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Have you ever walked into a bookstore, ambled through the aisles for a while, and then your eyes happen to spot a book that makes you feel like time has stopped? Like you’ve been waiting to find it your whole life?

This past weekend, I traveled with my wife to Athens, Ga., to visit our daughter for parents’ weekend at UGA. We spent Sunday morning lazily wandering the neighborhood there known as Five Points, where I found a small bookstore named Ghost.

There, on the shelves at the back of the store, I happened upon a slim nonfiction book titled The Philosophy Cure, by a writer named Laurence Devillairs, who I’d later learn is the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris in France.

I sat myself down in one of the store’s plush, comfy leather couches — with that slick-yet-soft surface that’s oh-so-easy to sink into — and started reading the first few pages.

Right away I was struck by the author’s angle: that philosophy isn’t something abstract, to merely ruminate about in the comfort of a lecture hall. On the contrary, she says, it’s a kind of medicine: “It even has the power to cure. But the question is knowing what it is that we are being cured of.”

Ahhh… well. Turns out, that’s a really big question for each of us, and a hard one to answer. In fact, it’s so hard that we shy away from it; it’s so much easier to tune out by scrolling social media or becoming caught up in the busy-ness of our lives. We’d rather push it off, thinking that someday we’ll get to those big questions — but there’s just too much urgent and immediate to worry about right now.

That’s a trap, Devillairs says. Recalling the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and perhaps the most famous two words he ever spoke — “know thyself” — she says it’s critical for each of us to take the time to get to know ourselves; that we’re more than the sum of our actions and behaviors:

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It was a cold February day, almost 25 years ago.

I drove downtown, like I did every day, to the big glass building that housed the tech consulting company I worked for. I parked in the garage, took the elevator and then an escalator upstairs and badged in at the door, a routine so ingrained I could do it in my sleep.

Everything was quiet, much quieter than usual. Back then, each of us had an office phone at our desk — remember those? — which had a tiny red light that blinked when you had a message.

But most of us rarely, if ever, used them. Why call when you can email? So mostly they sat silent, stoic, untouched.

That morning as I walked through the still-dark office, though, I noticed tiny red lights blinking everywhere. On this phone, and that one, and that one way over there.

When I got to my desk, my phone was blinking too. So I picked up and listened to the voicemail, which told me I had an appointment in about fifteen minutes. It included the room number, and said to bring my laptop.

I arrived at the room to find two of my co-workers, seated on opposite sides of a table. There was an empty chair, which I assumed was meant for me. So I sat down, and immediately I could hear each of them exhale a little, a hint of the bad news they were about to deliver.

As you’ve probably guessed, they told me I was being laid off, along with several dozen of my other co-workers. It was 2002 and the tech bubble was still bursting, and so they didn’t have much choice.

None of this reflected on me, they assured me, but — as you probably know if you’ve been in this situation — it was pretty cold comfort. The meeting was short; I signed a couple of papers and they gave me a severance check, then followed me to my desk where I gathered up the few belongings I’d kept there.

And then, that was it. I was no longer an employee there, I wouldn’t see my friends who worked there anymore, none of it was a part of my life anymore.

I didn’t know it then, but that morning marked a huge turning point. Where one part — one act, if you will — of my life ended and another began.

All the years leading up to that day, everything had been up — I’d been growing up, going to school, going to college, graduating and getting a job. Then that job led to a better job, and the next job led to a better job still. Things kept looking, well, up.

After that, though, my life went sideways. For a while I drifted — well, first I took my severance check and spent it on a trip visiting friends across the country, driving from Atlanta all the way out to California. But eventually, of course, I had to come back.

What was waiting for me was square one — I had no job, not much money, no real discernible reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Life is short, as they say, but the days really are long. How to fill all that suddenly free time?

I was 31 years old and it was tough for me then; I have friends who are in their mid-50s now and having to start over in new jobs, new relationships, new living arrangements. (In fact, I’m one of them, as I was laid off from my old job and — thankfully! — found a new one at the start of this year.)

In When Harry Met Sally, there’s a wonderful line Billy Crystal’s Harry says to Meg Ryan’s Sally at the end of the movie, when at last he realizes he’s head-over-heels in love with her:

“I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

This is just a line from a movie, I know, but when we lose something big in our lives — a job, a partner, anything — we want it back, you know? We want the security back, we want to be back on the path we were on. As soon as possible.

At the time, I didn’t understand that the first act of my life had ended and the second was beginning. I tried to hold on to that first act, I think, maybe a little too tightly. I couldn’t see what was right in front of me.

Now, it’s (almost) a quarter-century later and, at times, I wonder if I’ve come to a similar hinge moment in my life. I’m 55 years old; my oldest is about to graduate from college this spring and my youngest will become a teenager in just a few weeks.

Are there other things I need to be doing? Are there parts of my life I’ve given enough energy to, and are there new directions I should aim for?

These are the thoughts that swirl in the back of my mind when I walk and when I run (which has been a rare thing lately). But still, I lace up and get out there, and try to figure it all out.

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

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Training miles for this week

So how did your 17 miles go last week? (If you’re following the 12-week training plan.) And if you’re following the plan to run a half by the end of the year, how did your 13 miles go?

This week, you’ll notice we add two miles to the 12-week plan and three miles to the 16-week plan:

Here’s how our next week looks for the 12-week plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 17 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 19 — 5 miles/50-55 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 20 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 22 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 23 — 5 miles/40-45 minutes

And for the 16-week plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 17 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 19 — 5 miles/50-55 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 20 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 22 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 23 — off

And for the 10-mile training plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 17 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 19 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 20 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 22 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 23 — off

Let me know how it goes, and don’t hesitate to reach out! — Terrell

I like to think of myself as a good person. (You probably do too, I imagine.) To be honest, it’s not something I think about a lot; at the age I am now, 55, most days I don’t even question it.

But sometimes there are moments — not often, just every now and then — when I ask myself, “well, are you sure? Would you even know if you weren’t?”

Most of us, most of the time, fall into habits of thinking, habits of being. You have to in order to get along in the world, don’t you? We all need a working model of who we are, and how the world works, so that we don’t become paralyzed with decision anxiety over every little thing.

The habits we acquire, though, have a way of becoming second nature to the degree that we aren’t even aware of them. We simply move through the world, acting the way we act and thinking the way we think, without giving them a second thought.

Sometimes you realize, maybe that’s not good enough. Even though you’ve made it this far in life just fine, thank you very much, maybe you need to take a look at yourself and ask, “is what I’m doing still working?”

Recently, I stumbled across an article on Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which you’ve almost certainly heard of in history class, and which Franklin first sat down to write in 1771 and kept working on until his death in 1790.

The book starts in his childhood and ends with Franklin at age 52; he’d live another 32 years — three of the most consequential decades in American history — so presumably he would have covered more if he’d had the chance.

What struck me as I revisited the Autobiography is that for Franklin — often described as history’s best example of a “self-made” man — that wasn’t just a lofty, abstract ambition. He literally wrote down the ways he wanted to improve himself, setting goals and measuring his progress toward them.

Franklin was 20 years old when he did this; he’d attended school until he was 10, but his father didn’t have the money to pay for his education beyond that. So, he made up for what he lacked by reading voraciously while also working as a printer and newspaperman, swimming in the political and philosophical currents of his day.

At that point in his (still young) life, Franklin believed he knew right from wrong, that he knew what a good life was. It’s just that simple, right? Not exactly, he tells us:

“As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I imagined.”

Franklin knew himself well enough; temptation pulled at him constantly, in every conceivable way. (Yes, in all the ways you’re imagining!) He was bound to lose his way, he feared, if he didn’t make a conscious choice to improve himself.

So when he sat down to write out a plan, he called on everything he’d ever read: religious, classical and philosophical texts, distilling their lessons into what he labeled the “thirteen necessary virtues”:

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Seeing these, all listed, hit me like a bolt of lightning. That’s because I often catch myself in thought, wishing this or that thing had gone differently in my day, wondering what I might have done differently. Those thoughts always evaporate, though, never to be heard from again.

What if I were to sit down and actually take an inventory of myself, and figure out the things I wanted to improve — and then actually try them? Take one virtue and practice it each week, just like Franklin did?

Some of his virtues I can easily see where I need work; others I think I’ve probably nailed by now. (But maybe not, who knows?)

Have you ever tried something like this in your own life? Made an inventory, and then attempted to make the changes that inventory called for?

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

Your friend,

— Terrell

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How did your running go over the past week? Especially if you’re following one of the training plans I listed last week, how did it go?

Here’s how our next week looks for the 12-week plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 10 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 12 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 13 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 15 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 16 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

And for the 16-week plan:

• Thursday, Sept. 10 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 12 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 13 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 15 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 16 — off

If you’d like to run a 10-miler instead…

• Thursday, Sept. 10 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 12 — 3 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 13 — 2-3 miles/20-30 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 15 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 16 — off

Want to keep going? Become a subscriber

If you’re using and enjoying the training plans each week, I hope you’ll consider becoming a full subscriber — after this week, they’ll be available only to paying subscribers.

You’ll get a special Sunday issue with amazing races you’ll love running, plus lots more interaction with our amazing community that’s spread all around the U.S. and the world.

All you need to do is click/tap this button to join us!

Subscribe now

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About fifteen or so years ago, long before this newsletter was even a twinkle in my eye, a friend of mine would give me a call right around this time of year.

“Terrell, you know what time it is, right?”

I’d pause, then remember. “Oh no,” I’d think to myself, laughing. “Not again.”

“Yep,” he’d say. “It’s time.”

“Do we really have to?” I’d reply. “Wasn’t last spring enough?”

“Oh that was just the warm-up, my friend,” he’d say, or something like it. “Now it’s time to get out there again… so get those running shoes ready and meet us this weekend, because we’re doing this.”

And thus would begin our journey, along with a few other friends, over the next three months as we trained for a race together; usually it was a half marathon, sometimes a little longer. (We even ran a 21-miler once.)

We followed this ritual every fall for a few years, and while I loved it, I also slightly dreaded it — because it had been so nice being lazy all summer.

I imagine you might be feeling exactly the same right now. It can be so hard to get going again once inertia kicks in; a body at rest prefers to stay at rest, doesn’t it?

Not to mention, this year — especially this summer — may have brought challenges you weren’t expecting. Maybe it’s just the god-awful heat so many of us are experiencing (hand raised here) or maybe it’s a job change that’s disrupted your routine (hand raised again).

Whatever it is, I feel you. My running routine is all of out of kilter thanks to a combination of all of the above, which means I haven’t been feeling like myself lately. And I’ve been needing to get back to some semblance of it.

Two people I’ve spoken with recently for interviews here — Charles Zuckerman and Abby Heffern — have been on my mind a lot lately. The thoughts they’ve shared around how they’ve adjusted their routines to match their stage of life — to deal with the reality they’re actually experiencing — have really made me think.

Sometimes, you can’t give running your best — but, you can give it something. You can keep your toe in the water, so you’ll be ready for the times when you can give more to it, and get more out of it.

Ever seen the 1992 movie A River Runs Through It? If so, then you remember the reverence the main character and narrator, Norman Maclean, has for the rivers of his home state of Montana, and for fly fishing.

He learns that reverence from his father, who taught both he and his brother Paul the art of fishing as if they were training for the priesthood. (And their father, in fact, was a Presbyterian minister.)

Around the middle of the movie, Norman’s girlfriend Jessie asks him to take her brother Neal fly fishing with him and Paul, in hopes of helping them get to know her family a little better. Reluctantly, Norman agrees.

But Neal, unaccustomed to the ways of the Maclean clan, gets drunk and stays out all night; when morning rolls around and it’s time to go fishing, he can barely keep his eyes open, much less cast a line.

Norman and Paul decide to fish on their own, leaving Neal in their car to sleep it off. The day doesn’t get any better, and once they’re done, it dawns on Norman how unhappy Jessie will be.

There’s one, brief throwaway line in this scene, though, that for some reason has always stuck with me, since the first time I saw the movie. It comes when Brad Pitt’s Paul Maclean, searching for some way to salvage the day, says, “hey brother, let’s say we come back tomorrow, and wipe this day off the books.”

That’s what I’d like to use this fall for. No matter what I’ve been through or how I haven’t been able to get out there, maybe — just maybe — we all can start fresh, and wipe yesterday off the books, you know?

How about you? Where are you with your running? With your fitness? Are you where you want to be, or has life thrown you a curveball recently?

I’d love to hear, either in replies back or in the comments — as always, keep in touch!

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Our training plans!

As promised, I’ve put together a couple of different half marathon training plans we’ll use to run together over the next few months. (If you’d like one for another distance, like the 10-mile or the marathon, let me know.)

Run a half by Thanksgiving

For those of us who’d like to run 13.1 miles by Thanksgiving, our plan starts with tomorrow’s three-mile run — and, to the day, is timed for exactly 12 weeks before Thanksgiving.

It’s a five-day-a-week plan, and looks like this:

• Thursday, Sept. 3 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 5 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 6 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 8 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 9 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

Or, run a half by the end of the year

For those of us who can’t devote five days a week to training, I’ve put together a 16-week plan, which ends on December 23:

• Thursday, Sept. 3 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 5 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 6 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 8 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 9 — off

For the full training plan, become a subscriber

For the next couple of weeks, I’ll include each week’s training miles in our weekly Wednesday newsletter. After that, they’ll be for paying subscribers only. If you’d like to continue with us beyond that, I hope you’ll sign up.

You’ll get a special Sunday issue with amazing races you’ll love running, plus lots more interaction with our amazing community that’s spread all around the U.S. and the world.

All you need to do is click/tap this button to join us!

Subscribe now

“Maybe ye don’t know it, Mr. Herriot, but this is the best time of your life.”

“Do you think so?”

“Aye, there’s no doubt about it. When your children are young and growin’ up around ye — that’s when it’s best. It’s the same for everybody, only a lot o’ folk don’t know it and a lot find out when it’s too late. It doesn’t last long, you know.”

— James Herriot, The Lord God Made Them All

It’s a cliché, of course, but it’s true: you always look at your children the way they were when they were little — like the photo above, in which my now almost-13-year-old son was still just five, and I took him fishing at a pond near our house.

That’s why it wasn’t all that surprising when he asked me earlier this week, “Dad, is it hard for you seeing me as grown up now?”

(Of course, he’s not grown up all the way yet, but in his mind he might as well be.)

“Yeah, it is,” I replied. “But I’m starting to make my peace with it.” Because at a certain point, your only real choice is to accept it, you know?

Then he said something I didn’t expect: “Well, I hope you haven’t made too much peace with it.”

What I think he meant was, while he’s ready for the power-ups that come with growing up — and a phone is right at the top of that list, which I’ll get to in just a sec — he still likes being a kid, he’s not ready for all that comes with being a teenager just yet.

He’s seen quite a few episodes of Seinfeld with me. But this summer, we also went to see — his choice — the new live-action Moana, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Toy Story 5, among others.

(We also saw and really liked Spider Man: Brand New Day, though I could’ve done with a little less swearing; but hey, that’s just me.)

So, he still has one foot in kid-dom, even though every day he gets closer to becoming an adolescent. It happens little by little; you notice a different tone in their voice, a little more assertiveness in their step.

You ask yourself, “what was that I heard?” (Though you know exactly what it was, because it’s the same way you acted when you were that age.)

A friend of mine once likened raising kids to someone giving you a glass of sweet tea. It’s perfect, and for the longest time, you can’t imagine it being different. Over time, though, you start to notice hints of something else; did someone pour unsweet tea in here by mistake?

Year by year, there’s a little more in there, then a little more. And then one day, the sweetness is all gone. This is okay, my friend told me; it’s just a phase, and it’s one you’ll learn to roll with — and, fingers crossed, will open the door to a new kind of relationship.

It doesn’t mean, though, that you won’t feel nostalgia for the old one. And the old one has been pretty great this past year, as little T and I have spent much of it outside in our backyard: playing football, basketball and now baseball/Wiffle ball as each season has changed.

We’ve played almost daily, and there haven’t been any alerts pinging and buzzing a device in his pocket all that time, because there hasn’t been a device there to buzz.

In the not too distant future, though — very likely this fall — there will be. With him, we’re fast approaching the age when basically every kid has a phone; most of his friends have one now, and the few that don’t will very soon.

As you might imagine, I’m torn. There’s a part of me that would like to throw my own phone in the ocean, as I know I’ve struggled with using it too much at times. (Maybe a little more than “at times” if I’m being honest.)

But I’m also persuaded by the argument that we need to prepare kids for how to interact with the digital world, not pretend it doesn’t exist. So, we take all the advice we’ve heard and seen, and we try to figure out a path that’s best for us.

And meanwhile, we try to hold on to the “sweet tea” days as much as we can. It’s hard not because I think my son is, on the day we get him a phone, suddenly become a different person. Not at all.

Rather, it’s because I know he’ll be taking his first big step into the whole teenager thing. It’ll unfold slowly, I know, but maybe neither one of us is quite ready for all the changes that will surely come.

But come they will, right? If you have any advice for this phase — or really anything! — I’d love to hear it. As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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I’ve mentioned this before, I know, but one of my all-time favorite movies is 1984’s The Natural, which stars Robert Redford as an aging Roy Hobbs, a one-time pitching phenom whose path to the major leagues was derailed by a tragic accident.

The film’s present day begins nearly twenty years later, when a fortysomething Hobbs has decided to take one last shot at baseball, long past the age by which most players have retired.

I’ve loved the movie ever since the first time I saw it, back when I was in the seventh grade — the age little T is now, by the way. But it inspires me even more today, now that I’m much closer to Hobbs’ age than I was the first time I saw it. (In fact, I’m a decade older!)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched it for the first time in a long time. Some movies I once loved haven’t aged so well, but this one has — the peaceful, rustic farmhouse Hobbs grows up in, the glamour of New York once he finally makes it onto the Knights, the excitement of playing in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, it all still feels fresh.

Most of all, the climactic scene — in which Hobbs hits the highest, longest home run you’ve ever seen, sending the ball soaring into the grandstand lights, which explode in a shower of sparks down onto the field — still gives me chills.

Just before that happens, though, there’s a scene I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since my re-watch: when Hobbs, still at the plate, hits a high fly ball he thinks is a home run, but actually turns foul.

Walking back to home plate, he sees his beloved “Wonderboy”-inscribed bat, shattered in two on the ground. He’d made the bat himself as a kid, hewing it from the trunk of a tree felled by lightning. The bat had been a trusted friend, the one thing that connected him to his childhood, that never failed him. And now it lay in pieces, ruined.

Hobbs stands and stares at the broken bat, at a loss for what to do. We see the Knights’ batboy, Bobby Savoy, come running out of the dugout to pick up the pieces; he looks back at Hobbs, who has only one thing to say: “go pick me out a winner, Bobby.”

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It’s a nice (albeit warm) night here in Atlanta and when I look at my calendar I realize it’s already July 22nd… can that actually be true?

True it is, and when I think about that I’m reminded that my kids go back to school soon, and not long after that the Labor Day holiday will arrive, which means fall will officially be here, which means all sorts of things start happening.

And one of those, I know, is that many of you will start training for races, as the fall really is the best time to run (at least here in Georgia). Mid-October, after all, is just twelve weeks away.

So, I thought I’d share a sampling of the training plans I’ve created over the years here at THM, in case you’re thinking/dreaming of running a half (or even a full marathon) this fall.

Feel free to reach out with any training questions you have, by email or in the comments — I’m happy to help in any way I can.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Here are a few of my plans — you can see my full list of training plans here:

Those are just a sampling of the plans I’ve created, which also include training schedules for the 10-mile distance plus a few more half marathon plans.

You can see all of them here:

See all my training plans here

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A few weeks ago, my 12-year-old’s cross country coach sent us an email with a training schedule, the running he’ll need to do to be ready when school starts back up in August.

The plan starts small, with runs of five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and the like. It includes some strength exercises too, like planks and push-ups. Nothing too hard, nothing too demanding.

It’s designed for someone starting at zero, essentially, so that by the time school starts they won’t still be at zero. And it gets slightly more challenging with each week, so the students can ease into the fall like a plane heading down the runway, just starting to pull its nose into the air.

To be honest, this plan easily could have been meant for me.

My own running and exercise — while not falling all the way to zero — has certainly not been where it once was. Not where it needs to be, not where it ought to be. There are (good!) reasons for that, but nonetheless — we are where we are.

Even though I’ve run here and there, I feel like I’m starting from scratch. Like I’ve gone all the way back to the beginning. Which, maybe is… okay?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve never really felt like the year started in January. To me, the year begins when we go back to school, or back to college for the fall semester. When those first leaves turn red, orange and brown, that’s always felt like the true beginning of the year to me.

I think that’s why summer always feels to me like the conclusion of something — and, once you hit about the point where we are now in July, things start turning again. Toward the fall, toward a new start.

It’s been a couple of weeks since we last connected, I know, and I’ve had lots of thoughts. Things have been churning in the back of my mind, as I’m sure they have for you too.

I want to re-dedicate myself to my health and fitness; especially after the beach vacation I’ve just been on, when I let myself be lazy and eat… whatever I wanted! (It was glorious, by the way!) That can only last so long, though. Sooner or later, we have to get back on the path.

One thing that’s never far from my mind is, I’m midway through my 55th year. I may have a little way left to go in my life, I may have a long way to go — or maybe even a really long way. (My hope, of course, is for the latter.)

But there’s something inescapable about being at roughly the half-way point of life: you keep thinking, “what comes next?” Especially once your children get older, or at least when they aren’t little anymore.

In his stand-up act years ago, Jerry Seinfeld has a great bit about what it’s like to be a kid:

When you’re little, your life is up. The future is up. Everything you want is up.

“Wait up! Hold up! Shut up! Mom, I’ll clean up! Just let me stay…up!”1

That captures it so well, doesn’t it? When we’re young, we’re looking up, we’re looking forward, ahead to the adventure. Everything is about taking the next step up the ladder.

Now, though, I feel differently. I don’t know what’s next, but I’m not sure it’s up, necessarily. Is the right aim to stay where I am? To simply keep doing what I’m doing? Or is it to try to move forward, to break new ground?

Right now, I honestly don’t know. And maybe it’s okay not to have an answer, at least for the time being. But I do feel a stirring, for an answer I hope will come into view.

In the meantime, I’m going to put one foot in front of the other as I return to running — which won’t be easy, I know! But at least I have good company, all of you who get out there and do this too.

I’ll leave you with my favorite photo I took last week, a boat that had been converted into a Tiki bar, floating on a creek headed out to the Atlantic.

Keep in touch, and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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It’s almost time.

Time to power down, to kick my feet up and take a little rest. Soon, I’ll be heading with my family to a beach along the South Carolina coast, just like the one in the photo above.

It’s one of my favorite places in the world, a place where the afternoon sunset always feels like time slowing down, a place where I can put all my cares away for a few days.

Though I’m not sure there’ll be much break from the heat we’ve been experiencing where I live here in Georgia; at the beach it’ll probably be even warmer!

Still, that’s okay. I’ll be off the grid and doing some reading, hoping to finish the wonderful Harper Lee collection I recently picked up, The Land of Sweet Forever, plus Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club, her second novel and one I’d read she was working on a decade ago, but had long given up hope she’d ever finish.

And yet, here it is. (Which goes to show, we never really know what the future holds, do we?)

I hope your running has been going great and you’ve been having big adventures. Some of you, I know, have been running goal races and notching big accomplishments — which is amazing! If you have one coming up or really anything you’re looking forward to, I’d love to hear about it.

Until we talk again — which I expect to be in a couple of weeks — I hope you’re having a wonderful, restful summer, and that you get to take some well-deserved time off too.

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

Your friend,

— Terrell

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P.S.: I’ll have at least one, maybe two additional issues between now and then for paid subscribers, so be on the lookout for those 👍

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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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