What Keeps You Going
Plus races you'll love running in Anchorage, Dubuque, Moline, Portland, Samoa + South Pass City
Morning, friends! ☀️
As I write this to you on Sunday morning, it’s dark and cloudy outside, as rain showers are headed our way for most of the day. Which makes me really glad I got in an outdoor run yesterday morning, with an old friend of mine.
I hadn’t seen him in ages, though each time we run into each other, we say to the other, “we have to go for a run together sometime.”
I’d been meaning to reach out to him, I really had. I don’t know why I kept forgetting to actually do it, though.
Until Friday night. I’d run on my treadmill for my weekday runs (like I usually do) and thought to myself, I’ve got to get out along the river, I really need to feel what it’s like to run outside again.
And my friend George popped in my head. Maybe he’d like to join, I thought, so I texted him — fully not expecting to hear anything.
Then I saw the three dots, doing their thing…
“I’m in!” he wrote back. “Just so you know, though, I’m slow — so if you wanna run ahead of me, feel free.”
No worries, I told him.
And so, Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m., we met for our run. I haven’t run with anyone else in a while, so it took a little bit for me to fall into a cadence with someone else, and… it was great.
We caught up on everything — my wife’s new job, little T straddling the world of still being a little boy yet also becoming an adolescent, his wife’s yoga practice, his three kids and what they’re doing now (I pried a little on what he’d learned, and still is learning, from raising two teenage boys… “give them their space, and be there for them,” are two things I hope I’ll remember.)
I realized what I’d been missing, for a long time now. For most of the past few years, I’ve mostly been running on my own, by myself. Yes, every now and then I’ll get to run with a friend, but those times have been few and far between lately.
Years ago, I was part of a running group that met every Saturday morning. We’d go for a four-, or five-, or six-mile run and then decamp to a Starbucks for an hour or so of coffee and catching up.
At the time, it was simply a natural part of my week. One I even took for granted sometimes. But over the years, different life things pulled at all of us: one got divorced, another’s children started playing youth league sports on Saturdays, yet another had babies.
Today, we’re all still friends and see each other once in a blue moon, but our regular weekly runs are mostly a memory now. And I really miss them!
I share all of that with you because running yesterday with my friend George reminded me of it again, and sparked the possibility that while I can’t necessarily get the old band back together — "you can't step in the same river twice,” the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is reported to have said — maybe I can get a new band together.
In an interview once, Martin Short said that when he’s deciding on whether to work on a movie or television show project, he cares more about the people he’ll be working with than whether the movie or show will be a hit.
Why? Because when you’re an actor, he said, so much is out of your hands before the project ever sees an audience. But when you’re working on it, “the hang” you get to have with your fellow actors, writers and production people is what makes the work worthwhile.
I love that so much, and it reminds me again of what can make running so much fun and so meaningful — the people we get to do it with.
I hope you’ve had a great week and gotten some great runs in — as always, please do keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.
Your friend,
— Terrell
🏃♀️ To run
🇼🇸 Samoa International Marathon. Covered in lush green trees and known for their towering mountains, this tiny island nation in Polynesia — about a thousand miles off the coast of Australia, and roughly 2,600 miles from Hawaii — is where you’ll run this gorgeous course, which runs almost entirely along the northern coastline of Upolu, one of Samoa’s two main islands. It was home to writer Robert Louis Stevenson — of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame — in the last years of his life, and its history dates back some 3,000 years, during which it was settled by the Lapita people, only later to be occupied by a series of European countries, and granted its independence in 1962. The marathon takes place at night to avoid the daytime heat, and you’ll finish in the capital city of Apia. Set for Saturday, June 14.
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