What I learned on my summer vacation

Friends! ☀️ I write to you now that I’m back in my hometown of Atlanta, after a wet, soggy week along the South Carolina coast, where I spent last week with my family before the kids go back to school and the gravitational pull of fall starts kicking in.

The week was wet and soggy thanks to Tropical Storm Debby, which spent pretty much the whole week hugging the Georgia-Carolina coastline while we were there. Debby ended up dumping ten inches of rain on the small island where we stayed, and lots more than that further up the coast.

We never evacuated — but, to be honest, there were moments when I thought we ought to. As the storm was heading our way Monday night, local weather forecasters were talking about rain amounts on the order of two feet or more; as I found out later, a number of people did in fact evacuate.

The reasons we decided not to were many, but first among them was that — while I saw the blaring headlines and saw, like everyone else, the watches and warnings that covered large areas — I couldn’t figure out with much confidence what would happen in our immediate area.

What I heard from the forecasters on television was concerning, and even alarming in moments. But I was facing the prospect of asking my family to gather all of our belongings into our car, only to drive for hours in the heavy rain at night — something not without risks of its own.

Through it all, I kept thinking about the years I spent working in the newsroom at The Weather Channel, which now is almost a decade behind me. I remember watching storms form on satellite, hearing what our meteorologists said about them, and looking at maps, trying to discern what might happen to especially populated locations.

The challenge is immense, particularly when you’re dealing with storms that cover hundreds of miles in all directions. I was one of the people whose job was to write headlines and stories for weather.com, and our intention always was to alert viewers/readers to keep them out of harm’s way, to keep them safe. So, we focused on where the danger was, what was scary about it.

(Which is the smart and responsible thing to do most of the time, I should add! But sometimes, in some cases, you can — with the best of intentions, of course — go overboard and alert viewers/readers to scary situations that don’t end up happening. And that’s the last thing any of us ever wanted to do.)

What struck me during the storm last week was, I didn’t doubt that scary things were happening somewhere. But where, exactly, was that? I didn’t need information about a storm’s impacts two or three hundred miles up the coast from me; I needed information about what might happen where I was.

From our Weather Channel newsroom in Atlanta all those years ago, we could only paint with the broadest possible brush. Though we hoped that one day we might be able to provide super-specific forecasts for very narrowly defined local areas, the technology to do that didn’t exist yet.

(Apparently, it still isn’t. Someday, maybe…)

Thinking about all of this over the past week, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a conversation I had a few years ago with Amanda Loudin, a health- and fitness-focused freelance writer who’s written some really wonderful essays for us over the years, like this one on Amelia Boone and this one on finding motivation during Covid.

We were talking by phone, discussing how to write about running in a way the other running-focused publications weren’t already. I’ll never forget what she pointed out: that for all the ink (or pixels) that get spilled on shoe, gear and gadget reviews, “what people really care about is their own running.”

It’s easy to forget that, and not realize you’re feeling the gravitational pull of what other publications are doing. And on a personal level, in the screen-saturated world we live in today, it’s incredibly easy to become distracted by shiny objects — especially the blaring headlines in our social media newsfeed.

To focus on what’s actually relevant, actually valuable, and actually worthwhile… just figuring that out is a challenge, isn’t it? That’s what we try to do here, and while I don’t think I’ll ever have it completely solved, that’s what we’ll keep trying to do.

The other thing I wanted to share with you is something that took place on the final day of the Paris Olympics, the Marathon Pour Tours. Did you see it? Did you hear about it before it took place?

If you’re not familiar with it, the Paris Olympic officials held the first-ever truly public event in the history of the Olympic Games, inviting the public to run the same marathon course as the Olympic athletes — on the same day even, between the men’s and women’s marathon events.

The photo above is a snapshot of it; I think this is just absolutely the most amazing thing, and embodies the “you can do it too” spirit — that the Games aren’t only for athletes with other-worldly talents and skills. They’re for you and me also.

I shared a post about this on the new social network Threads, and got so many great responses from people over in France who’d participated. Some ran the full 26.2 miles, others ran a portion of that. You can see their stories and photos in the replies to my post — which, as I mentioned to my wife, shows me again how amazing the internet is, you know?

Anyway, I hope you got to see the Games when they were live last week, especially the track and field events, which absolutely blew me away — can you believe Gabby Thomas, Cole Hocker and Noah Lyles? All of it was just awesome.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and what you loved from the events — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

---

Our training miles for this week

How did your six-mile long run go last weekend? If it’s the first run of that length you’ve done in a while, I hope you enjoyed some well-deserved rest afterwards! We’ll run it again this weekend, to solidify our confidence in the distance — you’ve already done it, so you know you can do it, right?

• Thursday, Aug. 15 — 5 miles

• Saturday, Aug. 17 — 6 miles

• Sunday, Aug. 18 — 3 miles

• Tuesday, Aug. 20 — 5 miles

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions about our schedule, your running, or anything else 👍 — Terrell