The Long Run: What Running Taught Me About Building Decentralized AI (and What Decentralized AI Taught Me About Running)
I didn't win my 5K race this morning. Spoiler alert for anyone who was holding their breath.
I crossed the finish line of my second timed race in the same number of years breathing hard, legs burning, somewhere in the comfortable middle of the pack where I belong. Three years ago, I would have laughed at the idea of signing up for a 5k and signing up for a half marathon, which I just did yesterday, would have seemed patently absurd. Yet here I am, lacing up my shoes every morning, logging miles, becoming someone I didn't know I could be.
This week, I sat in on another Church of Rao meeting—the weekly gathering where Bittensor developers share updates, debate protocol changes, and push the boundaries of what's possible in decentralized AI. As the only non-technical member of my team at Covenant AI, I've learned to take notes in a language that sometimes feels as foreign as my first running plan did.
But somewhere between mile two of this morning's run and the post-race euphoria, I realized these two impossible journeys—the solo morning miles and the collective effort to democratize artificial intelligence—are guided by the same philosophy. Both require the same stubborn faith in consistency, the same comfort with plateaus, the same willingness to become someone new.
The Person I Didn't Know I Was Becoming
George Sheehan, the philosopher-runner who wrote Running & Being, put it this way: "The more I run, the more I want to run, and the more I live a life conditioned and influenced and fashioned by my running. And the more I run, the more certain I am that I am heading for my real goal: to become the person I am."
I used to read quotes like that and nod appreciatively while remaining fundamentally unchanged. Now I understand them in my muscles and lungs.
Three years ago, I was an observer of both running and blockchain technology—appreciating from a safe distance, understanding neither as something for people like me. Then I started showing up. First as a curious observer of Bittensor, then as a small-stakes investor trying to understand this wild experiment in decentralized intelligence. I tried mining and failed spectacularly (so far). But failure turned out to be tuition in a university I didn't know I was enrolled in.
James Clear writes in Atomic Habits that "every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." I was voting without realizing it. Each morning run, even the terrible ones, was a vote for "runner." Each hour spent trying to understand how miners compete in subnets, how validators assess quality, how incentive mechanisms align human and machine intelligence—those were votes for something else I didn't have a name for yet.
Now I'm the marketer and storyteller for a decentralized AI project called Covenant, taking notes at developer meetings, translating technical breakthroughs into narratives, helping coordinate a community building something that wasn't supposed to be possible. It's absurd when I say it out loud. It's exactly who I'm becoming.
The Cathedral Built One Mile at a Time
Here's what nobody tells you about both running and building revolutionary technology: most days feel like nothing is happening.
This morning's 5K wasn't dramatically different from the one I ran six months ago. My pace improved by maybe thirty seconds per mile—imperceptible to anyone watching, barely noticeable to me. Yet that's six months of 5 AM wake-ups, hundreds of miles logged in the dark, a thousand small decisions to keep running when every rational part of my brain suggested stopping.
Clear calls this the "Plateau of Latent Potential." He uses the metaphor of an ice cube in a warming room: "Twenty-six degrees. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you. Twenty-nine degrees. Thirty degrees. Thirty-one. Still, nothing has happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt."
I watch this same physics play out in Bittensor every week. In Church of Rao meetings, developers discuss incremental improvements to subnet architectures, optimization of incentive mechanisms, debugging edge cases that most people will never see. It feels glacial until suddenly it doesn't.
What astonishes me most is the speed once teams find their rhythm. Our Covenant AI subnet teams—Templar, Basilica, and Grail—move with velocity that shouldn't be possible. I've watched them identify a protocol vulnerability, design a solution, implement it, and deploy across the network in hours. Not days. Hours. There's technical brilliance, yes, but also this wild sense of humor that keeps everything human even when the work gets intense. Our discord channels fill with memes and jokes while simultaneously shipping production code that handles millions in value.
Sam Dare, who founded Covenant AI and serves as custodian of all three subnets, sets the pace. I've learned more about excellence from watching him operate than from any business book. When things break—and in blockchain, things break—his response is immediate and unambiguous: "It doesn't mean Grail is broken. It doesn't mean Grail is a failure. It just means that we need to harden the protocol." No drama. No blame. Just: here's the problem, here's what we're doing about it, let's move.
His philosophy is brutally simple: "Look, fucking knock it out of the park. Be so good you become undeniable." And then he backs it up. "The only thing, the only merit that matters is your accomplishment." This isn't harsh—it's liberating. Your credentials don't matter. Your background doesn't matter. Ship something valuable, and the ecosystem notices.
Jacob Steeves, Bittensor's co-founder, built the protocol on this same principle of compound improvement. When he asked himself "How do we create a supercomputer larger than any centralized entity can create?" the answer wasn't a single breakthrough but a system designed for "indefinitely perpetuating its exploratory adaptive trajectory." In other words: show up every day, compete, improve, repeat.
Sheehan understood this about running: "I am first what I am in practice, and only after that what I am in a race." The daily training runs—the ones nobody sees, where nothing remarkable happens—those are where runners are actually made. Race day is just where you demonstrate what practice already built.
The Competition Against the Voice That Says Quit
Around mile two of this morning's race, right when my pace felt comfortable and my breathing was steady, a familiar voice piped up: This is fine. You don't need to push. You've already proven you can do this. Just cruise to the finish. Maybe just walk for a bit.
Sheehan named that voice: "It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit."
I didn't quit. I also didn't win. But I did something harder: I kept the promise I made to myself at the starting line to keep running.
After the race with my daughter—celebrating the real victory of showing up and finishing
This same voice shows up differently in my work with Covenant AI. It whispers that centralized AI has already won, that Google and OpenAI have too much of a head start, that coordinating thousands of decentralized miners toward collective intelligence is a beautiful impossibility. Some days, especially during the failed mining experiment, that voice got loud.
But here's what I've learned by watching this community: everyone hears that voice, and everyone shows up anyway.
The Bittensor community isn't delusional about the challenge. As the charter states: "We are approaching a forking point for mankind; down one road is the centralization of power and resources... Down the other road is the potential for sharing these resources through open protocols." They chose the harder road with open eyes.
Mary Murphy, in Cultures of Growth, found that transformative organizations aren't the ones that suppress doubt—they're the ones that create cultures where people can take on impossible challenges without the doubt becoming debilitating. When someone's subnet design fails, the question isn't "why weren't you smart enough to get it right?" but "what did we learn?"
Sam said something recently that captured this perfectly. When one of our subnets faced a significant challenge, he told the team: "There's no other team in the ecosystem that is equipped to take such a bold move." Not as empty encouragement—as statement of fact. The team had earned that confidence through consistent delivery. The boldness was warranted.
I failed at mining. But in a growth culture, that failure was just expensive tuition. Now I'm using communications skills I already had in a domain I never imagined, contributing to something that seemed impossible to me three years ago.
The System Is the Product
Sheehan had a radical idea about fitness: "Play is where life lives. Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is the process. Fitness is merely the product."
On the good runs—which is most of them now—I'm not grinding toward some future fitness goal. I'm just running, experiencing the morning air, feeling my body do what it was designed to do. The fitness is a delightful side effect of a process I'd do anyway.
Clear makes the same point differently: "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." Goals are about results. Systems are about the processes that lead to results. "True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It's not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement."
This is exactly how Bittensor is designed. There's no central authority setting goals, no roadmap promising specific capabilities by specific dates. Instead, there's a system: miners produce AI outputs, validators assess quality, TAO tokens flow to valuable contributions, subnets compete for limited slots, the most valuable survive.
The goal—democratizing AI, building intelligence networks that rival centralized giants—emerges from the system. The process is the product.
When I sit in on developer meetings, I'm struck by how much energy goes into refining the system itself rather than chasing specific outcome metrics. How do we make validation more robust? How do we prevent gaming? How do we balance competition with collaboration? How do we ensure contributors are rewarded fairly? Get the system right, and breakthrough emerges naturally.
My half marathon training plan is a system. I'm not fixated on a finish time goal. I'm committed to the system: run these prescribed miles at these prescribed paces, rest when scheduled, trust the process. On race day, whatever time I run will be exactly what this system built. And the day after the race, I'll still have the system.
Every Day, The World Changes
Here's what makes both running and building decentralized AI addictive: every single day, you get to witness what you're capable of.
Not in some dramatic, highlight-reel way. Most days the evidence is subtle—a hill that felt slightly easier, a pace that felt slightly more sustainable, a technical concept that finally clicked. But Clear is right: "Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you're willing to stick with them for years."
In Church of Rao meetings, I watch people casually discuss breakthroughs that would have been science fiction three years ago. And they're already moving on to the next challenge before I've fully processed the current one.
The pace is intoxicating and occasionally overwhelming. Every day I witness something that blows my mind. But Murphy's research on organizational culture offers a framework: growth cultures normalize continuous learning. The goal isn't to master a static body of knowledge—it's to stay in the learning flow.
That's why I can contribute as the only non-technical team member. My value isn't knowing everything about distributed systems or machine learning (I don't). My value is staying in the learning flow, asking questions, translating between technical and narrative domains, helping coordinate a community that's moving faster than any individual can fully track.
The Water We're Swimming In
Murphy opens Cultures of Growth with a fish metaphor: "Imagine a fish swimming in a lake. Saying that mindset is a purely individual characteristic is like saying that how that fish behaves comes down to the fish, alone. It completely overlooks what's going on in the water."
Culture is the water we swim in. It shapes what seems possible, what seems normal, what seems worth attempting.
Three years ago, the water I was swimming in made running seem like something for "athletes"—a category I didn't belong to. It made cryptocurrency seem like gambling, decentralized AI like fantasy, career pivots into technical fields like irresponsibility.
Then I changed waters.
I started running with RISE Run Club—every Saturday morning at 7am—where showing up mattered more than pace. I joined Bittensor communities where curiosity mattered more than credentials. I found people attempting the impossible as their daily practice.
Saturday mornings with RISE Run Club—where showing up matters more than pace
Clear writes: "One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior." In my new waters, running every morning wasn't exceptional—it was what people did. Contributing to open-source AI protocols wasn't audacious—it was Tuesday.
This is what I find most remarkable about the Bittensor ecosystem: the culture actively designs itself for growth. The Delegate Charter isn't just a governance document—it's a cultural manifesto. "For us, open-source is a moral imperative." "The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse."
These aren't platitudes. They're design specifications for the cultural water. They attract people who want to swim in waters where decentralization is normal, where building in public is expected, where the impossible is just the current edge of the possible.
Murphy found that the best cultures are deliberately designed but locally enacted. Leadership can set principles, but culture lives in daily interactions. Every Church of Rao meeting where developers respectfully debate approaches, every Discord conversation where newcomers get patient explanations, every subnet launch that pushes boundaries—these are the daily interactions that make the water what it is.
I'm part of creating that water now. As a communications professional, my job is partly to make the culture visible to itself, to tell stories that reinforce cultural values, to help newcomers understand the waters they're entering.
The Long Run Ahead
I'm not training for a half marathon to win it. I'm training because I want to know what I'm capable of when I commit to a system and trust the process. I want to experience that moment around mile 10 when my brain insists I should stop and my legs keep moving anyway. I want to cross a finish line having discovered something about who I'm becoming.
I'm not working in decentralized AI because I think we'll achieve some specific outcome on some specific timeline. I'm here because I want to be part of a community attempting the impossible as their daily practice. I want to witness what emerges when you align incentives properly and let emergence do its work. I want to tell stories about what becomes possible when people refuse to accept that certain waters are off-limits to fish like them.
Sheehan's most radical claim was this: "Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be."
Not the person you currently are. Not the person society says you should be. The person you were meant to be—which you can only discover by showing up consistently, building systems that compound, surrounding yourself with growth culture, and running toward your potential even when the finish line is distant and unclear.
Three years ago, I wouldn't have believed I'd be writing this. I wouldn't have believed I'd be training for a half marathon while simultaneously helping coordinate a decentralized AI protocol. I wouldn't have believed that running and building revolutionary technology would turn out to be the same practice, guided by the same philosophy, requiring the same daily faith in processes that transform us slowly then suddenly.
But here I am. Still nowhere near winning any races. Still the least technical person in most meetings I attend. Still learning, still running, still becoming.
I'm grateful to Sam for showing me what undeniable looks like. Grateful to the Templar, Basilica, and Grail teams for letting me witness technical excellence with humor intact. Grateful to RISE Run Club for Saturday mornings that proved I could. Grateful to the Bittensor community for building waters worth swimming in.
The long run continues. The water we're swimming in keeps changing because we keep changing it. The impossible becomes improbable becomes inevitable becomes yesterday's foundation for tomorrow's impossibility.
I still don't know exactly where any of this leads. But I know this: I'm showing up tomorrow, lacing up my shoes, logging my miles, taking my notes, contributing my part to systems larger than myself, trusting that consistency compounds in ways we can't predict but can absolutely rely on.
And that's enough. Actually, it's everything.
For more on Bittensor's vision of decentralized intelligence, visit bittensor.com. For community discussions and Church of Rao meeting updates, join the Bittensor Discord.
For anyone inspired to explore running philosophy, I can't recommend George Sheehan's "Running & Being" highly enough. James Clear's "Atomic Habits" and Mary Murphy's "Cultures of Growth" have profoundly shaped how I think about personal and organizational transformation.
For anyone in Stratford, come join us at City Hall on Saturday mornings at 7am for RISE Run Club.