9 Years of The Half Marathoner (!)

What a long, strange (and amazing) trip it’s been

You know that saying, about how a butterfly flapping its wings on an island in the Pacific can change the weather halfway around the world?

Something kinda like that happened to me a little over nine years ago, when I happened to spot this article in the New York Times, about a pair of former NBC producers who’d recently started their own email newsletter, called TheSkimm.

Their approach to reaching readers — you pop up in their email inboxes, rather than appearing in their Google searches or their Facebook or Twitter news feeds, where you hope against hope that they’ll click on your posts — immediately caught my eye.

At the time, I owned a website called Half Marathon Guide, which relied almost completely on Google searches to bring in readers. (There’s a good chance you discovered this newsletter by visiting that site, in fact.)

What that meant, however, was that I had to keep my finger always on the pulse of Google’s ever-shifting algorithm, a Sisyphean task that grays the hair of even the biggest website publishers — and especially the teeny-tiny publishers, like me.

But what Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, TheSkimm’s founders, were doing — just sending out an email, which lands in their readers’ inboxes every morning? “That,” I said to myself, “now that’s the way to do this.”

So, I got to work. I found my way to Mailchimp, where I cobbled together a signup form, and started collecting email addresses. I was honestly surprised as many people signed up as they did; a few the first day, then a few more the next, then a dozen or so the day after that. This was in late December of 2014 or early January of 2015, and the email addresses just kept coming in.

Around the middle of February 2015, I realized, “okay, I need to actually start sending something out soon.” (You would have thought I’d have figured this out from the start, right?) So, I asked myself, what would people visiting my site want to read in their inbox?

I started with a themed list of races, every Wednesday. Races in national parks, races at the beach, races in New York City, in San Francisco; races on the east coast, the west coast, the southeast. I wrote a few words at the top of each issue, a few paragraphs that grew over time into longer essays. Those seemed to hit a mark with readers, especially the ones who wrote me back. So I kept going.

After a couple of years of writing the newsletter every week — and, often, staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. the night before to write it, and smooth out all the formatting necessary in Mailchimp’s interface — I discovered a new email service provider, the platform you’re probably using to read it right now.

That’s when this whole thing changed — and, more interestingly, it’s where you enter this story. Before, when I sent out the newsletter every week, I’d hear replies back from a smattering of you. But after we changed email platforms and Substack added its discussion features, we were able to talk to each other in a way we hadn’t before. And so we did, about everything — from changing your running form to Ask Me Anythings to what we’re reading to how we were handling Covid to where we are in the world.

From the very first one, I’ve had a blast chatting with you in our Friday live discussions. Even though we’re talking over the internet and likely are separated by hundreds, maybe even thousands, of miles, our chats have always felt like a gathering of friends to me. They’ve reminded me of what I always loved about the running groups I’ve been a part of over the years — a chance to get together once a week and just let it all hang out.

They’ve been a constant throughout the past few years, even as the newsletter has changed. And it has changed, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. In the “before” era prior to Covid, I mostly sent out information about races; that was why most of you signed up, what most of you were looking for. But once Covid hit and the restrictions on gatherings began, races everywhere were cancelled — which meant I had to ask myself, “what do we do now?”

Covid changed us all, of course. And I changed too — what interested me, what drew me in, the topics I wanted to write about. I know this wasn’t to everyone’s liking; a number of readers unsubscribed during this time, and I totally get why they did. (If I showed up at Dunkin Donuts and suddenly they weren’t serving doughnuts anymore, I’d turn around and walk out the door too.)

But enough of you stuck with me that we’ve been able to make this whole project much more varied, much more interesting and fulfilling. (I hope that’s true, anyway!) I know that sometimes, I write about odd, quirky subjects. On more than a few of my posts, when I’m about to hit Send, I wonder if you’ll say to yourself, “okay, this guy has really checked out with the baggage now.”

Because you (mostly!) haven’t, that means I get to explore a lot more with you — from what it was like when we lost our family dog Murphy a few years ago, to what it felt like as a parent to watch the news about the Uvalde school shooting, to what I’ve learned from Aristotle about being a person in the world, to what it’s like to watch my son grow up.

I know these aren’t the things you’d expect to find in most running newsletters; but they’re the things I’d share if we were in a running group together in person — they’re the things I’d be trying to find my way through, to work out together.

Throwing off the constraints of writing only about running has been both liberating and, oddly, kinda terrifying too. It’s a little like gliding along in a canoe on a narrow river, slowly but surely making your way toward the ocean. When you get there, you don’t realize how accustomed you’d become to those narrow boundaries — and, as the river opens up into the whole wide ocean, you can feel like, “whoa, this is big… now what do I do?”

That’s why I want to say thank you so much for being here, for supporting this newsletter and me as a writer, and for being part of the amazing, kind, supportive community we’ve built here together over the years. I really can’t believe we’ve been going for nine years (!) — quite a few of you have been here since the very start! — and I hope to keep it going for a long time to come.

As always, let me know what’s going on with your running/life, and keep in touch.

Your friend,

— Terrell

A quick photo I snapped on the beach in South Carolina, where I visited with my family last week