Why My Dunk Journey Went Quiet—and Why I'm Starting Again

In September 2025, I published a post on this site announcing that I was going to try to dunk a basketball. A guy from Japan who has loved this game for decades, now living in the US, closing in on fifty—and I promised honest progress reports along the way. I called them Dunk Diaries. I meant it.

Then the site went quiet. No diaries, no workout logs, no measurements. No dramatic failure story either. Just silence. If you read that first post and wondered what happened, this article is the answer—and the answer is more ordinary, and I think more useful, than a highlight reel would have been.

The goal, for anyone just joining

The plan was simple to say and absurd to attempt: dunk a basketball at, or at least near, age 50. I laid it out in the launch post, “My Journey from Midlife Layups to Maybe… a Dunk?”, and if you're new here, that's the best place to start. The short version: I've loved and played this game for decades, I can't dunk, and I decided that the approach of my fiftieth birthday was exactly the wrong time to try—which is precisely why I wanted to.

I wrote back then that I had no clue whether it would actually happen, and that this was what made the journey fun. Both halves of that sentence are still true. What I didn't write—because I didn't know it yet—was how quickly the journey would stall.

What actually happened

Here is the honest accounting: the training routine lasted a few days. That's the whole story. There was no injury. There was no crisis, no turning point, no cinematic moment where I looked up at the rim and gave up. Work got busy, life filled in the gaps, and the routine that was supposed to become a habit quietly lost every scheduling fight it entered.

I kept meaning to restart. Next week, then next month. And the longer the silence stretched, the heavier it got, because a restart now seemed to require an explanation—and writing “I stopped after a few days” felt embarrassing. So instead of an honest update, I published nothing. That was the real mistake. Not the stopping. The silence.

Why ambitious goals stall—and why it isn't laziness

If you've ever launched a fitness project with genuine enthusiasm and watched it evaporate within a week, you know this pattern. Motivation is great launch fuel and terrible cruising fuel. It gets you to commit, announce the goal, maybe even publish a post about it. It does not get you into your training shoes on a Tuesday night after a long workday.

Midlife makes the math harder. Work doesn't pause for your vertical jump. Family doesn't either, and neither does the simple fact that energy is a budget now, not an assumption. None of that is an excuse—it's the terrain. My first plan ignored the terrain. It was built for a version of my life that has no bad weeks, and that version does not exist.

There's also a quieter trap: the all-or-nothing plan. When the plan is ambitious, missing one day feels like breaking something. Miss two, and the whole project starts to feel ruined, so you avoid thinking about it—and avoidance compounds. A few days of stalling became months of quiet not because the goal died, but because I had no plan for what to do after stalling.

Stopping is not the same as failing

Stopping isn't the failure. Pretending I never stopped—that would be the failure.

Somewhere in those quiet months, I realized I had been framing this wrong. A journey that pauses and then resumes is still a journey. Most real ones look exactly like that. The only version of this project that would be genuinely worthless is the dishonest version—the one where I come back months later pretending the gap never happened, or quietly delete the original post and start over like a new person.

So let me say it plainly: I stopped after a few days. That is not the end of the story unless I decide it is, and I'm deciding it isn't.

The restart: slower, smaller, built to survive real life

Version two of this challenge starts from different assumptions. I'm not publishing a training program here—I'm not a trainer or a doctor, and this site is a journal, not a plan to copy. But the principles I'm carrying into the restart are simple:

• Small enough to survive a bad week. Sessions short enough that a busy stretch shrinks them instead of erasing them.
• Consistency over intensity. Showing up regularly matters more to me right now than any single heroic workout.
• A years-long horizon. The first attempt quietly assumed quick results. This one assumes the opposite and treats patience as part of the challenge.

• Respect for recovery. I'm closing in on fifty. I would rather progress slowly than restart from zero again—so when something has to bend, it will be the plan, not me.

What the progress reports will measure

The original post promised Dunk Diaries, and this time they are actually coming. To keep them honest, they'll be built around a handful of concrete markers rather than vibes. My intention is to track:

• Standing reach—how high I can touch flat-footed, the boring number every dunk calculation starts from.
• Jump touch height—how high I can actually touch at the top of a real jump.
• Estimated vertical—the difference between those two, tracked over time.
• Consistency—how many sessions actually happened, because after this past year, that's the number I trust most.

You'll notice there are no numbers in this post. That's deliberate. I don't have honest ones yet, and I would rather publish nothing than publish guesses. The first proper baseline will come in a future report, measured plainly and shared even if the results are humbling. Especially if they're humbling.

Documenting a journey versus performing one

The internet is full of transformation stories, and most of them are edited the same way: the messy middle gets cut. You see the announcement and the triumph, never the months of nothing in between. I understand why—silence doesn't get clicks—but that editing quietly teaches everyone that stalling is shameful and rare. It's neither. It may be the single most common event in any ambitious goal.

So here is the editorial policy for Road to Dunk going forward: the boring weeks get reported. The zero-progress months get reported. If the whole thing stalls again, that gets reported too, along with whatever I learn from it. I can't promise you a dunk—nobody honest could. What I can promise is a real record of a real attempt, made by a real, busy, almost-fifty-year-old body.

Where this goes next

The next Road to Dunk post will be a baseline: honest starting measurements, and an honest look at the gap between where I am and where a dunk lives. After that, progress reports as the work actually happens—on reality's schedule, not a content calendar's.

And if you have your own version of this—a challenge you announced, started, and quietly dropped after a few days—consider this your invitation. The gap isn't evidence of failure. It's just blank space. The next entry can start whenever you decide to write it.