Hearing your stories: Sam Robinson
'It’s hard to point to any one thing and say, ah yes, running got me this. Because running got me everywhere.'
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve been having reading the stories you’ve been sharing over the past few months. All the different kinds of experiences I’m hearing from you, all the different challenges you’ve faced and how you’ve handled them — I’m moved by every one of them.
So far, we’ve heard from THM readers far and wide, insightful stories from Rosalie Chan, Erinn Connor, Ken Morrison, Colleen McBride, Chanse Carlson, Debby Jones, Ruth Franklin, and Edith Zimmerman.
Today, we hear from longtime THM member , who also writes a running-focused newsletter called that’s one of my favorite reads, one I know you’ll love too.
If, after reading Sam’s story, you think you might like to share yours too, please know that I’d love to hear it — I am trying to “meet” as many THM readers and members as I can. So all you need to is reply back by email or in the comments below, and we’ll go from there. — Terrell
So, let’s hear a little bit about you! Who are you, your age (if you’d like to share), where you’re from, what you do, etc.
My name is Sam Robinson and I live in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. I live with my wife and two-year-old daughter in a little converted loft space in an old ice-cream factory not far from Lake Merritt.
I turned 40 this February and my day job is as a content designer at PayPal, where I lead a small product-writing team. My real love is long-form writing and research, which I mostly do in my newsletter,
, exploring the cultural, historical, and existential experience of movement and life on foot.
What does your running routine look like? How many times a week, and how far do you run?
Sadly, I’ve been dealing with a bad knee injury, so not much running right now. When I’m healthy, my routine is extensive. I run every day. My weekly mileage used to be high, averaging around 90 to 100 miles per week. Nowadays, as a new-ish parent, 70 to 75 miles per week is about my max.
At the moment though, I’m just on the spin bike, lifting weights, and doing a lot of PT. It’s grim, Terrell. I’m so bored, I’m watching crappy Gerard Butler movies to keep from going insane on the spin bike. Like, I just watched Geostorm... by choice. Who the hell does that? People who have to ride a spin bike when they’d rather be running, that’s who.
Fingers crossed I’m back out there soon.
Were you an athletic kid growing up? What are your early memories of what fitness and health were about?
I had a 1990s middle-managerial-class childhood in the suburbs. For my brother and me, that meant playing a lot of sports, rotating with the seasons. It was baseball in the spring, sailing and swimming in the summer, soccer in the fall, and then basketball in winter.
My parents were both active — my dad was in the military and my mom ran cross country in high school and at Providence College. But they never pressured us to perform or improve. I think my parents wanted us to be healthy, to be part of a team.
They wanted us to make friends, have fun, and learn how to lose with grace. Winning wasn’t the point. Some folks might mock this as “participation-trophy culture”, but I ended up an all-conference NCAA athlete with a Ph.D. and a stack of national championship medals. Seems like it worked out.
How did you first get into running? Was there something that inspired you — like a performance at the Olympics, for example, or a runner you discovered by watching them on social media or TV? Or was there someone in your own life who inspired you to think, ‘maybe I can do this?’
So I did a lot of sports, right? But I didn’t consider myself to be a sporty kid, if that makes sense. I was nerdy, bookish, played a lot of video games.
When I got to high school, if I remember correctly, my mom suggested track would get me in better shape for soccer. So my freshman year I joined the track team. I kind of hated it. The competition was scary and holy hell did every race hurt. I finished the season ambivalent about running.
Then something happened that following summer, some internal pubescent switch flipped. Up until then I was not particularly driven: B-ish student, mediocre athlete, not particularly talented at much of anything. Over that summer, I came to this semi-conscious realization that I wanted to be good at things. Indeed, I wanted to be the best I could possibly be at things.
Was it part of growing up? Some new phase of identity formulation? I’m not sure. But my point of view on the world and my place within it shifted. I decided if I was going to play soccer, I would practice every day. If I was going to play the trumpet, I would be first chair. If I was going to run, well dammit, I was going to be the best in the school, and then the county, and then, Lord willing, the state. (Spoiler: I did not become the best in the state.)
Anyway, I got better at running.
How has your interest in running evolved since then? Do you run farther, or faster now?
Running consumed me. I improved enough my junior and senior years to get recruited to run at Furman University in South Carolina. I was often injured in college and generally underperformed, but I kept competing after graduation.
I joined the post-collegiate running scene in Colorado and then here in the Bay Area. I never got legitimately fast, but won a few races and had some good performances, especially on the trails.
Nowadays, amid early parenthood, running fast is lower priority. If/when I get healthy, I’d like to tackle the shorter stuff again (5K to 10K range). I’m now in the masters division (40+), which opens up a new category of competition. But the goal of quick running doesn’t take up as much headspace as it did ten years ago.
What do you balance your running with? Do you have a family to take care of? Kids, parents or other relatives or loved ones? If so, how do you balance all of it and still make time to run/care for yourself?
I try to spin a lot of plates: family, stressful tech job, newsletter side-hustle, freelance writing projects I’m slowly making progress on.
My wife — a better runner than I — also balances a lot. Because our running interests overlap, we do an okay job at acknowledging that we both need time for work, running, and creative endeavor. And our daughter does well in a running stroller, thank God.
I mean, it’s hard. Parenting is hard. I feel tired and sad and worried and ill-tempered almost everyday. I struggle not to be a shitty father and husband, at least, I know I have a lot of work to do.
All that is to say, this is not the season of my life for self care, haha. I don’t sleep much. If my workout does not happen before 6:00 a.m., it’s just not going to happen. (Hence the Gerard Butler movies). It’s exhausting, but feels like the most equitable way to balance running, writing, and childcare with my wife.
Is there anything you’re especially proud of that you can point to your running and say, ‘this helped me achieve ______’?
Running is so central for me, this question is sort of like that Foster Wallace joke about the fish asking the other fish how the water is. Like… what’s water?
It’s hard to point to any one thing and say, “ah yes, running got me this.” Because running got me everywhere: to college, to grad school, to incredible friendships, to the job that helps feed and house my family.
I’m just grateful, really. I’m grateful to my family, to all the coaches and teammates, to so many friends who gave me opportunities to keep doing the sport. Nobody ever said ‘you don’t belong here.’ That speaks to a lot of unearned privilege and grace that’s been extended to me over the years. I’m very lucky.
What have you learned about yourself from your running journey? Is there anything that’s changed about you since you started?
This is actually something I worry about. I’ve been running since I was 14. Sure, the distance, pace, and setting has varied over the years, but that’s a lot of time doing the same damn thing over and over again.
What I’m saying is, I worry that I’m dodging growth. Have I worn a little groove of running practice that’s comfortable and easy at the expense of exploring other possibilities? Perhaps I have actually not changed at all. Quelle horreur!
I suppose I’ve learned to be less inwardly focused. When I run now, I notice more. I try to pay attention to the texture of the spaces I move though, to be more curious about the terrain, buildings, objects, and people I encounter. I try to wonder more.
Like, why is this road intersection so wide? Why does the trail go this and not that way? Why are all my running shoes made in Vietnam, mostly by women? Why can you have P.E. in grade school but not as an adult? And so on and so on. And these often end up as questions I try to explore in Footnotes, from the sensory to the historical to the philosophical.
Where would you like to go with your running? Is there anything special you’d like to achieve — like, say, running all six World Marathon Majors, or running an ultra?
In terms of my own running, nothing special, really. I’d like to keep trying to race and compete and be as good as my body allows me to be.
But I would love to build something. Obviously, I’d love to turn my newsletter into a media empire (cackles maniacally!). But I’m also excited by the idea of directing a race.
Every town has some unique element, usually something that doesn’t map neatly onto 26.2 miles or 5 kilometers. For example, here in Oakland, we’ve got the flatlands and the hills.
For years, I’ve thought there should be a point-to-point type race from the bayshore to the top of the hills, which would connect the city across lines of neighborhood and class, ecologies of the estuary with the ecosystems of the hillside forests. How fine that could be!
Working on something like that could be a possible challenge for the future.
What keeps you going? Especially if you’ve been running for a while — do you ever get bored with it? How do you find new things to motivate you, to keep you going?
You mean, beyond crappy Gerard Butler movies? I dunno, man. What else can we do? We have to keep on trying to get through whatever the hell this is. If running helps, I’ll keep running. And if I’m going to run, I’m going to try with all my ability, effort, and cunning.
I don’t plan to retire from running. If I need to stop or do something else, to paraphrase that Korean War general, I’ll just advance in a different direction.
Look back at yourself when you were a kid, maybe say 10 years old. Remember how you felt, what you thought, especially what you thought you were capable of back then. If you could talk to that kid now, what would you say?
Play the long game. It’s so easy to fixate on a single race, on a single workout. That’s especially the case if you’re young and hot-to-trot. For the first few years, I thought I had to go to the well on every single interval workout. But this is not the way.
No, the real discipline is not going as hard as you can. It’s working a “little hard,” but working a little hard every single day. Day after day after day. For years and years and years.
You can’t do that if you’re slamming your head against the wall every time you toe the line. Or finishing every workout completely gassed and tasting pennies. What’s needed are many moderate efforts multiplied thousands of times.
It sucks, but that’s the discipline. That’s what it takes to be good. So that’s what I would say to young Sam, who wanted to be as good as he could be.
Also, I’d tell him to buy Apple stock when it was 31 cents a share 😉
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Spectacular life story! Advice: continue to enjoy your family … before you know it, your “little one” will be in college!
Wonderful perspective. I try to remember that running careers are long. It's easy to get caught up in a single race or qualifying for this or that. What matters is improvement and liking the sport enough to want to keep doing it. That's the real marathon