1Dec 29, 2023
I can hear Riley running behind me now, feet crunching on the glittering asphalt, her breaths ragged and shallow, and I smile, remembering a conversation I’d had with her about breathing. Riley has been training to run a 5K. Here we all are, just a few days past Christmas, on the other side of the […]
2Sep 23, 2022
Slowly we begin, feeling rumpled, and, somehow, still buried under covers, even though we, in our performance series shirts, have just stepped off the porch and into the first gentle light of morning. I look down at my running shoes, at the edges dirty with road dust, assessing, as though the shoes will be the […]
3Feb 15, 2019
About a mile out, the runner begins to hear the finish. When all he can see is still just road–that sunlit glint in the asphalt, those weather-worn and faded lines, the gravel and litter and patches of grass, the bib pinned to another runner’s shirt–he begins to hear first the music with its dull boom. […]
4Apr 7, 2017
We run in that space just before the sunlight bursts new born, obliterating darkness; in that space where apart from the faithfulness of day, we’d not expect the arrival of Light at all. This is the parenthesis between rain showers, the tar-dark, murky stillness before another downpour, somehow carved for us like a silent pause. […]
5Feb 28, 2014
Go. Saturday morning and this is what he says, when I am struggling to wake up, when I am trying to remember how to think. How many miles today? You should go. Enjoy it. Enjoy it? Really? Weary growls through my bones. I switch on the lamp beside the bed. Let there be light. He has […]
6Nov 8, 2013
It’s an old cliché, but true: Life is a marathon. And this, also, is true: When I woke up on marathon morning, I didn’t want to run the race. And since transparency happens to be my Call, I should also say that most of my living happens exactly this way. I am not very good […]
7Sep 27, 2013
The truth is, our living is messy. It isn’t the carefully selected photos we share on Facebook. In the flurry of morning readying, I reach into the cabinet for a cereal bowl. A red-brown something has dried over the blue and purple flowers, and something tiny green and branching like a tree—something resembling a flattened […]
8Jul 26, 2013
Just as the morning becomes, we run together beneath the sun. A light breeze wraps our shoulders. I glance up at the sky—blue, the color rich like Morpho wings, with wisps of sea foam cloud. I stare hard, gasping. Day after day, the heavens pour forth speech. “They have no speech, they use no words; […]
9Apr 19, 2013
The minute I see the buses, my throat gets thick, before I’ve even spotted my son in the crowds of children clotting the walkways. I’ve come to cheer him on, to acknowledge that he works hard and pushes through. I want him to see me there waiting, watching. “Run, Adam. Run!” I will shout his […]
10Jan 25, 2013
Okay, listen: whatever you feel like doing, do the opposite. It’s a war strategy, really. It’s your secret weapon when the taunts come sharp and deadly, when your enemy thunders toward you, when the ground trembles with the assault. It’s what I’m learning to do when I face defeat, weariness, complaint, anger, bitterness, pride, fear; […]