Hans Bhatia.
Solving big problems
with awesome people.

Eighty-two hours, water and electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium).

Day 1 felt deceptively easy. Turns out my electrolyte powder had hunger-suppressing ingredients. Sloppy start.

Day 2 the goosebumps came in waves - body priming for a hunt. Ketone taste in my mouth by evening. Couldn't sleep; three hours of podcasts before my body called it.

Day 3 I got diarrhea and briefly panicked - turned out I'd been having about 4x the recommended sodium. Calmed down, meditated (more random thoughts than ever), hand-wrote notes.

Broke it at 6:16am with bone broth. Then eggs, avocado, spinach.

Wrote about it: substack →

Three minutes in a tub between 0 and 2°C.

First thirty seconds are a panic. After that the breath settles and the cold becomes weirdly quiet.

Forty days starting Dec 26, 2025.

No social media (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn feed - DMs only). No YouTube, Shorts, Netflix, or movies. No games. No podcasts. No solo entertainment whose only purpose was passing time. Books were fine. Music allowed only while doing something necessary - not at the desk.

Minimum five hours of timed deep work a day. Fifteen minutes of total silence daily - no phone, no music, no work. Just sitting or walking.

Slip-ups didn't reset the clock. Note the trigger, get back to it.

Wrote on Substack every day about what went well and what I noticed.

Two 45-minute workouts a day (one outdoors), strict diet, no alcohol, a gallon of water, ten pages of non-fiction, daily progress photo. For seventy-five days straight.

It was good. Lost a good bit of weight. A few nights I was finishing the second workout at 5am.

Water is more annoying than you think.

Did the first one on a whim. May 23 in Waterloo - 13.38 mi at 10:23/mi, finished in 2:19:00. Was feeling good, so I went.

Nine days later, June 1 with friends at St. David's Track - 13.26 mi at 8:44/mi, 1:55:48. Flat circular track made pacing easier than the road.

Winter 2024 at Waterloo. CS452 (real-time programming, aarch64 microkernel + Märklin train control), CS488 (computer graphics), and CS444 (compiler construction) all in one term.

Each is famously brutal on its own. The conventional advice is to take one at a time. I took all three with a full courseload and part-time work.

Routine: leave the trains lab around 3am, walk over to the graphics lab, start and finish that week's graphics assignment, head to an 11am class, then bike home and sleep at 1pm.

At least four all-nighters, some back-to-back. Honestly it was fun - I hadn't pulled all-nighters since high school test days.