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 […]
Tonight’s essay wasn’t written. I stared at the screen for 90 minutes, trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to say. Or, more accurately, trying to figure out what the essay wanted to say. By the time I figured it out, I’d been here nearly three hours. However, the outline is complete, which […]
I just finished the draft of my second essay for The Summer of Run: An Addict’s Journey. “Within the Deluge” tells the story of my very first moments at my very first campground, as the skies opened up and I was forced to pitch in some pretty terrible conditions. This is from Act 3 of that […]
A man in Cincinnati jumped out of a hotel window. As he passed each floor, people could hear him say: “So far, so good.” – butchered joke told by Steve McQueen’s character in The Magnificent Seven I’m taking this week to settle into my routine at the house. Tomorrow I’ll run, and begin work on […]