What Viking actually looks like

I need to manage your expectations here, because what I’m about to describe sounds ridiculous. I know this because my mother saw a photo of my “work setup” and called to ask if I was having a breakdown.

Here’s what a typical Viking day looks like for me.

I wake up around 6:30. No alarm. (If you need an alarm, you’re not sleeping enough, and if you’re not sleeping enough, nothing I write here will help you. Go fix that first, then come back.) I check the weather. Not the way normal people check the weather, to decide between a jacket or no jacket. I check it the way a ship captain checks it. Wind speed. Precipitation probability by the hour. Trail conditions. UV index. The two biggest influences on my workday are now storm probability and trail ratings. If you’d told me this two years ago I would have mass-blocked you.

By 7:15 I’m out the door. Phone in a magnetic neck mount. AirPods in. A small daypack with a portable battery, a water bottle, and sometimes a packable laptop if I know I’ll need to sit down and type at some point. I look exactly like a tourist who’s about to livestream a mediocre sunset on TikTok. This is the Viking disguise. It’s not intentional, it’s just what happens when you strap technology to your body in ways that consumer electronics were never designed for.

The first mile is warm-up. Physical and mental. I usually spend it reviewing where I left off yesterday. I pull up my last Claude conversation and have it summarize the state of things. What did we build, what’s broken, what’s next. This is the equivalent of sitting down at your desk and opening your IDE, except my desk is a forest path and my IDE has birds in it.

By mile two, I’m working. Actually working. Talking through architecture decisions, debugging logic, brainstorming features, sometimes dictating entire blocks of documentation. The voice chat function on modern LLMs has turned my phone into a coworker who never interrupts me to talk about their weekend, never needs a stand-up, and fits in my pocket. I talk, it responds, I think while I walk, I respond back. The walking is not incidental to the work. The walking IS the work environment. My brain operates differently when my legs are moving. Not vaguely “differently” in a wellness-podcast way. Measurably, noticeably, can’t-go-back differently.

Around mile four or five, depending on the trail and the complexity of what I’m working on, I’ll find a bench or a rock or a log and pull out the laptop for twenty to thirty minutes. This is when I need to actually look at code, review a PR, or type something that voice can’t handle well. Then the laptop goes back in the bag and I keep walking.

I usually clock between eight and fifteen miles a day. Not because I’m training for anything. Just because that’s how long it takes to get a full day’s work done when you’re moving at walking pace and thinking at full speed.

I’m home by early afternoon most days. Showered, fed, and done. Not “done” in the way where you close your laptop at 6pm but keep checking Slack on your phone until midnight. Done done. Trail-tired. The kind of tired that earns you sleep instead of stealing it.

If you saw my output metrics you’d assume I’m chained to a desk fourteen hours a day. If you saw my Strava you’d assume I’m a hiking guide. The Venn diagram of these two assumptions is a single weird circle, and I live in it.