Topping Up rounds up what's happening in my world and things that caught my attention. To subscribe to my newsletter, click the paper airplane icon on the right side of any page.

Back to school and the end of summer has seemingly brought a fresh wave of COVID — I hope you are staying healthy out there. This time of year is the best weather for the Central Coast of California, so I’ve been enjoying warm sunny days in Monterey.

Starting over is one of the most dominant experiences of the last decade for me — wrestling with the feeling of comparing myself to past achievements while trying to maintain gratitude for the health I have. With the warm weather and fresh clearance from my doctors to get fully back into training, I’ve been out on my bike for the first time this year, and last weekend, I ran my first 10k since before my surgery (and as you can see above, the sea lions are back in Monterey.) Read more: Not Knowing is Most Intimate.

Wrapping up my Summer Blockbuster Watch, had us revisiting movies I never really think about any more, specifically, Grease and Ghost (1990). Both of these movies feel particularly strange in modern times, but Grease is a great comp for the cultural phenomenon that has been Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters this summer. If you were a kid in the 80s, you couldn’t escape the popularity of Grease and its stars, Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. Everyone was taking any excuse to wear poodle skirts, go to sing-a-long screenings in gymnasiums, and don white t-shirts and slick our hair back.

Ghost similarly came out of nowhere on the backs of its stars, Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze and grossed over half-a-billion dollars at the global box office. Without Whoopi Goldberg keeping this supernatural romantic thriller grounded with humor and resistance, the movie would have totally gone off the rails. Watching Ghost now, I would put it in a time capsule as the sole artifact to represent 1990. The movie slams together the maximalist nature of the 80s with a more serious and gritty decade rising, bucking the mainstream for everything indie turned up to 11.

Also mining the past, Hulu has released the first series based on Ridley Scott’s Alien. Alien Earth goes back in time to this planet, where just a few corporations compete to be in charge of, well, everything. The show expands upon Scott’s world to include new species of alien life (as well as the xenomorph) being collected for research purposes, but also expands artificial life in the form of androids in the original films to include cyborgs and consciousness uploaded into synthetic bodies. The show looks great, capturing the mood of Scott’s world, and it’s sufficiently creepy as we get xenomorph action right out of the gate. However, it also shows off the difficulty in stretching such familiar stories from the cinema into long episodes that have a hard time balancing story and action. They just dropped the fourth episode in a six episode run, and if you’re a fan of the franchise, it’s worth watching.

This morning, I had an email from Alex Hutchinson with a link to his story in Outside Magazine, “What You Need to Know About the New Data Linking Marathons to Colon Cancer.” The description reads,

The study referenced is from doctors at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute and was presented at 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting (an association for clinical oncology.) The findings, summarized in Hutchison’s article found,

As you can imagine, the data is causing a lot of concern and highlighting the need to screen for colon cancer earlier than what we’ve been used to historically. The data set included folks who had completed 2+ ultramarathons or 5 marathons and my mind immediately went to wondering what the cause was. The first line of the study text reads,

This hypothesis makes sense, though I haven’t yet found research to elaborate on it. To be fair, the study wasn’t designed to find a cause, but I have my own ideas. Having spent a decade living with the impact of gastrointestinal injury from Crohn’s disease as well as endurance training. I wrote about the connection between inflammation and endurance training while training for a marathon in my piece from 2023, “Inflammation Demystified: Where Endurance Training and Autoimmunity Meet.” Consistent endurance training is hard on the body, and the further you get into a training cycle, the easier it is for recovery to slip and the harmful effects of the body’s response — inflammation — to creep up. As workload expands, the body’s demands for amino acids from protein go up, and as inflammation becomes more consistent, the more difficult it is for our body to extract these vital components from the food we eat, creating a deficit. Over a long period of time, this deficit can affect a number of things in the body, but the gut is particularly sensitive with an extremely thin protective that is fueled primarily by glutamine, an important amino acid.

As the authors point out, decreased blood flow to the gut could be a big problem, as blood is the primary way that our body receives nutrients. There are ways to compensate for these deficits, but it requires a different view of fueling the body that includes nourishment as an evolving target to stay on top of. I also wonder about the long-term impact on the gut of super-high carbohydrate intake in the form of sugars that has become the norm for athletes with an exploding product landscape. There is more to dig into here, but the takeaway for endurance athletes is to talk with your doctor about screening for colon cancer early and perhaps more often than people who aren’t pushing their body so hard. Also, to look into ways to support recovery through the lens of gut health, making adjustments for the long-term health of your colon and not necessarily short-term race day gains.

Right now, you can buy my book, “Crohn’s Disease AIP Cookbook: Recipes to Reduce Inflammation and Eliminate Food Triggers on the Autoimmune Protocol” on Amazon for under $10!

Speaking of Alex Hutchison, his recent book, “The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map” is available as an e-book for $1.99. I wrote about Alex’s writing in another newsletter, and this is one of my favorite books of the year so far.

One of my favorite books of the decade, “Death of the Author” by Nnedi Okorafor, is on sale for less than $14. This epic work of meta-science fiction unfolds as a story of a disabled author, Zelu, woven through the author’s own work to unravel her mystery. “Death of the Author” is a gorgeous work of fiction.

“Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir” is Craig Mod’s story of walking Japan while working through his experience as an adopted child and the memory of a lost friend. TBOT as Craig has affectionately referred to it, is both heartbreaking and inspiring, and  is a steal right now as well.

I hope you’re out enjoying the weather wherever you are and realizing that now is where opportunity lives until next week.