. I ‘learn’ the same few lessons year after year. Part of the unfortunate truth is that everything you want to do in your life is hard work. There’s no easy way out.

Fitness has become the latest major cornerstone of my life to go through this lifecycle. 2016 - 2019 was a massive fitness peak for me, which ended as COVID came on the scene. It’s unlikely I’ll ever get into better shape than I was around the time COVID started. It was a lot of hard work combined with simply being in my physical prime as far as age goes. I was in my gym’s weightroom 5-6x a week. I’ve always been interested in fitness, but that was the first modern fitness wave.

COVID then resulted in a loss of all fitness. No weightroom available for a year and a half. My weight went from 170 to 225 as depression eating filled the fitness time slots. Then, the COVID vaccine. The second my COVID vaccine was deemed sufficient to wander around the outside world again, I was back in the weightroom. No longer at the VIM in Central Square Cambridge, I was now a mainstay at the Fitness Factory in Shadyside Pittsburgh. My weight drops from 225 all the way back down to 180. This was the second fitness wave. I’m back to lifting 5-6x a week.

Then, I injure my rotator cuff as a direct result of too much Olympic-style heavy lifting. That was summer 2023. I was blogging here during that time period. Y’all can go dig up the old posts if you want to see what the reaction at the time was, but it was a fairly devastating injury.

In hindsight, I can recognize that what followed fitness-wise wasn’t the right direction for me. I lost faith in fitness. Honestly, I felt betrayed by fitness. It went from a cornerstone of my life to being removed from my life entirely. Part of the issue was that I legitimately didn’t know what to do. I investigated returning to the weight room a few times, but now even older than I had been when I sustained the injury, I struggled to come up with a plan that I actually believed in. By the start of 2026, I was back up to a weight of 233, and completely and utterly out of shape, and unhappy about it.

Enter GYM - the local fitness cult that I joined at the end of April. For the first month, I attended one class per week. For the second month and a half, I attended two classes a week. Now, I’m in my second week of attending three classes a week. Technically you might want to track the third fitness wave even further back than this - perhaps to the two months of dance classes I took directly preceding the GYM experiment. Whenever you’d like to pinpoint as the start, I have no doubt that the third fitness wave is currently in progress.

You’re allowed to not believe in this grand proclamation, but I’m reporting from within the third fitness wave that this is indeed the third fitness wave.

GYM checks a number of boxes that I’ve never really needed to check before. Most importantly, it’s a workout studio focused on longevity. The cult leader is Chris, a 55 year old woman with an extensive workout background - including being a former cross country runner for the University of Pittsburgh. She’s worked out hard as a youngin’ gotten injured, and kept going. She’s familiar with injuries that are common to people lifting the Olympic bar, and as a result she only uses dumbbells in her studio. She prioritizes movements that will help you avoid injury as you age. She’s still here at 55, and she’s in way better shape than I am.

Looking across the three fitness waves, I can see that the first two ended due to a large scale event that changed my day-to-day life, and my fitness needs. The first ends with COVID, the second with an injury that completely changed my entire fitness life. I think an obvious lesson here is that I need to be a little more resilient.

The specific area of resiliency I need is the ability to come back after a major disruption to a routine that had been working. We’ll see if I remember any of this if and when the time comes that I can no longer attend GYM. Maybe I’ll be forced to move to a new neighborhood, maybe GYM will close, maybe I’ll get injured again - obviously we have no idea. But, hopefully the next response won’t be ‘gaining 50 pounds and losing 100% of all fitness’, and will instead be something more moderate. There’s more than enough evidence that I am a fitness person, and as long as I’m physically able, I always will be. I am prone to large-scale self-destruction in the face of major adversity. Those who know me well are aware of this. Maybe I’m gaining some awareness of it too.

Game Dev and Speedrunning

Let’s get back to the two life goals that define me as a person that I continually struggle to stay engaged with, shall we?

Well, in light of the fitness cycle analysis that we just did, how does that relate to game dev and/or speedrunning?

Let’s think back to time periods where these things were going really well. Starting with speedrunning, there was an extremely simple formula to the time period where I was seemingly getting new top 3 times on various leaderboards every month. That formula was, speedrunning was my #1 priority. During my peak speedrunning time period (essentially 2024 and early 2025) I was neither working on game dev, nor working out. I was living and breathing speedrunning if we’re being honest. I was putting several hours against speedrunning every single day, and the results quickly started speaking for themselves.

Now, what about game dev? I’d say the peak game dev productivity periods were 2022 - 2023, and the beginning of 2026. During the 2022 - 2023 sort of time period I was working out a lot and also working on game dev a lot, but not speedrunning at all. During the hot streak at the start of this year, 2026, I was really just doing game dev - very little working out, very little speedrunning.

If you combine this information, I think a truth that I need to come to grips with is: I have never, across ~six years of intermittently attempting to, been in a routine where I was happy with working out, speedrunning, and game dev all at once. It’s not a thing, and never has been.

Another truth: It is my life goal to get into a routine where I am happy with working out, speedrunning and game dev all at once (and my family life, which is the first thing that needs to be going well).

So….I’ll be noodling this situation.

Good luck everyone out there. I believe in you. Go forth and have a great weekend.

Later Update:

I forgot to mention, I consolidated a bunch of my initial Youtube snippets from level 1 into one longer video. It’s here if you’re looking for it: