Agoura Hills, Camden, Lake County, Lisbon, Malta + Moab
Races you'll love running, weekly recs + 'The Calling of Voices'
I’ve been thinking about my heart a lot lately. No, not my metaphorical one, not the “seat of my soul,” as writers of a bygone era might have described it. I’m talking about the actual, four-chambered muscle that sits near the center of my chest, the one pumping trillions of blood cells through my body right at this very moment that I write these words.
A couple of years ago around the end-of-the-year holidays, I happened to pick up this book at Barnes & Noble when I was looking for gifts. When I got home, I promptly put it on my bookshelf, and there it has sat ever since, collecting dust along with the dozens of other half- or yet-to-be-read (someday!) books I’ve also purchased over the years.
This past week, however, something in the book must’ve called to me, as I found myself pulling it off the shelf and finally cracking it open. Why now, I’m not exactly sure; it could be that, especially over the past year, I’m seeing friends and family members deal with heart-related health issues in a way that drives home the urgency to take care of my own. (I am 53 now, after all, and the realization is finally dawning that perhaps I’m not as invincible as I once thought I was.)
I haven’t made it very far into the book just yet, but the introduction already is arresting (no pun intended!). Author Sandeep Jauhar tells the story of his decision to get a CT scan of his heart at age 45 — when his weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and other risk factors suggested he’d shouldn’t yet be experiencing any issues at all — and learning just how far down the path of atherosclerosis he’d actually already traveled.
Jauhar’s story proceeds from there, as he weaves in with his personal story the history of how we discovered what we know today about our hearts, and the miracles of treatment we’ve developed in just the past few decades, and where medicine leaves us at this particular moment (especially when cases of cardiovascular disease are expected to skyrocket in the coming decades).
Overwhelmingly, however, it isn’t necessarily the ins and outs of the medical history of the heart that are impressing me. Rather, what keeps dawning on me is the need to consciously care for our health, from an early age, and give a level of attention to something most of us likely take for granted — including me.
There’s a part of me that wants to do exactly what Jauhar did, and get a CT angiogram as soon as possible; and then there’s another part of me that doesn’t, because if I learn something about myself that requires action — especially change — what will I do about it? Can I change the habits I’ve had for most of my life?
Of course, there’s much more to say about this and I will in a future issue — I’ve already gone on too long! — so I’ll close with these words by Frederick Buechner, whose essay “The Calling of Voices” I’ve written about before, and speaks to me in this moment too:
“There is nothing moralistic or sentimental about this truth. It means for us simply that we must be careful with our lives, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
Everybody knows that. We need no one to tell it to us. Yet in another way perhaps we do always need to be told, because there is always the temptation to believe that we have all the time in the world, whereas the truth of it is we do not. We have only one life, and the choice of how we are going to live it must be our own choice, not one that we let the world make for us.”
I hope you have an amazing Sunday and get in a great run wherever you are in the world — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.
Your friend,
— Terrell
🏃♀️ To run
Des Plaines River Trail Half Marathon
Lake County, Ill. | Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024
With fast and flat, wide course made of a crushed gravel surface that winds alongside the Des Plaines River in northern Illinois just outside Chicago, this half marathon — the race also features a marathon, 50K and a 50-miler — starts at the Half Day Forest Preserve in the Lake County Forest Preserves, where you’ll run the trails through the preserve before meeting up with the Des Plaines River Trail. From there, you’ll run cover about four of the trail’s more than 30 miles, including stretches along the river on the way out and on the way back in; the elevation stays mostly steady around 660 feet.
Megunticook Trail Festival
Camden, Maine | Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024
Its organizers call it the “race where the mountains meet the sea,” run here in this small coastal Maine town where Mount Megunticook, the second-highest mountain along the Atlantic coastline, looks out onto Penobscot Bay below. You’ll run the trails that wind their way up the mountainside, climbing some 1,900 feet of vertical gain in the race’s 20K, its closest even to a half marathon. There will also be a 50K — “brutal” and “beautiful” they add — as well as a 10K, all run through the trails of Camden Hills State Park.