Angel's Rest, Arches, Eden, Painted Hills, Swanzey, Vietnam + Washington's Columbia River Gorge
Races you'll love running + weekly recommendations
Good morning, friends! ☀️
Thanks for your patience lately, as I’m just returning to your inbox after more than a week away. I was on vacation at the beach in South Carolina with my family last week, after which it’s taken me a few days to re-acclimate to “real” life again. I think I’m just getting back in the swing of things now!
It’s been a ton of fun for me to see where and how you’ve been running through our July running challenge, which — if you haven’t checked it out — you can catch up in the Chat area of the Substack app. You all have been sharing photos, your experiences, your mileage and more, and it’s really been a blast for me to follow along with you.
Something that’s occurred lately to me as I run, especially as I and many people I know seem to be in periods of transition in our lives. Whether it’s a child graduating and leaving home for college, parents getting older, or going through a job/career change ourselves, I and a number of people I know are experiencing big changes, ones in which we know our lives will be, look and feel very different soon.
Over the years, I’ve often read — and shared with you — the idea that running can be therapy, that we should think of it as mentally and emotionally transformative, in addition to being physically so. And that feels true, as we all know how much better we can feel about life, and ourselves, once we’ve finished a run.
But the more I think about it, the more I think that idea is oversold, or at least misunderstood. Running can’t actually replace a great conversation with a friend, or the love of a partner, or the camaraderie we feel when we’re part of a group that shares a common interest. It can’t do for us what a therapy session can do, either.
What it does, I think — especially in the cacophonous, always-on 21st-century world we live in, where stimulation comes at us from all directions — is give us the space to breathe, to be with ourselves, to be alone with our thoughts.
It gives us the space to talk to ourselves, and hear from ourselves. But it can’t do the work for us; I’m not sure anything magical happens on its own.
In the 1993 movie Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins plays the British writer and academic C.S. Lewis, who is caring for Joy Gresham, an American writer who is stricken with cancer and later becomes his wife, played by Debra Winger.
There’s a scene in the movie when the cancer appears to go into remission, which of course comes as a huge relief. One of Lewis’s fellow academics at Oxford approaches him after a class:
Harry: “Christopher can scoff, but I know how hard you’ve been praying. And now God is answering your prayer.”
Lewis: “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
That scene has stuck with me all these years, ever since the first time I saw the movie in the theater. In just a pair of lines of dialogue, it feels like it sums up nearly the entire human condition — we’re so helpless, each of us, in so many ways. We can’t stop bad things that befall our loved ones, we can’t stop the earth from turning.
But still we yearn, still we need to see that a better life is possible. And that’s worth yearning for, right?
I hope you have an amazing, amazing Wednesday, and enjoy a great run out there today — let me know how it goes!
Your friend,
— Terrell
🏃 To run
⛰️ Skyline Mountain Half Marathon. Described by its race organizers as “punishing, unforgiving,” and yet “ridiculously beautiful,” this race is all that and more — with some 1,900 feet of elevation climb in just the first three miles of the half marathon route, which organizers say is a half marathon “plus one,” meaning it’s 14.1 miles instead of 13.1. The race takes runners along what is known as the Ben Lemond and Skyline trails, which climb up the mountains here in the northernmost part of Utah through a series of switchbacks, twisting and turning along the dirt trails within the Cache National Forest, looking out onto Salt Lake City to the south and the mountains of southern Idaho to the north. Set for August 12, 2023.
🎨 Painted Hills Half Marathon. A run through the beautiful Painted Hills unit of Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds National Monument near the tiny town of Mitchell, home to just over 100 people and called the “gateway to the Painted Hills.” You’ll start your 13.1 miles just outside Mitchell amidst the beautiful hills themselves, whose slopes are striped with hues of red, tan, orange and black, left behind by past eras of climate change. After running alongside the hills for much of the course, you’ll finish back in Mitchell. Set for September 2, 2023.