I awoke off just a bit. The alarm on my Xoom tablet went off: first at 5:10 and then again at 5:20. I got up at 5:40 after falling back asleep. Losing 20 minutes wasn’t a disaster — I build spare time into my race mornings — but it did set the tone. I was […]
The words are the only bits that have survived my life. The only elements that have passed the test, time after time. They are always there. The reality is that it’s me that has betrayed them. I never found a way to live with them when I drank, and I’ve never found a way to […]
September 11, 2001: The unimaginable happened. But I choose to remember that in that awfulness, we revealed ourselves to be capable of so much love.
1. I can’t sleep with the air conditioning on anymore. I could when I was in the Austin. The searing, 105 degree temperatures, the running, the house fixing, and the yard work made it impossible to live without air conditioning. I am back in Indiana now where the heat, while intense, pales after The Summer […]
I met this dude in 1996, the year I rolled into Austin. We worked together at Trudy’s. We also became best friends over a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey while discussing how we’d ended up in Austin. The short story: the women we’d been with decided to not be with us. Good enough: we bonded […]
This is from Essay #4, which is a treatise on my first major run of the summer. I was camped at the base of Mt. Pisgah, just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. This particular mountain is nearly one-mile high, and the run I was about to try was 3,600 feet along a 6.5 mile route […]
I’m working backwards through the essays at this point, but that’s okay. I have a clear sense of where I’m going at the moment. This is the end of Act 1 of the Epilogue: Because I Loved, which takes place at the Grandfather Mountain Marathon, the last stop on The Summer of Run. The book […]
I am putting the finishing touches on my fifth essay from The Summer of Run, a 4,000-word piece about the three most important life lessons I’ve ever been taught (by men other than my father, that is). Strangely, this has been the hardest essay to write, taking nearly 14 hours of writing, editing, and thinking […]
I am putting the finishing touches on my fifth essay from The Summer of Run, a 4,000-word piece about the three most important life lessons I’ve ever been taught (by men other than my father, that is). Strangely, this has been the hardest essay to write, taking nearly 14 hours of writing, editing, and thinking […]
This essay hasn’t come easily, but after 4 hours of writing tonight I’ve finally finished 2,000 words of Act 1. Here’s the stunning conclusion (Crossing the Threshold one might even say): I’d run the Percy Warner Park trail nearly 7 minutes faster than I’d done the day before, girded by a knowledge of the trail […]