Month-in-Review Highlights: September 2025

Me walking with the French athletes and their support team for the IRONMAN World Championships, as captured by my darling spouse. Nice, France. September 11, 2025.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

We came back from our August summer vacation and had only a few weeks to catch up with regular life before we returned to Nice for the Ironman World Championship that my spouse’s feats of endurance in late June had qualified him to race.

September, then, felt like a lot of ramping up and getting back into gear with one big break in the middle.

The links I added above will give anyone interested a much more in-depth report on the two races than I’ll provide here, but suffice to say he had an incredible experience in Nice for the championships other than a midtrip bout with food poisoning that had him seriously concerned that, after all the effort leading up to race week plus the travel and logistics, he wouldn’t be able to compete. (Spoiler: He competed and competed well.)

As for me, the month saw me edging back into my fiction writing. After putting one of the two novels I had in progress in the drawer after more than a year and a half of struggling with it, my morale had dropped below sea level. Out summer vacation came at a good time to get me out of my low spirits. When we got home, I felt the old itch for storytelling coming back.

Though I told myself I’d return to the novel still standing when we got back from Nice, I outlined a scene for it before we left. I couldn’t help myself. As it happened, getting back into the story gave me a confidence boost and a good on-ramp into more intense writing sprints when we returned to Lausanne with Arnaud’s finisher medal from the race. I even wiggled in a bit of writing time while out of town for the race, sketching the shape of another scene.

Since we got back to Lausanne for the autumn, I’ve been at it full-bore. I cross my fingers when not typing in hopes that this manuscript will actually turn into something worth anyone but me reading.

Otherwise, I had a lot of spirits-bolstering social time in September. As I head into full-on autumn (and then—gulp—winter), I need to ensure I prioritize social connection. I can get so focused on the work and on the life-maintenance tasks that keep my world running that I neglect the interpersonal moments that make all the rest worthwhile.