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A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend at work. He’s pretty disciplined about what he eats, I’d noticed, always bringing fresh fruit, salads and other healthy choices for lunch.

Our conversation drifted toward strength training, which he does regularly and… I wish I did. I know I need to — I’ve known it for years! — but I find it so difficult to find the motivation to do it, let alone set aside time for it.

(Maybe that’s why I found myself bringing it up, as I’m fully aware I need to, and yet for some reason keep finding excuses not to… then again, maybe that’s a subject for another day!)

He asked me what I wanted to get out of working out, a question that reminded me of the first time I ever worked out with a personal trainer, which now is more than a decade ago. The first time I visited a gym, the trainer I met with asked me, “what are your goals?”

Goals? So, people have goals when they work out?

“Yeah,” he replied. “Where do you want to get to? What do you want to look like?”

To be honest, I’d never thought that way at all. All I’d had was a general sense it would be a good thing if I was stronger, if I was in better shape. Never gave it a single thought beyond that.

“Well…” I replied, hesitantly. “Actually, I’m not sure.”

That’s okay, the trainer assured me. I was far from the first person who’d walked in there without a clue. We’d start with some basic workouts, and move around to different parts of the body over the course of a few sessions. Piece of cake, right?

Turns out… it wasn’t! But that’s another story for another time too 🤣

Now, all that came back to me the other day when I was sitting and having lunch with my friend. Because when I thought about working out with weights, all I could think of was how difficult it was, how arduous I remember it being.

I must have been sharing that, because the next thing he said made me do a double-take: “Do you really want to get bigger? You don’t have to, you know.”

Even though I knew I didn’t want — or even think it possible — for me to become some musclebound bodybuilder, for some reason I equated lifting weights with that. Meaning, why would you lift weights if you didn’t want that?

No, he told me, you can just work out a little bit — incorporate a few small things into your routine, just two or three times a week. There’s no need to make a huge production of it; just make it a natural part of your life.

“Just add some stretching, a couple planks, some squats,” he told me. “You don’t have to be like these people on Instagram.”

That’s stuck in my mind so much these past few weeks, because with my new job — and the five-day-a-week commute — I haven’t been running like I used to. Really, the only time I’m able to get a run in lately seems to be on Saturdays, when I have a couple-hour window to just go and be by myself.

But because my running doesn’t look like it used to — my mileage stats on Strava are pretty low these days! — I’ve started to tell myself I’m not a “real” runner anymore. (And I write this newsletter!)

What I’m trying to remember is, what I can do right now may not look like it did a year ago. Someday I’ll be back to running the kinds of miles I used to run, but right now isn’t that time. That’s okay; for the moment, I’m needed elsewhere.

You’d think that by the age I am now, 55, I’d long have become accustomed to the seasonality of life. But I still have to learn, I still have to adjust. I still have to figure out how to be patient, and let what needs to happen, what needs to be right now, be.

Someday I’ll be in a different place and be able to devote more time to it. But now, I’ll need to take what I can get and do less — and hopefully, someday it’ll be more again.

Does this make sense? Does it sound off the wall? I hope not — I’m also really curious if you go through phases like this in your own life, whether you go through seasons.

How does it work for you?

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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All this past week, my wife, little T and I have been watching the University of Georgia baseball team compete in the Men’s College World Series in Omaha, Neb. It’s been a blast, not least because my wife is an alumni and while I’m not, I was born and raised here, and so red and black are our colors for life.

We’ve been living (or dying!) on every pitch, every swing, every home run that Bulldogs catcher Daniel Jackson hits 447 feet into the stands — and it’s been so awesome to see, as this year is the team’s first trip to Omaha in almost twenty years.

This is also the first time little T has ever really been into watching baseball, my first love as a sports fan back when I was a kid. He’s humored me here and there; we’ve taken him to see the Atlanta Braves play, but at those games the highlight was the ice cream (!), not anything happening on the field.

I must admit, the sport has tried my patience too in recent years. First, the steroids scandal of two decades ago, but more recently the emphasis on sports betting has slowly but surely drained away a lot of the enthusiasm I once had.

That may be why the college game has been such a breath of fresh air. There’s local pride involved; that’s our Bulldogs competing up there in Nebraska, you know? (Even though we don’t personally know a soul involved with the team!)

I realized, I’d forgotten what the rhythm of baseball feels like. In recent years, we’ve watch a lot — a LOT — of college football, which is bursts of action but mostly a lot of… standing and walking around. Golf, also a love of mine, is similar; it’s mostly preparation for (very) brief bursts of action.

Baseball, on the other hand, is subtly misleading. Yes, there’s a lot of standing out in the field. (Especially for the outfielders.) But even in moments when the game feels slow, there’s an undercurrent of action, of thought and strategy bubbling just below the surface.

When you really get into it — when you’re thinking along with the pitcher and the batter, deciding whether the next pitch should be a fastball, curveball or changeup, or which part of the field the batter will try to hit to — you realize how absorbing it can become.

You find yourself leaning on the edge of your seat with every pitched ball, every swing of the bat. (“No way that was over the plate!” you say to yourself when your team gets robbed on a two-out called strike three.) You get wrapped up in it, because it’s fun to get wrapped up in it — it’s fun to care.

Even though you know heartbreak is part of the deal… as, sadly, it was for our Bulldogs. After losing to the University of Oklahoma on Monday, they faced the University of Texas in must-win elimination game on Tuesday; for several innings, they couldn’t put any runs on the board.

Very late in the game, though, UGA broke through with a pair of runs to take down the Longhorns, which gave us hope! But then last night, they had to play Oklahoma again and friends… it’s wasn’t pretty.

Georgia gave it everything they had, but the game reminded me so much of what it was like to watch the Braves battle the New York Yankees in both teams’ heyday thirty years ago. The Yankees played on a completely different level back then, just like Oklahoma did last night.

We were sad, not so much about the loss but that this fun ride for UGA had now come to an end. After all, I’ve seen a lot of baseball games in my life, gone through a lot of disappointment. At 55, the games don’t matter to me like they once did.

But for little T, this is all new to him. Caring about games is new to him; he doesn’t have years or decades to draw on, to know that once the season is over, it’s time to leave it behind and think about the next one. That you’ll get a chance to start anew.

So, I probably don’t need to tell you that there were quite a few tears after last night’s loss. We had to process it, figure it out. “Why couldn’t they beat Oklahoma?” I don’t understand it either, I told him.

There’s a part of me, in moments like this, that wants to calm him down, tell him it’s no big deal, to shrug it off and look forward. But then I remind myself, it’s good to care, you know? It’s good to put our hearts out there, to wear them on our sleeve.

Adulthood has a way of taking a lot of that away, as we all know. And of course, we do have to mature as we grow up and get older; it’s part of how we deal with life, I know. But there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to let go of really caring about something to the point that it breaks your heart.

Maybe that’s because when we can care that way, it means we’re more than just automatons bobbing about, more than the technology we carry around in our pockets — we’re flesh and blood, with heart, sinew and bones inside, a real person who cares.

It’s all too easy, as we get older, to sand these edges of ourselves off. To forget what we were like when we were kids, to leave the things we once cared about behind.

Maybe I needed to be reminded that we shouldn’t. Like Faulkner once said, maybe we need to be reminded of “the old verities and truths of the heart,” you know?

Anyway, I hope you’ve had a wonderful week and have gotten some great runs in — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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If you’ve followed the career of former Olympian Kara Goucher for any length of time, you know what a hero she’s been to so many in the running world. (And to me!)

And if you have, then you know the challenges she’s been dealing with ever since she was diagnosed back in 2022 with runner’s dystonia, a rare neurological condition that makes her left leg muscles contract involuntarily, causing her to lose her balance and fall whenever she ran.

The years since have seen steps forward and steps back. After retiring from her marathoning career — and flirting briefly with ultra running — she has since retired from competition altogether, as her condition no longer allows it.

But Goucher’s spirit is still very much alive, in both what she shares in her social media feeds and the podcast she co-hosts with the now also-retired 2018 Boston champ Des Linden.

Thanks to medication and physical therapy, she’s been able to keep running — shorter distances, of course. (Much shorter, in fact.) But that she’s able to run at all is a victory — she didn’t have to give up the thing she loved to do, that gave her identity and a sense of purpose.

But saying “thanks to medication and physical therapy” elides just how difficult it’s been for Goucher to get to a place where she can share an experience like the one above, her longest run in years.

That’s a huge part of why I’m so drawn to her story, why I find her so inspiring even now after all these years.

Of course, I can’t do what she’s done in competition — I’m not even in the same galaxy as her, or any runner at her level. Never have been, and never will be. (Certainly not at age 55, anyway!)

What I can relate to, though, are the difficulties she’s gone through and the courage she’s shown in overcoming them. And maybe — maybe? — that’s something I can replicate in my own life.

One of my favorite writers is Candice Millard, the author of books like The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic, about the all-too-brief presidency of James Garfield, who was inaugurated in March of 1881 — only to be shot at a Washington, D.C., train station that July.

In this beautiful tribute, Millard shares something Garfield wrote that echoes to me what Goucher’s past few years have been like:

“I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health,” Garfield wrote. “As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man.”

Honestly, had something similar happened to me, I’m not sure if I’d have reacted the way Goucher did after receiving her dystonia diagnosis. I might very well have said to myself about running and exercise, “okay, that’s the end of that!”

But she stuck with it. And in doing so, she’s given us something more special than any medal she’s ever won: she’s shown us what it’s like when the tide goes out, when we get to find out who we really are.

That maybe we do have a little bravery, a little courage down in there. That maybe we can find it too, when we need it most.

I hope you’ve had a great week so far and have had a chance to get some great runs (or walks, or hikes, or rides) in — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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It’s been quite a journey for my little ceramic friend.

Or rather, I should say he’s taken me on one — as meet up with him I finally did on Saturday morning at the Masters.

But let me back up. Do you know who this little guy is?

If you’re not a golf fan or even a sports fan, you can be forgiven. But if you are, then you probably know what you’re looking at: the Masters gnome, one of the rarest sports-themed collectibles to come along in a long, long time.

He stands just over 13 inches tall, sports an Augusta National quarter-zip vest and hat, and (by some miracle of engineering) even holds a miniature replica of a Masters golf umbrella that really does open up.

I didn’t even know what a garden gnome was until a couple of years ago, when an old friend of mine shared a tantalizing story with me: he and his then 17-year-old son were walking out of the gates of Augusta National, each with a gnome they’d just purchased in hand.

As they were walking, a man approached them and said to my friend’s son, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for that gnome.”

They looked at each other, incredulous.

“Nahh, thanks,” they replied, and kept walking. But the man kept walking after them.

“I’ll give you a thousand for it,” he said.

That offer was too good to pass up. “SOLD!” my friend’s son yelled back at the man, who then walked over, counted off ten brand-new hundred-dollar bills, and placed them in his hand in exchange for the bearded garden ornament.

When I heard that, you can guess where I was the next morning: in line, before the sun was up, to see if I could buy one too.

You had to get there that early because, as my friend told me, Augusta National only sells several hundred of the gnomes each day of the tournament — and, when you arrive as early as I did, you see just how many people are after the same thing.

Fast-forward to this year, it’s Saturday morning and my wife has joined me in the early, early hours to see if we could be among the lucky few. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you we were out of the house by 5:30 a.m. and in line just outside the gates of the club at 6:00 a.m.

Those gates, by the way, don’t open until 7:00 a.m. And because Augusta National has a strict no phones policy, there’s no bringing your favorite glass rectangle with you to pass the time.

So what do you do? Well, we got to talking with the people we were waiting in line with — a line that easily stretched to two or three thousand people spilling out into the parking lot.

A woman in front of us was there with her husband; they’d purchased a gnome a few days earlier at one of the tournament practice rounds, and hoped to snag a second one.

She’d been coming to the Masters for years, she added, and always had a big order of merch to buy for friends and family members. This year was no different.

“Where are you from?” she asked; I replied that I lived in Atlanta but had grown up in Augusta, just a few miles from where we were standing. She told me she was from Thomson, Ga., a small town about twenty minutes away.

“You’re kidding,” I replied. “My first job was at a newspaper in Thomson.”

She asked me if I knew someone whose name I immediately recognized. “Of course I do! He was my boss,” I told her, adding that I remembered my days working at his newspaper like it was yesterday.

I was in my early twenties, just out of college. This was before we even knew what the internet was, so a newspaper still meant a lot back then, especially in a small community like the one I worked in.

We shared stories about our friend; I remember he always dressed a little like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird; in fact, I knew Atticus was his hero.

At the time, I assumed from the way he dressed and the way he talked that, surely, he was more than a few years older than me. But last year, when I stumbled across his obituary, I realized he was only a year older than me.

She had seen him just a few months before he died. “He looked really bad,” she said, adding that his face was gaunt and the waist of his pants were cinched to the last notch.

“Not like himself, not like I remember him at all.”

Our mutual friend had died by suicide; I’d always wondered what happened to him and to the newspaper I loved working for. It’s my favorite job I’ve ever had, or at least the one I look back on with the most affection.

A few years after I left, he sold the paper and opened an antique shop. After that closed, I lost touch with him, still always wondering how the rest of his life had unfolded.

I wish I had good news to share; he did have a relationship later and a child, a son who’s now college age. But the years weren’t kind to him, and he experienced a lot of disappointment and heartache.

The man I remember — I use the word “man” now, but weren’t we still kinda just boys then? — gave me my first real job, believed in me and always had my back when I wrote stories about local government leaders that weren’t so flattering.

He’d hired a cast of characters that I still remember lovingly; editors and salespeople who took me under their wing and mentored me, encouraged me, and helped me learn how to spread my wings as a writer for the first time.

I’m still working on how to hold these two thoughts: being sad that he’s gone and for the pain he experienced, while also remembering the person he once was, the zest and exuberance he brought to everything.

I hope I took a little piece of that with me, and with any luck have carried it with me to the places I’ve been since.

And to think, I’m not sure I’d have shared his story with you were it not for me and my wife getting up at an ungodly hour to try to go buy a $60 ceramic gnome, for… “why are we here again?” we asked ourselves as we longed to go back to bed (!)

I hope you’ve had a great week and have gotten some great runs in — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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A few weeks ago, I started a new job.

(It’s going well, I’m happy to report!)

But it’s also meant a big shift in the practical realities of my day-to-day life. And so, at least for the time being, my running has fallen by the wayside in a big way.

This past weekend, I was finally able to sneak in a run along the Chattahoochee River, near where I live. It was glorious, the weather was fantastic and I felt great out there, like I hadn’t missed a run in a long time.

But the truth is that I had; almost two months had passed since the last time I ran. I knew it had been a while, but I didn’t realize it had been that long.

I know I need to figure out a schedule when I can regularly get in my runs, but it’s difficult now. I have to leave early each morning to catch my train, and I also get home from work later than I used to.

And lately, when I get home from work I’ve fallen into a routine of playing a little one-on-one basketball with little T in the (tiny!) court/parking space on the side of our house.

There are days when I could get in an after-work run, I know, either on my treadmill or in our neighborhood. But here’s the thing: he’s just a few months away from turning 13, and he’s still asking me to play with him.

“Dad, let’s go shoot some hoops,” is what I hear, right around 6:30 p.m. every evening.

That might remain the case for a while, he might keep asking me to play. But he also might not; I can see already how important his friends are becoming to him, how the world outside our home is becoming more interesting to him.

All of this was swirling in my mind when I pulled up the latest issue of one of my favorite newsletters, ’s , in which Caroline shares the struggle she’s been going through in sticking with her own running routine.

She’s trained for and run the New York City Marathon a few times in recent years, including last year — but has since found it near-impossible to get back out there:

“The third and final catalyst arrived, as ideas often do, while I was out on a run.1 It was my first run in months, a hiatus I chalked up to a snowy winter and various personal commitments. But the larger truth was, I’d grown to hate it.

Where running had once been a safe space, an outlet devoid of pressure, it had morphed into a pressure-laden chore. There was always some training plan I’d fallen behind on, some pace I couldn’t hit. ‘My third unpaid job!’ I’d joke, then fail to laugh because it wasn’t funny. My attempts made me feel like a failure, so I stopped.”

Can I ever relate to this, I thought to myself.

I don’t know how it works for you, but when I get really into something that’s new to me — whether that’s running, or fly-fishing, or even Wordle — my enthusiasm acts like an ocean wave.

Something unexpected catches my eye — like running when I first started, or fly-fishing, or golf, or Wordle — and I feel a passion stir. I read everything I can about it, buy the equipment, scout out places I can go do it.

I see all the possibilities — all the places my new hobby can take me, all the fun I might have. My enthusiasm builds as I throw myself into it, going and going.

Sooner or later, though, the wave crashes on the shore. I need to take a break, get away from it for a little while. I have to wait until the passion comes back; I can’t will it into being. (Maybe this is why it’s hard to do more than a couple training cycles for big races in a single year?)

The things we put ourselves into — that we put our identities into — they change, don’t they? Not just over months and years, but days and weeks.

My feelings, I’ve found, move up and down like the mercury in a thermometer. I ask myself, “is this right for me? Am I that good at it or not? Am I kidding myself? Should I just quit?”

There are times in our lives when we really can run that ultra, or climb that mountain, or… [insert big goal here!]. But sometimes it’s our moment to pull back from that, to regroup and listen to our hearts, and try to hear what they’re calling us to next.

What is yours calling you to?

(As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going!)

Your friend,

— Terrell

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I noticed it last Sunday afternoon, just as the sun was starting to set.

We were sitting in the stands of a nearby high school football field, watching little T play flag football, his last game of the season. His team was only a few points behind, having just scored a touchdown on their previous drive down the field.

They were playing defense, and T was lined up to guard a kid I could tell was a really good athlete. Sure enough, on the next play the quarterback from the other team threw him the ball, which he caught. And then started running… fast.

From the stands, I could see T try to keep up with him. But the kid who caught the ball had a kind of speed that allowed him to burst into action and take off sprinting, like a blur.

What I noticed next probably only lasted about a second or two; maybe not even that long. As the boy carrying the ball put more distance between himself and T, I could see my little man slow down, bit by bit.

He didn’t give up. He loves being a part of this team; he’s the first to high-five a teammate who does anything good, like making a catch or snatching a flag off an opposing team member’s belt. (That’s a tackle in flag football.)

He even made a huge, field-long catch for a touchdown in his first game. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in sports!… though I’m being a little biased here, I’ll admit 😉

In that moment last Sunday, though, I could see on his face — the other player looked so fast, there was just no way he could catch up to him. I could see the belief drain out of him, even if only for a moment.

You might ask, of course, how could I even know this? The truth is I don’t; not for certain, anyway — though knowing little T as well as I do, it’s a belief I’ve heard him express. And maybe too, it hits close to home because it’s also the way I used to feel when I was his age.

That I couldn’t do what other kids could do athletically, either — that I couldn’t keep up with them, match their pace when we ran laps in P.E. class, or catch them when we played tag as kids.

Why did I believe this? Maybe because another kid had told me I couldn’t, or I didn’t think there was any way I could do things as well as other, more obviously athletically gifted kids could.

Whatever the source or reason, I had made up my mind I wasn’t, couldn’t be good at sports — and I had no idea I’d done that. I wasn’t conscious of it at all, but somewhere in the back of my mind, an idea formed and took root. And I created a narrative that I came to believe, even though I wasn’t aware I had.

Lately, I’ve been reading a book that’s been sitting in the Apple Books app on my iPhone for years, one that obviously intrigued me once, but for some reason I never found reason to read until now: John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul.

(It’s a bit of an obscure title, I’ll admit… but I love out-of-the-way, unexpected books like this.)

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Lately, I’ve been reading The Essays of E.B. White, a collection by the author of the famed children’s stories Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Somewhere I picked up that he was among the best-ever essayists, and since that’s kinda what I do here, I thought to myself, “maybe I can learn something?”

Early in the book, White includes a dispatch from January of 1958 — which must have been unimaginably frigid cold, given where he lived on the coast of Maine’s Blue Hill Bay. The opening paragraph caught me right from the get-go, and I was entranced:

Margaret Mitchell once made a remark I have treasured. Someone asked her what she was “doing,” and she replied, “Doing? It’s a full-time job to be the author of Gone With the Wind.” I remember this cheerful statement this morning as I lay in bed, before daylight, marshaling in my head the problems and projects and arrangements of the day and wondering when I would again get the chance to “do” something — like sit at a typewriter. I felt a kinship with Miss Mitchell and comforted myself with the pleasing thought that just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to “do” anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

I’ve bolded the last sentence because… well, don’t you just love this? This idea of pushing “the pursuit of making a living” to the side, placing it in a box where it belongs, so we can give ourselves over to the real task of our lives — one of “such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace”?

Now, I mean no offense to anyone who has found their purpose in their job. I know plenty of people who have, and I’m happy for them. (Sometimes I wish I could be like them!)

But while I’ve always worked — since I was sixteen years old, when I got my first job bagging groceries at Winn-Dixie — I’m not sure I’ve ever quite identified with work in the way I expected to when I was younger, and first started exploring careers I might go into.

That can make a person feel out of step, especially in the era we’re living in, which hasn’t changed much since the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote this essay back in the early 1930s:

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

In fact, you could argue this attitude has probably only intensified, couldn’t you? It’s enough to make a person sigh, rest their chin in their hands, and let out a long exhale, wondering how the world got itself in this place.

Truthfully, I do feel more at ease with this now that I’m in mid-fifties, versus twenty or thirty years ago. Back then, I’m sure I felt more of a sense of something being missing; there are so many paths you might take, how do you know which is the right one?

What if you miss your calling? (Is there even such a thing as “a calling”) Can you go back and start over? Would you even want to if you could? Or maybe… serendipity and happy accidents can work out just as well?

Okay, it’s late at night and I’m sure you’re as tired as I am so I’ll wrap things up right here — but I’d love to know what your experience has been.

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going 😀

Your friend,

— Terrell

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If you’ve ever seen the 2006 biopic The Pursuit of Happyness, you know what I’m talking about.

In the movie, Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a medical equipment salesman and single father struggling to make ends meet in 1980s-era San Francisco. He even ends up homeless for a while, racing home after work each day to his son’s day care, in hopes of securing them a spot in one of the city’s homeless shelters for the night.

The movie’s heart-tugging moments always get me — especially the scene in which Gardner shows up for a job interview at a brokerage firm in a paint-splattered jacket and white undershirt; asked what he’d say if someone got hired after showing up without a shirt on, Gardner replies, “he must have had on some really nice pants.”

Since the first time I saw it, what has stuck with me are the moments when Smith narrates each “chapter” of Gardner’s story, punctuating the movie with words that become familiar as the scenes roll on:

“This part of my life is called… running.”

“This part of my life is called… intern.”

“This part of my life is called… happiness.”

Gardner never knows when a new chapter in his life is about to start; events overtake him, sometimes overwhelming him. He’s simply forced to adapt and adjust, and it only becomes clear later that his life is different from what it was before.

You may remember back in January, I shared with you that I’d been laid off from my day job. (As much as I’d love for this newsletter to be my day job, the financial realities of life in 21st-century America say that can’t be the case.)

But things happen. Companies merge and go through changes, hiring a lot at times and then… the opposite. The latter is the circumstance I found myself in, when I got the word my job would be ending.

I was prepared — in my mind, at least — for a long winter of job searching. I had no idea how long it might take, but I knew from talking with people I’d worked with in the past that I was starting a process that might take time. A long time, in fact.

Most of my inquiries about potential jobs led nowhere, a common story for anyone looking right now. But, just like when you go fishing you never know when you’ll feel a bite on the end of your line, in February I received an offer after only a few weeks of looking.

There was just one catch: this company would soon be returning to five days a week in the office. I’d worked from home since March of 2020; I didn’t realize until yesterday that’s been a full six years — almost half my 12-year-old son’s life.

Yes, in my old job I worked a couple of days a week in the office. But going in so seldom made in-office days feel like the exception, not the norm.

Now, I’m up and at ‘em by six in the morning every day; showering and dressing in business casual (whatever that means!) and taking the train into downtown Atlanta. It’s a big change.

Instead of interacting with the world mainly through screens, now I’m a body in the world again. I see, interact with, walk past and work with dozens of people every day. People on the train platform, people in the hotels and shops I walk through and past to get to my office… people quite literally everywhere.

It’s easy to forget this when you work from home. Sure, you see your friends on the weekends, people you know from your child’s activities. But that’s for few short hours. Most of the time, it’s just you and your laptop. You don’t realize how much being away from the world has changed you.

Now, all kinds of new stimuli are coming at me. On the train into work, unhoused people sit a few seats away. (Many when it’s cold, in fact.) When I get to my station, there are convention-goers and corporate travelers, from high-school students all the way up to middle-aged road warriors.

When I walk in the office, I’m meeting an entirely new (to me) group of people. It’s not unlike being a kid and going to a new school, you know? You’re unsure of how it will go… will they like me? Will they welcome me, or give me the cold shoulder?

(I’m happy to report the opposite, by the way — everyone has been incredibly welcoming in the new job, making me feel at home.)

And that makes me realize something else: how lucky I’ve been. A lot of people I know who are job searching right now are seeing only curveballs in the dirt. But when it was my turn to stand in the batter’s box, I got a fastball right over the heart of the plate.

Now, I know my story isn’t in the same league as Chris Gardner’s. Nothing nearly as dramatic has happened to me. But I relate to what he shares with us, describing how one chapter of his life ended abruptly and not knowing when or how the next might begin.

You don’t know how long you’ll have to stay in the air without a net below. You don’t know whether, or how, things might work out. You just go day by day, because that’s the only option.

I hope I can make the most of this new chapter in my own life like Gardner did in his — not nearly as big, of course! But I’m very aware that opportunities for a completely fresh start don’t come along all that often once you reach the age I am (55).

(My wife tells me I worry too much about the age thing, and not to focus on it — which I’m trying to do! You never completely forget it, though.)

Have you ever contemplated, or undertaken, a completely fresh start in your own life? How did it go? Are you doing it now?

I’d love to hear your story. And, as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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It looked like it had been set up correctly, perched atop a metal stake in my mom’s backyard. Birdseed filled the front tray, while the solar panels on its roof were turning sunlight into electrons as I looked on.

I tapped the button on the white, oval-shaped transmitter; a tiny light glowed green. But it wouldn’t transmit anything; I was ready to dismantle it whole, put it back in its box and ship it back to the merchant for a refund.

“You can’t get it to work?” my mom asked.

“No,” I grumbled, more than a little frustrated with myself. But I decided to take one more look at the directions.

“Let me try this,” I said, faking a little confidence, as I knew I’d already run through almost all of the troubleshooting suggestions in the tiny-print instruction sheet.

So after deleting and re-installing the app on my mom’s phone, which I then re-paired with the transmitter, I finally got them connected — her Birdbuddy was up and running and ready to share itself with the world.

“Finally!” I said to myself, certain that after all the trouble of setting it up, I’d never want to so much as look at it again. And then I took a peek at what it was sending to my mom’s phone.

A small, grey-and-charcoal-colored bird perched on the edge of the red tray, nipping away at the birdseed beneath its feet. It looked directly into the camera, turned its head, and turned it again the other way. Then, as quickly as it had landed moments earlier, it flew away.

In the app, I noticed that you can add friends, who receive a text message every time a bird makes an appearance within camera range. So I signed myself up, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. Within just a few minutes — and, it seems, every ten minutes after that — my phone vibrated with a new notification. “See who’s just landed,” it said. “Check out who’s just stopped by.”

Remember, at first I was hugely annoyed by the whole idea of this. Who’d want to set up a camera in their yard to look at birds? Can’t you look at them from the window? Isn’t that enough?

But when I got a look at a house finch looking into the camera and back at me, I was hooked. (The app includes an AI you can use to recognize each bird species; so far, I’ve seen finches, eastern bluebirds, northern cardinals, chipping sparrows, tufted titmouse, and lots more.)

I couldn’t get enough. Every time I heard my phone buzz with a new notification, I raced to pick it up so I could see what new bird species had flown in for a visit.

The app’s AI can even get specific enough to “read” each bird’s face; you can give them names if you pay for the premium version. (I’m too cheap for that! But after a while, you do feel like you come to know each bird individually.)

Each successive alert only whetted my appetite for more. I found myself in a bookstore, scooping up Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds and Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Deck, a companion card set to her bestselling book (which she also illustrated) on how her fascination with birds first took flight.

A few years ago, my wife and I considered bringing home some backyard chickens. We never figured out how to make that work; what do you do with them when you want to take a vacation? Still, these birds are stirring my interest in that anew.

One thing you can’t see in the photos — but I can — is that the yard just behind the bird in each snapshot is the yard where I played as a kid. This is the house I grew up in, this yard is the one I ran around in from the time I could walk.

Played countless hours, running all around back there, hiding and seeking, throwing frisbees, practicing my pitching… all the kind of kids’ play you can imagine. And then one day I stopped playing back there, because, well, that’s what you do as you grow up. We all do.

Right now, my son — I call him “little T” in these pages a lot — is halfway between his 12th and 13th birthday. My wife and I said to each other just this past week, “you know, we’re about to lose him” — not that he’s going anywhere, of course.

Rather, he’s perched on that edge between his boyhood and his teenage years. It’s hard to pinpoint where one phase ends and the other begins, but we definitely know when we’ve left childhood behind — because we don’t go back, do we?

I know, I know, I know. I did it too, and so did you, and so did all of us. It’s inevitable, and it’s healthy. Growing up means you’re growing. It’s what he is meant to do. That doesn’t make it easy, though, does it?

So for now, even though it’s only for a moment, I can go back there (at least in my imagination) thanks to my new bird buddies, who never seem to run out of interest in the camera — or appetite!

As always, keep in touch and let me know what’s new with you in your running and your life — and thanks for your patience while I’ve taken the past two and half weeks off. It’s been a restful break, but I’m so glad to be back in the groove with you.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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My title for this newsletter is a little ironic, I must admit, considering that today the weather is gray and gloomy here in Atlanta, and for many of you there’s still snow and ice on the ground (and will be for a while).

But the title hit me when I was out for a long trail walk yesterday with our golden retriever Twix, and I couldn’t resist. The sky was sunny, temperatures were in the 60s, and the day just felt like a glimpse of spring, which we’ve all been longing for after these ice-cold winter months.

Even the daffodils here are starting to sprout up through the ground, which reminds me right now is a chance to start anew — no matter how long we’ve been underground, we get another chance to bloom again.

It’s a funny feeling, being 55 years old and feeling like you need to start anew, or start over. When I was a kid, I always thought I’d have more things figured out by now, you know?

But it dawned on me once when I was sitting in a service at our church, listening to our priest recite a Bible passage; hadn’t I heard this before? Like, many times?

When I started paying closer attention — and not simply daydreaming in the pew, which is what I’ve done for most of my life 😉 — I saw how the same material gets covered every year, from start to finish.

We read the same passages from the Bible, and through the same sections of our prayer book. (My family and I go to an Episcopal church, so the Book of Common Prayer is a big part of our service.)

Starting in Advent and proceeding through Lent, Easter and Pentecost, we cover the same ground, reflect on the same ideas and thoughts, year after year. You’d think we might shake things up and try something different, wouldn’t you? But we don’t — it’s the same, year after year.

Maybe most churches are like this; I’m honestly not sure, because I’ve visited other denominations only a handful of times in my life. From what I’ve seen when I’ve visited other houses of worship, though, there’s at least some broad commonality with my own.

We read (largely) the same book, we find the same stories meaningful… you’d think at some point we’d all “get it” and no longer need to keep reviewing the same material year after year, wouldn’t you?

Earlier this week, I had the chance to sit down for a Zoom conversation with , who’s been a longtime friend and subscriber of THM. (She was even kind enough to do an interview with me a few years ago!)

I reached out to her because I wanted to talk about writing, publishing and the business of both, as well as the possibility of turning this newsletter into a book-length project; Henriette is an accomplished novelist and a co-founder of her own publishing company, so I knew I’d come to the right place.

We covered so many things, but one that stuck out came when I asked her this: I know how to write an 800- or 1,000-word essay; how do I know when I have an idea that’s worth devoting 200 or 300 pages to? How do I know if there’s enough “there” there?

Her response? “Think like the inquisitive two-year-old you once were, and keep asking why.” Take out a sheet of paper, jot down your ideas, and look at them from every angle — and keep asking why, keep digging down to what’s underneath them.

I realized how tempting it can become, especially when you reach my age, to go through the motions of whatever you’re doing — your work, a church service like I mention above, really anything — without even realizing you’re going through the motions.

Especially when it’s something we’ve done repeatedly, we can fall into a mindlessness we’re barely even aware of. But, like the spring, there’s also invitation to reflect, to think more deeply, to really consider whatever it is we’re experiencing, listening to, going through.

I realize how much more there is to see when, like Henriette says, to really look, to really see what’s in front of me. What I might be missing.

Once upon a time, I’d sit in a church pew and gaze at the ceiling, blissful in my own headspace, but also missing what was going on all around me. That’s not exactly the crime of the century, of course 😀 But what if I tried noticing, or listening, a little more closely?

I hope you’re having an amazing week and getting some great runs in — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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The year was 1987. , then a writer for The New Yorker, was spending her weekends traveling far and wide across the U.S. to find out what people did with their Saturday nights.

She hung out with people cruising in cars along small-town streets in Indiana; with families celebrating their daughters’ quinceañera in Arizona; with a lounge band performing in Portland, Oregon; and with fraternity members at Georgia Tech, who trashed their own house after a football game.

The story that caught my eye the most — which she’d publish, along with all of these, in her 1990 book Saturday Night — took her to maybe the oddest place of all in America to spend a Saturday night: a nuclear missile silo in Wyoming.

You’d think, of course, that it took months of requesting and processing security clearances to get in — not to mention a believable explanation of why you’d even want to visit a missile silo. But as Orlean explains in her book Joyride, it was a lot easier than that:

“To give you an idea of how innocent the world was in 1987, let me tell you how I managed to get access to that silo: I wrote a letter to someone in the press office of the Pentagon, explaining that I was working on my first book and that I wanted to see what Saturday night was like in a nuclear silo. In short order, I received a letter giving me permission and providing me a date for the visit and directions to the silo in Wyoming. I don’t remember being subjected to any security clearances at all. I wasn’t searched when I got to the silo, and I was ushered in (and down) with as much (or as little, really) scrutiny as I would have received if I’d been attending a real estate open house…”

She goes on to describe the crew manning the silo — “so young they looked like they’d just gotten their first shaving kits” — but the next paragraph triggered a feeling in me I’d almost forgotten, when she wrote:

“So many aspects of my reporting on Saturday Night now seem like they took place in another world — a guileless, unguarded one. I was an unknown writer approaching people I didn’t know, and they all agreed to let me observe them in their private moments. The more official settings, like the silo, were governed by the most half-hearted rules. On occasion, it verged into lackadaisical…”

At first, that might sound (kinda) like a criticism. But to me, what I hear when I read these lines is more melancholy, a sigh of sadness. For an innocence that’s been lost, and for a world that feels far, far back in the rear view mirror.

I don’t have any experiences quite like the ones Orlean describes in her book; I’ve never spent the night in a missile silo, nor have I ever gone cruising up and down a small-town Indiana street. (I have had a few Saturday nights like the one she mentions at Georgia Tech, though — a long time ago!)

My one experience that leaps to mind when I think of this era came around the same time she was doing her reporting in Wyoming — it may have been a year or two earlier, but close in time.

It was March, and I’d traveled with a friend of mine and his family to Florida, to catch some major league baseball spring training games. I was 14, maybe 15.

We’d seen an early game that day between our beloved Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees (who beat up on the Braves pretty good, as I remember). We were staying at a hotel near the Braves’ home field; after dinner, we were stumped as to what to do, because the team wouldn’t play again until the next day.

We looked across the street at their field, which had completely emptied out. No one was in the stands, the field and the dugouts were clear. We looked at each other and said, hey, why not see if we can get in?

I know this sounds a little far-fetched — you’d never get onto the grounds of a major league sports facility today. But we were able to “break in” by simply… walking up, opening the gate, and walking right in.

We looked around the dugout and found real, honest-to-God major league Louisville Slugger bats and real, genuine Rawlings baseballs, made just for major league play. And we took them out on the field — me, my friend and his younger brother — and played ourselves a game not unlike the one you see Kevin Costner play in Field of Dreams.

We ran the bases; we took turns pitching and swinging the bat, knocking balls way into the outfield. We slid into second, slid again into third, and then took turns sliding into home.

All that time, a couple of the field lights were on, so we could see while we played. We must’ve played for at least an hour. And never, not a single time, did a security guard ever stop by and shoo us out of there. (I think we even took home a couple of the bats as “souvenirs” — don’t judge me!)

I can feel myself sigh a little as I write these words. And I don’t want to make you sad, or feel overly melancholy. But I do miss the carefree nature of that world, or it least the way it seemed carefree.

It makes me happy to think about it, even if that world isn’t with us anymore. As my son said once years ago, “sadness is kind of sweet, because sadness is about happiness.” And he’s right, you know?

Anyway, this is what was on my mind tonight — thanks for indulging me 😀

As always, keep in touch and keep me posted on your running/life and what’s new with you.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Our training miles for week 5

First, please forgive me for not including these last week — but here’s our training schedule for the week ahead, in minutes and miles, and I’ve added schedules for the 12-week, 16-week and 10-mile training plans:

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Right around this time of year almost a decade ago, I got a phone call from my mom with a question that immediately piqued my interest:

“Want to go with me to Cuba?”

Well of course I did, but my wife Meredith and I had a 12-year-old and two-year-old at home, and I had to work, and this, and that, and well…

“When do we go?”

In a few months, she said. The trip would be in mid-March.

Well, I thought to myself, when will I get a chance to travel to Cuba again? I knew it would be a stretch to make it work with the rest of my life, but… I said, “of course, I’ll go.”

And, fast-forward three months, we’re on a plane from Miami making our way over the Straits of Florida on our way to Havana, where we’d land and spend the next week with a tour group, seeing the city as well as the farming region known as Pinar del Río, on the western tip of the island.

Once we landed, spent the night at our hotel and got our bearings, we went off into the city, exploring.

We walked through plazas like the one in the photo above; we walked along the Malecón, a five-mile promenade perched atop a seawall, where Havana’s young people rendezvous at night.

The architecture of the buildings looked as if they had once been beautiful, majestic even. It’s a cliché, but they really did have “good bones,” even if many of them were more or less crumbling.

You probably know the reasons why. The longstanding U.S. embargo plus a legacy of reliance on the former Soviet Union and a still-centrally planned economy have left this once-popular tourist destination enfeebled; one man I met, who shared how low most Cubans’ incomes were, said simply, “we find ways to get by.”

Not everyone we met had a sad story — not by a long shot. I’m sure I’m far from the only one to experience this, but to a person, everyone we met in Cuba was warm, friendly and welcoming. They were open, they spoke honestly about what life there was like.

It was hard, I learned. For starters, at the time there was no island-wide internet service; in Havana, people crowded around the outside of a baseball stadium we drove past, sitting on the sidewalks while catching up on their text messages via the stadium’s wi-fi.

Out in the Pinar del Río countryside, we met a tobacco farmer named Benito who made fun of us being so attached to our cell phones; to show us what we looked like, he picked up an ear of corn off the ground to “call” his birds, who flew into his hand immediately.

Elsewhere, we met singers, we met dancers. We met teachers and students in a school; we met nurses who worked in a hospital just down the street from the school.

One of my favorite visits was the day we met a group of kids playing baseball in a Havana park. The chain link fences separating the stands from the field had long since been chewed up and torn apart; the dugouts looked like they’d been built and painted decades earlier.

The kids played with a joy I’ve seen my own little man play with when he and I play football in our back yard. Whenever I look at these photos, I wonder if any of these boys ever made it to the major leagues here in the U.S.:

The most remarkable thing I found on the trip, though, was remarkable (to me, at least) because we saw it everywhere: photos, posters and illustrations of Cuba’s revolutionary leaders, be it Fidel or Raúl Castro, or Che Guevara.

Framed photos of Guevara were on the walls of many of the buildings we entered throughout the trip, in towns big and small; posters of both Castros were plastered on walls and buildings all around Havana. You couldn’t take a bus ride without seeing Castro’s face at least a few times around the city.

Their faces, and famous things they’d said or written, were present anywhere and everywhere people might find themselves in Havana, so often that you’d never forget them.

We also visited a plaza near the center of the city, where in his younger days Castro — he’d died the previous fall at age 90 — would assemble groups of thousands to stand and listen to hours-long speeches on a regular basis. (Attendance wasn’t exactly optional, we were told.)

To have the hand of the leader always on your shoulder — metaphorically, at least — no matter where you went, or what you did… it was such an alien thought to me, as an American. But there, it was inescapable.

Given all of that, and how suffocating it must be, it was perhaps surprising how many people we met who clearly were unbowed by it. They had found something in their lives — their job, their family, their neighborhood — that brought them joy and purpose.

Now of course it would be fair to say I’m just an American on a tourist visa; I only saw a glimpse of their lives, a tiny fraction of what life there is actually like. And that’s all true.

But I like to believe I caught a tiny bit of their hope, their resilience, their courage in the face of forces much larger than themselves — how they carried themselves, and how they still managed to find beauty in their world.

I hope to make it back someday, if for no other reason than Havana puts on a gorgeous marathon through its city streets every November — who knows, maybe I’ll make it?

In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing Sunday and get a great run in today. It’s in the teens here where I live in Georgia! As always, stay safe, stay warm, and keep me posted on how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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In our bathroom, up on a top shelf, lies an electronic blood pressure monitor, velcro fabric strap and all.

For most of the past few years, it has sat there collecting dust. I bought it after a visit to my dentist, where a routine blood pressure check showed a number I thought couldn’t be real.

I took few readings at home with it, but the results were a lot closer to normal, so my worries subsided and I put it away. Until a couple of weeks ago.

That’s when I realized, yikes — I’m about to turn 55. My annual physical was in a couple of weeks, so I thought maybe I ought to take a peek at what my numbers might look like.

I pushed the big button on the front and the digital display lit up, which meant the batteries inside were still good. So, I strapped the velcro cuff around my arm, pushed the button again, and listened to it hum as the fabric slowly squeezed.

Now, the numbers it showed me… were a little scary. I turned to my wife, who was next to me on our bed reading, and showed her.

“Maybe you should try it again,” she said, seeing how rattled I was. “Give it a few minutes and do it over.”

So I did. I followed the instructions inside the box, this time giving myself five minutes to calm down and relax — not moving, not even talking.

And this time… I breathed a sigh of relief. Not perfect, but better. Closer to “normal,” closer to the green zone on the side of the monitor, the zone you want to be in.

I’ve never had to worry about my blood pressure, ever in my life. Every time I visited the doctor in the past, my numbers were within that green zone.

But lately, whenever I talk with friends my age, I’ve realized how many of them take medication for it. And a little digging around unearthed the fact that the vast majority of men my age in the U.S. have some degree of hypertension, many of whom don’t even know it.

(When I found that out, I was like… whoa.)

On the day of my physical, all of this is rumbling in the back of my mind. As is the awareness that, over the past couple of years, several numbers in my lab results — like cholesterol, triglycerides, etc. — had been trending up. Not dangerous up, not yet. But not the direction you want to be going in, either.

After I finish my appointment and head back home, I’m anxious to find out what’s in my new lab results. I check the app on my phone that connects me with my doctor, once, twice, a third time. But there’s no update.

It’s not until later that night that I decide to check one more time, and… the results were good. Better than I expected, even — several of the numbers that had been trending up took a nosedive, some even back from “high” into “normal.”

Which makes me wonder: how did this happen?

For so long, I’d been worried that as my age rose, those lab numbers would just keep on rising and there was nothing I could do about it. But there’s one thing I haven’t yet shared with you, the thing I think may have caused all this.

Starting December 31, my wife and I quit alcohol completely. Not a drop has passed our lips since then. The day after I got my lab results, I messaged my doctor to ask him if this brief a period of laying off alcohol could have that kind of effect. His response: “It does look that way.”

Now, I should add that I’ve sworn off alcohol before and later resumed. So I don’t want to make any big predictions just yet about where I’m headed from here.

But these results from something as simple as quitting drinking for just ten days are pretty undeniable. (It also got me thinking that, if I can see lab numbers like I’m seeing now, there’s no reason I can’t make it to age 90 or 95 — and not just make it, but a healthy 90 or 95. Who knows?)

Of course, to make it to that age, I’ll need to maintain my running — we all knew that was coming, right? — and I’ll need to keep following the plan I shared with you last week:

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O-kay. Okay, okay, okay.

I can see the date on the calendar, I know January really is here.

(Does it have to be?!)

All this week, each morning when I roll out of bed I notice my body does a little more creaking, a bit more popping.

I feel a little like a bear that’s been hibernating all winter, poking its head out from its den for the first time in weeks. Snow is still on the ground; does that mean I can go back to bed?

Getting started with running again — especially after a long break — can feel this way, right? In the back of my mind, I want to yawn and go back inside my cave.

But something tells me, put that thought aside. Go look for your running shoes in the back of your closet; don’t worry, they’re still there. They’ve been there for weeks, just waiting for you to lace up again.

Truth be told, I have been running here and there during the past few weeks. Sporadically, but surely. So, I’m not completely off my game.

But what game I do have is pretty rusty, and in need of some long, slow stretches to get me fully warmed up.

With that in mind, I thought I’d share with you some plans I have for the year ahead here in our newsletter, plus some miles you can get started running over the next week.

First up: the books I’d like to read and explore as we run this year. I’ve followed this format before — most recently a couple of years ago — but it occurred to me that it might be helpful to share with you a kind of syllabus for what I’m thinking, the topics I’d like to explore and the directions I’d like to go.

Bear in mind, we may not get to all of these, or explore each one from start to finish. We may touch on just parts of them; that’s okay, because what I hope is to find the gold in each to share with you, the parts that are most relevant for us.

And, perhaps, as a starting point to explore other things – we shall see!

Here’s what I look forward to diving into:

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Few movie scenes have left me with a lump in my throat like the one that closes Cast Away. You remember it, don’t you?

When Tom Hanks, who plays a FedEx systems analyst named Chuck Nolan, has returned after four years stranded on a deserted South Pacific island only to find that his girlfriend — whom he’d planned on proposing to — has married someone else?

The scene in which they take the (very) short drive in the rain in Chuck’s old Jeep — when they realize that, no matter how much they loved each other before his plane crash, life has moved on and they have to let each other go — that one, of course, gets me.

But the next scene, in which we see Chuck travel to the middle of nowhere to deliver the last package from his ill-fated cargo flight — that’s the one that really gets me.

We see him on the side of a dusty Texas highway, a road atlas splayed across the hood of his car. A woman driving by, seeing how lost he looks, slows down and stops. She tells him if he takes one direction, the road will take him to “Amarillo, Flagstaff… California.” Take the other, and he’ll find “a whole lot of nothing, all the way to Canada.”

He thanks her, and she drives off. But she hasn’t gotten far when he notices a symbol on the tailgate of her truck, the same angel’s wings painted on the package he’d just delivered.

Chuck watches her drive away, then walks into the middle of two roads. He stands — literally, as well as metaphorically — at a crossroads. Remember, he’s lost everything important to him: the woman he loved, colleagues who lost their lives, years of his life.

And yet, even after all he’s gone through, he stands at the door of a new chapter. He remembers what he learned from all those years stranded on the island: “I know what I have to do now. I’ve gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

I share this with you because, after all the years I’ve been writing this newsletter, one thing that comes up again and again in the comments are moments you’ve been at a crossroads in your own lives.

Times when you’ve been injured. Moments when you’ve lost a spouse, or lost a job, or moved to a new city, or watched your parents grow old, or your children grow up. Joyous times and challenging times.

Now, I’m at one of my own in my professional life. The company I work for is going through a merger, which means you probably can guess what comes next: a number of roles are being eliminated, including mine.

I share that with you not so you’ll feel sorry for me — I’m fine, my company has treated me wonderfully, and is giving me a really nice severance package — but to let you know, I’ve arrived at a crossroads too. For the moment, I’m not sure which way to go.

There’s something I’m losing, for sure. But this moment also reminds me there are more possibilities than what I’ve imagined so far; maybe this moment is asking me to think in a different way?

Occasionally, I’ve shared articles here on finding what some call your “why” — the reason you’re out there running, pounding the pavement (or the trail), putting one foot in front of the other, again and again.

I’ve known what that is for me… sometimes. Of course, when I’m training for a race, my reason is to build myself up so I can run 10 miles, or 13 miles, or 26 miles, or whatever.

But dig a little deeper, and I think why I keep doing this is so I can discover who I am out there on the road. How I’m developing, who I’m becoming. I process everything in my life when I’m running; I don’t really think about my pace or my distance all that much anymore.

Now that the new year is here — can you believe it’s really 2026?! — I stand, like many of you no doubt, at a place where the path ahead is clouded. I’m not sure which way to go. But I’m excited to take steps forward and find out.

I’m also excited about the year ahead for us here at THM. I’ve so enjoyed getting to know you better over the past year, through the interviews so many of you have done — more are on the way, and please know I’d love to talk with you if you’re interested in sharing your story.

Something that has also been a blast for me is live video, which and have been so gracious to appear with me. I hope to do more like these with them this year, and to bring in more voices I think you’ll love hearing from.

Next week, we’ll get started in earnest with running for the year, as I’ll share training plans for multiple distances in each week’s issue — half marathon, full marathon, 10-miler and 10K.

You’ll need to be a paid subscriber to receive these, plus everything else our members get — become one here for 30% off today.

In the meantime, I’d love to know — how did your year go, and have you reached a crossroads in your own life? What have you learned, and how has it gone?

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going!

Your friend,

— Terrell

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A musical coda: whenever I need a little boost on the treadmill, this is the song I turn to:

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There’s always something different about this time of year, isn’t there? It doesn’t matter whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or even the winter solstice. There’s something unique about these final couple weeks of the year, when time slows down.

To me, it’s always felt like an “in between” time — when work slows, our normal responsibilities recede into the distance, and we can just be. And reflect on the year just gone by.

When I think about what I’m trying to do with this newsletter, the thread that runs through it all is to try, in however small a way, to lift you (and me!) up. To find some inspiration, something that gets your blood flowing, and gets you to feel like you can go out there and take on the day.

But if I’m being completely honest, there have been moments this year — more than I’d like to admit — when I’ve gone to my own well for inspiration and not found much there.

It has been very difficult to watch what has been happening this year to those at the margins of our society, the most vulnerable among us, and not feel an overwhelming sense of despair. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m not the only one who feels like a David without a slingshot, looking up at a gigantic Goliath towering over us all.

Then, I remember.

I remember the protests I took my son to earlier this year. The feeling of being among people who felt like I did — who wanted not just to feel awful about what was happening but to do something about it, however small that something might be.

I remember the causes and the candidates I’ve donated to and campaigned for, even in small ways and even when I couldn’t donate much. Sometimes a little can go further than you think.

I remember that I’m just one person, and while I should — and will — aim to do all I can, the world outside my door will still be there. I can’t make it go away, no matter how hard I try.

I remember that I have to put my shoulder to the wheel in whatever way I can, and trust that someday that effort will bear fruit. Because none of us can know what lies ahead, the only thing we can control is ourselves.

And, maybe most importantly, I try to remember to be careful in what I behold, the images and stories and news I consume. Because, to paraphrase Nietzsche’s famous words, we need to be careful not to “gaze too long into the abyss, because the abyss also gazes into you.”

What does that mean? I think we have to take care not to get so engaged with what causes us despair that we become like it ourselves — that we need reminders that life also contains joy, excitement and happiness, even when we don’t see it.

This is going to sound really ridiculous, but I got a reminder of exactly that yesterday. I was driving in my car, listening to a radio broadcast of something awful in the news — pick any story, they were all terrible.

Irritated, I tapped the music icon on my car’s dashboard screen and pressed “Play.” I had no idea what song was cued up, or what I was about to hear.

And what popped up first?

The opening “BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM” of James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”!

Have you ever heard this song? I’ve loved it since the first time I heard the opening notes blasting from the stereo of an old college friend’s convertible, decades ago. It’s electric, it gets you up on your feet, and you can’t think about anything else, especially when you hear JB’s intro:

Fellas, I’m ready to get up and do my thing! (Yeah! That’s right! Do it!) I want to get into it, man, you know? (Go ahead! Yeah!) Like a, like a sex machine, man, (Yeah!) movin’, groovin’, doin’ it, y’know? (Yeah!) Can I count it off? (Okay! Alright!) One, two, three, four!

When I heard it yesterday, I was finally able to snap out of it. (I believe the words I said to myself were “FUCK… yes!”) It dawned on me that we all have moments when we feel bad — but that feeling isn’t meant to give us license to simply feel bad some more. No, it has a purpose: to spur us to action.

The year ahead is bound to bring lots of reasons to feel despair, for certain. But these are opportunities to take action, no matter how small, to do what we can to make this world a little bit better.

I realize this may be the weirdest Christmas/holiday email you’ve ever received. Same for me! But I hope it fills you with the same energy, the same spirit, the same aliveness, as that song did for me when I heard it.

I hope you have an amazing, wonderful holiday filled with love, laughter and cheer — and I can’t wait to see you again in the new year.

And in the words of JB, “Get it together — right on, right on.”

Your friend,

— Terrell

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And a musical coda I think you’ll love…

It’s perfect, isn’t it? It sums up exactly what I want to do this time of year. I can feel my energy start to power down, like the engines of an airplane once you reach the gate.

Now is the time for movies, chili and cozying up by the fireplace. I am getting some running in, but it’s pretty sporadic right now. That’s okay, though, because come January first, we’ll be back at it.

For now, I’m enjoying a little rest and I hope you are too. I wanted to share with you something special I have planned for next week, a Substack live chat I’ll be doing with , who writes the fantastic newsletter .

Anna is a longtime health journalist, certified personal trainer, and mat Pilates instructor who also pens an occasional column for the New York Times on all things exercise. I’m excited to talk with her so I can finally — finally! — get on track with strength training.

It’s a goal of mine for the new year, as I’ll be turning 55 in January — it’s something I want to incorporate in a way I’ll actually sustain. And because I know I’m not the only one with questions around strength training, I thought I’d invite you to our conversation too.

So, mark your calendars for Monday, December 15 at 1:00 p.m. ET — and feel free to send me any questions you’d like to ask in the meantime.

I can’t wait to learn more from Anna, as I really want to use the next year to get in plenty of running, but also to work on my whole body — strength, cardio, what I eat, how I sleep, all of the above.

I’ve prioritized running over all those things, but at (almost) 55, I know it’s time to grow up a little and add more things into the mix. I hope you’ll join us on Monday!

See you then — in the meantime, keep in touch and send me your questions, and we’ll answer them live.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Years ago, when my son was still really little, I remember a conversation I had with my sister once over the phone. We were catching up about what was going on with each of our kids, the kinds of things you normally talk about with a sibling.

I’ve forgotten almost everything we said to each other that day, but one thing she told me seared into my memory, something I still think about often:

“You know, you really should get down on your knees every day and thank God you’re a man.”

She was laughing when she said it — which means I must have said something kinda dense, that revealed just how little I knew about the challenges of having and raising kids. (I wish I remembered! Though I imagine I’d laugh at myself now if I could.)

There’s another, deeper level to what she was saying that I see now also. Not only did I enjoy a freedom from the physical challenges of being a woman — I get to enjoy us having kids, but I didn’t have to “have” them. I didn’t go through nine months of pregnancy or give birth, just for starters.

No, it was that I’d also been completely oblivious to a whole constellation of little privileges I’d enjoyed my whole life, ones I’d never even noticed.

Sure, I’m aware of my gender and ethnicity; all I have to do to see those is look in the mirror. But I move around in the world, and always have, looking like I do: white, male, and generally in good health. I won the ovarian lottery, which means I’m rarely asked to think about what life is like for those who didn’t.

What brought all this to mind for me today is this touching, thoughtful essay by on what the past year has been like after experiencing a serious knee injury that meant he couldn’t run at all for many months.

For Bromka, this has been extremely challenging (to say the least!) as running has been so central to his life: born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he’s a 2:19 marathoner and a former member of the Bowerman Track Club Elite running team, as well as running coach today.

But “when a piece of cartilage broke free from the end of my femur,” he writes in his essay, “that wasn’t possible for many months.” Only very recently has he been able to tiptoe back into the sport, re-learning how to run so he won’t injure himself again.

Over the past year, my father and my father-in-law have experienced some pretty significant health challenges too. They’re not uncommon for men their age — my dad is in his mid-80s, my father-in-law just turned 77 — but they’re another reminder for me of how lucky we are when we’re healthy.

Remember the 1989 movie Always, with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus? When she tries in vain to persuade Dreyfus, who plays a daredevil aerial firefighter, not to make one last flight before taking his new trainer job? She climbs atop his plane and into the cockpit, trying to get through to him: “These things are fragile!”

I’m thankful today that I’m whole, in good health, and can get out there as often as I like. I’m thankful that you’re here too — especially because, as we all see in the newsletter world today, you have more choices than ever. You could read anything you want.

But you’re here, and I appreciate that so, so much. You’ve made writing this newsletter the most enjoyable thing in my entire writing career, really the best thing I’ve ever done — and I thank you so much for that.

You’ve made this possible, every one of you. And I hope you have a wonderful few days off, and get some great running in.

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going — we’ll see each other again after the holiday!

Your friend,

— Terrell

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One last thing

I can’t let you go without sharing an amazing story I think you’ll love, which I discovered thanks to . It’s the story of Paul Lundy, who worked an office job for more than three decades in the Seattle biotech industry, but reached a point when he just couldn’t do it anymore.

That’s when he discovered 92-year-old Bob Montgomery, who ran a tiny business repairing typewriters. And the rest is, well, you’ll have to read the rest of the story here.

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Almost exactly this time a year ago, little T was in his school’s fifth grade play. It was a musical — “Anything Goes” — and he tried out for the lead male role.

Not that I doubted his acting chops; there’s nothing he loves more than being a ham around the house, singing in the mirror at the top of his lungs. Maybe, I thought, it’s better not to get his hopes too high… what if there’s some amazingly talented kid going for the same role, you know?

Well friends, he got the role. And suddenly our lives were filled with theater, morning, noon and night. We watched all kinds of taped performances of the show on YouTube, discovering Sutton Foster’s amazing turn as Reno in its 2022 revival on Broadway.

(I even tried to sneak in the Indiana Jones movies by sharing Kate Capshaw’s take on the title song in Temple of Doom, but… no dice 😞)

His performance — in three separate shows, mind you — blew us all away. I couldn’t believe he actually got up on the stage, in front of all those people. Not only did he not forget his lines, he was totally comfortable up there.

Now, you may be wondering why I’m sharing this with you — and, if you’ve had children, you’ve probably had an experience just like this.

But I was thinking about it after I stumbled across this video, an interview with the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, on what he’s learned from having kids — especially since he didn’t have a family until he was in his late 40s.

Around the middle of their conversation, Graham Bensinger asks Seinfeld about another interview he gave over a decade ago, in which he said he realized “there was this whole other quadrant of my brain lying there dormant. Kids give you something. If it wasn’t for my kids, I’m pretty much done with living. I could kill myself. Now there’s something else to live for.”

He was joking in that next-to-last sentence (of course!), but what he said next really caught my ear:

“Kids are the greatest show on earth. So, you just wanna watch them live. [There’s an] entertainment value in watching them try to live

You know, I don’t watch all the shows that everybody watches, I don’t find them interesting. I watch baseball, and [other than that] I like to see what the kids are doing. The kids are very entertaining because they’re primitive humans.

You can’t not watch the turtles try to get to the waves. You know, the little blue turtles when they run down the beach? And some of them make it and some of them don’t? You have to watch it.

And so that’s what kids are — you’re just watching these turtles run for their life.”

I share that because last year, I thought little T was all about theater — it was what he wanted to do, what he wanted to be. His sister had loved it too when she was in school, and he wanted to follow in her footsteps.

Now, those days may as well have been a century ago. Because now, there’s nothing we talk about, think about, breathe about more than college football.

Last year, he was practicing how to quickly change in and out of different costumes to make his marks for each scene in the play. Now, we’re practicing running routes in the backyard, as I try — try! — to learn how to throw a spiral so I can get the ball to him at just the right moment.

Every Sunday, when the new rankings come out, we go over them with a fine-tooth comb. Did UGA get the shaft? Should Indiana really be ranked that high? Look at what’s happened to Miami and Carson Beck…

(All the backyard playing we’re doing, by the way, is reminding me why this sport is played mostly by people in their teens and twenties — at 54, your fast-twitch muscle fibers don’t work quite like they once did 😂)

What impresses me most, though, is how he doesn’t feel bound by what he “was” before, an actor. He feels free to take that role off like a jacket and try on another, completely new one as someone who loves football.

He’s only 12 years old, of course, so we’ll likely see him make (many) more changes like this. But there’s something so freeing about letting go of what you were before and becoming something completely new — something I think we all can learn from, you know?

Anyway, I hope you’re having a great week and getting some great runs in — as always, keep me posted on how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.”

— Louis L’Amour

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No matter what day of the week it falls on, the first day of the year is one I almost always experience with a feeling of liftoff. Like a plane taking off into the air, first with nose up and then landing gear up… and then off we go.

What happened the year before, whether it was good or bad or meh — whether I feel like I achieved anything worthwhile or not, all that gets swept away. The first of January is a blank slate, a new beginning. Anything is still possible, you know?

Before that plane can take off, though, it has to land and hang out at the airport for a while. It needs the passengers it’s carrying to disembark, to take their baggage with them, and to go rest in the hangar for a while while it undergoes maintenance and refuels.

That’s kinda how I’m feeling right now with running, and with everything. I didn’t chase a big goal this year, but I did have a goal: the PNC Atlanta 10-Miler, back in October.

But now that we’re already in mid-November — and this may be hard to believe, but there are only seven weeks left in 2025 — it feels like the right time to shift gears and slow down, to pace myself as we head into colder weather and shorter days.

Downshifting doesn’t have to be only be a time for relaxing. (Though that’s what I like about it the most!)

It can be a time for change, too.

A couple weekends ago, my family and I traveled from where we live in Atlanta to a small town in rural Georgia, about two hours away. One of my dad’s cousins, whom we got to know well growing up, was turning 90 and celebrating her birthday.

I’ve made this drive a thousand times, at least the stretch along the interstate out of Atlanta. It has a different look every time I drive along it; there’s always some new piece of the highway being built, some new exit ramp or bridge going up.

Once you turn off the interstate, however, and onto the back roads that lead south from it, you’re in a different world. From the one I live in, anyway, with its gleaming corporate office towers emblazoned with names like Google, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.

Along these back roads you’ll see nice, well kept estates here and there. But they alternate with dilapidated old farm houses, their paint peeling off in the sun as kudzu vines slowly swallow them up.

We visited this town about once a year when I was growing up — sometimes less, sometimes more than that. Back then, we’d go fishing, we’d go climbing on the giant boulders out in the wide-open fields on my great uncle’s farm. We’d chase each other running around the dirt roads, stopping only to climb up in the hay barn (and nearly fell out of it once or twice).

Those places are all still there; they’re largely the same. But aside from a single new road that was under construction, almost nothing had changed from what I remember growing up.

Downtown stores still stand empty, many boarded up. Nothing new has gone in them, even all these decades later. And while a couple of new schools have been built, there’s been virtually no development — most of the land in the county is unused, even after all these years.

Now, there’s plenty about this place that’s wonderful. It’s peaceful, and it’s quiet — when you’re there, you can feel the tension you absorb from living in the city fall away. (And there are plenty of downsides to living where I live, of course; as one writer once described Atlanta, it’s a city “devoted to the worship of everything new.”)

From being there again, though, after all these years it dawned on me: change is a choice. The growth I’ve seen in the city where I’ve spent my adult life didn’t just happen on its own — people made it happen.

And the same is true of each of us, on an individual level. It dawned on me that whatever I feel I’m missing in my life at this particular moment, I’m not going to simply chance my way into it. I won’t just get lucky and stumble into it. (Or, at least it’s highly unlikely that I will!)

No, if I want to experience growth and change, those are things I need to make a choice about — and actively take steps to bring them about.

Even that may not be quite right.

Lately I’ve been re-reading a book we discussed last year, James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. The book’s subtitle — “How to finally, really grow up” — hints at why: I’m going to be 55 years old next year, and maybe it’s time to, you know, “really finally grow up”?

That sounds crazy, I know. I have friends who are already talking about retirement, which for them is just a few years off. (I have one who already has!) But I still feel the same I always have — the world still feels new, like I have so much to learn. How can I possibly be ready to be put out to pasture?

As Hollis describes it, the first half of life is for pushing, acquiring, forging — not just a material living, but our identities. This is when our ego is in charge — the part of us that’s motivated to establish our independence, to claim a piece of the world for ourselves:

“We can see that the agenda of the first half of life is predominantly a social agenda framed as, ‘How can I enter this world, separate from my parents, create relationships, career, social identity?’ Or put another way: ‘What does the world ask of me, and what resources can I muster to meet its demands?’”

Eventually, Hollis adds, our ego must let go of its grip so that our soul — our unconscious, our inner self — can take over. This begins a new phase of life that brings a lot of uncomfortable feelings; we can feel unmoored, like we’re in the middle of a river and don’t know which side to swim toward:

“In the second half of life, the worm turns, the agenda shifts to reframing our personal experience in the larger order of things, and the questions change. ‘What does the soul ask of me?’ ‘What does it mean that I am here?’ ‘Who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?’”

Our ego will push back against the soul, Hollis says; that’s why transitioning from one phase of life to another feels so awkward, so uncomfortable. Like something’s wrong, or missing.

We have to learn to stop pushing, he adds, and allow the soul to do its work in leading us where it wants to go. That’s difficult, to say the least, and I wish I had an easy answer.

But also, right now I feel like I’m in a moment when questions are more interesting to me than answers. So maybe I don’t need the right answers right now, as long as I’m asking the right questions.

What about you? Is this something you’ve experienced? A “before” and “after,” when your life felt markedly different?

As always, I love hearing your thoughts and what’s going on in your running/life — let me know!

Your friend,

— Terrell

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