After a first month and change of blazing lockdown productivity, this past week I went a bit off the rails. I didn’t make any real progress on work, dropped the ball on most of my side-projects and habits, and generally just listlessly pissed away my days. Today, I regrouped, and am ready to get back to it full bore in the week ahead. But, at the same time, the huge amount of uncertainty continues to weigh on me.

Outside, the weather is amazingly beautiful, and New Yorkers seem to be heading in droves to the two parks (Central and Riverside) right by my apartment. Yet, at the same time, one of the restaurants across from my window just emptied out their tables and chairs yesterday, and papered over their windows this morning, apparently closing for good.

In theory, New York’s stay-at-home order expires at the end of next week. But Cuomo has already suggested he’s likely to extend that, at least in hard-hit part of the state like NYC. And, as I’ve written before, I’m not entirely sure how much the city is likely to bounce back even once those orders lift.

Recently, I’ve been puzzling through what COVID means for the specific logistics of gyms, in-person training, and therefore the ongoing Composite beta test. How, exactly, is a busy gym supposed to operate under the constraints of social distancing? Sure, you can rope off every other cardio machine, but how do you handle barbells and dumbbells and kettlebells and everything else? Mark out 10’x10′ individual zones with tape on the floor? If so, where do trainers go? And how do you deal with the vastly reduced total occupancy that entails? Pre-COVID, at peak times, attendance was probably two to threefold greater than social distanced layouts would allow. So even if you strictly enforce capacity limits by allowing members to sign up for slots, you’ll still wildly piss off the 50-65% of them who are paying for monthly memberships but being told they can’t actually use the gym. And all of that doesn’t begin to account for the likely far greater droplet ‘blast radius’ when people are huffing and puffing mid-workout; based on research I’ve seen, there’s good reason to believe six feet of separation may not be nearly enough.

During odd moments of the day, I’ve therefore been running napkin numbers in my head for what an extremely scaled back version of things might look like. What if my ‘gym’ was a small 500 sqft space, where I just trained one person at a time? Would people be more likely to return to something like that? And, even if so, how quickly could I get things set up and outfitted? In Midtown Manhattan, for example, it would be tough to run even a tiny boutique without showers and similar amenities.

So, lots to puzzle through. Though all of it still rather abstract. At this point, I have no idea what, exactly, comes next – the timing, the regulations, the attitudes of my fellow New Yorkers. I’ll be doing my best to keep pushing forward day by day, to lay groundwork as effectively as I can. But, in the end, I suspect I won’t have much choice but to wait for it all to actually play out.