Every weekend I like to go for a long run, so last Saturday when I was in Alabama on the Nootbaar Institute’s “Faith & Justice” trip, I left the hotel about 6:45am to explore. I soon noticed several other runners, a surprising number, and then noticed they were all wearing racing bibs. I then rounded the corner and stumbled upon a road race preparing to start.
I asked one of the runners about the schedule, and he said that a half-marathon was starting at 7am, and a 5k would follow at 7:15am. I looked at my phone and saw that it was 6:50am. After two seconds’ worth of thinking, I raced back to my hotel, up to my fifth floor room to snag a credit card, then back to the race site to see if I could register for the 5k. The gun for the half-marathon went off just as I made it to the registration table, and I was the last person to register for the 5k. Once registered, they provided a bag full of race goodies, which led me to realize that I had nowhere to store it, so I ran back to the hotel a second time to store it during the race, then raced back to the starting line just a few minutes before the 5k began.
There were 500+ runners in the 5k, and I may not have been fully awake, but when the gun went off I took off and won my old-man age group and came in maybe 10th or 11th overall. Life is just funny sometimes.
I’m not 100% sure why I’m telling you all this story. Maybe just an encouragement toward physical fitness. But maybe the encouragement is this: When you walk out the door each morning to face another day, keep your eyes open — you just never know what you might discover.
I woke up two minutes early, turned off the alarm, and crawled out of bed at 5:28am, glad to go for a run, while never excited to crawl out of a warm bed in the darkness. I exercise daily, but once a week I drive to Malibu Colony Plaza in search of a flat place to run that also has easy parking. I like it there, although I do not care for the early morning darkness in the winter months. On Thursday I was glad to notice a slight hint that the light of spring is coming.
I stretched a bit and took off as normal, trying to wake my legs up, too. My pace is always measured at first, careful not to start too quickly, but on that morning, I soon added a short sprint as I dodged leftover rain puddles alongside the dangers of PCH traffic.
Near the Malibu Pier, I noticed what appeared to be an unhoused individual on the sidewalk ahead, lurking, if you will, in the shadows. I often visit with unhoused people, so this was nothing extraordinary, but knowing that many battle mental illness makes me a little wary in early morning encounters. I noticed that this young man was gathering his things and shuffle-jogging ahead, presumably to get out of my way, so I gave him a wide berth and passed by with several feet between us. We exchanged good mornings, and I added a how’s-it-going, which, although a standard greeting for me, may not be the most thoughtful question for an unhoused man carrying a large pack on his back before six o’clock in the morning. But his response, half-shouted with what I can only describe as great joy, and spoken like he was glad that someone asked, was, “I’m doing f***ing great!”
Well, alrighty then. I was glad to hear it. My mind began to cycle through options for why he was doing expletively great at such an hour, but ultimately, I just chuckled and took it at face value, thankful that he was having a fantastic morning.
After reaching the halfway mark I fist-bumped a power pole and turned back, now in a much better mood, and at some point, encountered my new friend again where I said, “Have a good one, friend.” He replied, “You, too, brother,” with “brother” said in a way that led me to believe that if I immediately fell and busted my head open, I was 100% convinced that this man would take care of me like a brother. I can’t explain how I knew that from a word spoken in passing by a stranger, but I knew it to be true. What a warm and peaceful thought in the forty-degree weather.
At the Malibu Pier again, thanks to ever-lighter skies, I stopped long enough to take a picture, then took off for my final mile of the morning. I may get my runner’s card revoked for this confession, but I don’t think I have ever felt a runner’s high; however, when I started running again, I felt like a deer bounding through the woods, bouncy and strong, and that last mile was phenomenal. I don’t know that I have ever felt better on a run
My short drive home felt very different from my short drive there, and when I pulled into the neighborhood it seemed that no one else had even stirred from their slumber. Before the sun had truly risen, it felt like I had already had an incredible morning.
I felt the need to write about that first hour of Thursday morning but wondered about the moral to the story. Why should anyone care about that first hour of my day?
Maybe the moral is that who needs a moral to a story when you stumble on anything good? In a life that can be too cruel too often, notice all the good moments. They seem to get us through the rest.
Laps on a track can be tedious for a runner, especially when you can almost sense the nearby beach and mountain trails wondering why you are running in circles instead of enjoying their spectacular views. So maybe I was just bored and looking for entertainment when I noticed the snail there on the track with me. Now I’m not known to be fast, and I don’t want to brag, and pardon me for being crass, but I was absolutely kicking that snail’s ass—if snails have asses. Again, not to brag, but in the time it took me to run twelve laps — three miles! — the snail had only made it across two or three lanes. Regrettably, I don’t think the snail even knew that you are supposed to run on a track in a circular fashion, so its lack of progress was sort of embarrassing. I just couldn’t break the news, but I kept watching on each lap, and that silly snail kept right on going.
I myself was on the track because I am a fifty-three-year-old man whose decades of poor posture produced a year of terrible lower back pain. The pain was so intense that I thought running was over for me entirely. Done. Kaput. Sayonara. But, surprisingly, I have been inching back toward where I would like to be as a runner. Inching, well, I guess, yes, now that I say it out loud, at a snail’s pace. I was specifically on the track that day to take it slow and easy so that I could continue for the long haul.
Huh. Interesting.
Maybe the snail and I have a lot in common after all, beyond our striking features. Stubbornness, for starters. Or, to place it in a more positive frame, perseverance. Confucius reportedly said, “It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop.” I’m not 100% positive that Confucius spoke English, but I’m trusting this is somewhere in the neighborhood.
My primary physical talent is that I do not like to stop. That can often be a negative characteristic in multiple life areas, which is worth considering on another day, but today I celebrate the good in that part of my constitution. I may not be the smartest or fastest or strongest or funniest or best-looking or mechanically-inclined or able to leap even small buildings in a single bound – okay, a bit depressing to go on recognizing all the things I am not – but I have always been able to keep on moving, even when it hurts, and even when it is slow going. Sometimes, maybe that’s a pretty great thing.
I guess a snail running track can be quite inspiring when looked at from the right angle. When we gauge ourselves not by flashy victories but the ability to persist toward a destination, maybe we can be pretty inspiring, too.
It just occurred to me that the snail may have been crossing the track the entire time I was there simply to line up for the mile run. I wouldn’t be surprised, and if so, you go get ‘em my new snail friend.
I remember that it was a driving rain, not the occasional sprinkle that SoCal folks like to call rain. It was the sort of rain that I normally wouldn’t run in, but I did that day simply because it was my last chance and others expected me there. What I did not know was that my regular running buddies had invited others, just for me, and it warmed my heart when ten friends showed up to run “The Strand” with me in the driving rain.
I discovered The Strand way back in 2010 when I resumed running after a twenty-plus year rest stop. Back then, I wanted to move beyond running circles on a track but needed somewhere flat, which wasn’t too easy to find around Malibu, and a friend told me about a special place where she did her marathon training. I checked it out and fell in love instantly. In the early days I ran alone, but eventually my friend, Jeff, tagged in, and before long we had a beautiful variety of folks along for the run, and I loved it. That final run in early 2019 was special to me, posing for a picture with ten great friends, all smiling and soaked to the bone, there as a sweet gift to me.
I suppose that I thought I might run it again someday. We left a daughter in California in 2019, so I knew that we would visit, and I probably thought that I would have a chance to run it again. But I could not have anticipated the curves in the road of life over the past five years, and by the time we made the surprising decision to move back in early 2023, due to back trouble, I wasn’t sure that I would even run again, much less on The Strand.
But today, I did. Six glorious miles, nearly five years later. Maybe Mother Nature is nostalgic because it almost rained me out, but the sun popped out like a giant surprise just as I took off, and I dodged the flooded parts of the path as I ran down memory lane.
To be candid, I had decided that it would be okay if I never ran again, including The Strand. Aging and injuries help readjust your expectations of life. But I felt wistful every time I drove by and kept the goal in mind, and I am glad that I had a chance to do something that was special to me—again. I know enough now to admit that I might run it hundreds more times, or never again, and either way is okay. But I guarantee you that I will appreciate each opportunity, should they arise.
As I ran, I remembered a lovely poem from a dark poet, Raymond Carver, who expressed his desire to go down to the ocean and see the sights one more time, at least. He wrote:
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much to be thankful for already. But I want to get up early one more morning, at least. And go to my place with some coffee and wait. Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.
Exactly. I hate to seem greedy, too, but my posture will also be facing forward, hoping for the chance to go to my favorite running place one more time, at least – rain or shine.
I am pleased to report that we hiked the Mt. Hollywood Trail this morning (not to be confused with Mt. Lee of the famed HOLLYWOOD sign). To do so, we left Malibu just before sunrise and arrived in the Griffith Observatory parking lot before 8am, well before you have to pay to park there but nowhere nearly before significant numbers of folks arrive to enjoy the spectacular hike, e.g., as we approached the trailhead, a large high school cross country team was stretching in preparation for some serious hill work.
From one perspective it turned out to be an easy hike—wide trails, easy to follow, and just 1.2 miles to the summit—but the 550 feet of constant elevation is anything but simple. Case in point: The many runner passersby did not appear to be whistling show tunes. And although I refuse to complain about SoCal weather, while the weather app said it was 67 degrees, most of the trail was exposed to the sun and it was the hottest 67 degrees imaginable, maybe with our slowly approaching the sun and all.
There were fun, quirky parts of the hike, like the Berlin Forest, complete with a road sign sharing that it is 5,795 miles to Berlin, Germany, one of L.A.’s sister cities, and a rest stop sponsored by Tiffany & Company, but of course, where one can sit and enjoy a nice view of the HOLLYWOOD sign. But the panoramic views along the way were the real stars of the show: looking back down on the Observatory and Park, looking out at Downtown Los Angeles, and on a clear day like today, looking all the way to Catalina Island and the vast Pacific Ocean.
For our purposes, it was simply another nice day to be together, out in nature, seeing something special, and not to be overlooked, enjoying the beautiful human diversity found in this City of Angels. It was a good morning from start to finish.
We stopped at one point on the trail in an area ominously named Dante’s View, partly to see what was there, but mostly to stop going uphill for a minute, and in that brief moment yet another small pack of the young cross country team passed us by, and when they did I overheard one young leader encouraging his teammates by saying, “This is going to make us better.”
Well said, my young friend. Well said. That’s why Jody and I got up early today and drove across Los Angeles—to be better, both individually and together.
This morning, thanks to a young runner that I didn’t even look up to see, I was reminded that courageously pushing ourselves up the hills of life surely isn’t easy, but it makes us better, and the views from the top are absolutely worth the struggle.
Is it fair to say you are a runner if you don’t actually run?
I ran a mile this morning. It has been 262 days since I ran that far, but who’s counting, huh?
On January 4, 2023, while living in Carlinville, Illinois, I went for a run in the early morning darkness. It was a familiar run to the Square, still decorated with festive holiday lights, and I noticed a pain in my left leg different from the typical getting older pains. Instead of making a good decision, I chose to tough it out and finish the three-mile run, but by the time I arrived home I realized that was a mistake.
I did not seek any medical advice, because how silly would that be, right? I chose limping instead. More accurately, I thought “rest” solved everything, so I tried to rest it out. That didn’t work. Eventually, I poorly described how I felt in a casual conversation with my friend, Abby, an athletic trainer, who thought it sort of sounded like IT band trouble. I responded with what seemed smart: a morning stretching routine; working on my core, and doing some cardio on an exercise bike. I truly thought that was going to help. It didn’t.
In mid-April, I secretly flew to L.A. for a job interview and took a redeye home, which led to an uncomfortable night crammed into an airplane seat. Not long afterward, I discovered the worst lower back pain of my life; so painful, in fact, that I actually listened to my wife’s advice to visit a chiropractor, which don’t tell Jody this part, but that was the first good choice I had made in all of this. It turns out that it wasn’t my leg or my IT band at all; instead, I had some spinal issues that desperately needed addressing.
Months later, with the critical help of chiropractors in Illinois and now California, slowly (and with an emphasis on slowly), this morning, I went to Zuma Beach and ran a mile. All to say, I’m happy today. Still a long way to go, like the ancient Lao Tzu quote about a thousand-mile journey starting with an itsy-bitsy step, although I’m not sure Lao Tzu actually said itsy-bitsy, but you get the drift.
Today’s little milestone could have been depressing instead, I guess. My pace was terrible, less Noah Lyles and more Noah shuffling the elephants around the Ark. It actually seems that I am racing faster through my middle-age years than I did at Zuma this morning, and that could be a downer to someone who once did not question whether it was okay to call himself a runner.
But.
I remember a story about the great hall-of-fame baseball catcher, Roy Campanella, after his terrible automobile accident in 1958 that left him paralyzed just before the Dodgers played their first season in Los Angeles. Whoever told the story mentioned seeing a PT nurse toss a little toy ball to Campy and his struggle to catch a ball that a toddler could catch. A hall-of fame catcher struggling to catch a toy. But you know what, Campy kept trying to catch that ball while writing a book that he titled, It’s Good to Be Alive.
So, dadgum it, call me a runner. I am a runner that ran a mile today. And when I did, with plenty of time to think about it, I thought: It’s good to be alive.
Given 4,000+ miles of moves back and forth across the country just in the past five years, it stands to reason that I would love a sport called “cross country.” Now I love all sorts of sports, but with all due respect—and you would never know this from watching ESPN or reading the sports page—cross country absolutely crosses the finish line in first place.
I can see that you have a different opinion. That’s okay, your being wrong will in no way prevent us from being friends. Just know that I’m not alone. Writer/speaker/podcaster-extraordinaire, Malcolm Gladwell put it this way: “I won’t belabor the obvious about cross country. It is insanely fun. Races take place during the glory days of fall. The courses are typically in beautiful parts of the country. Cross country meets don’t feel like sporting events; they feel like outdoor festivals—except everyone is fit, as opposed to high. Everyone should be so lucky as to run cross country.”
That’s what I’m talking about.
My introduction to cross country came in the fall of 1985 when Coach Watson came to our high school cafeteria and asked several of us, “Hey, do you want to run cross country?” We said, “Sure,” not knowing what it was, but knowing that we liked Coach Watson and that it sounded like something to do, and with no actual training or meets in advance, we traveled to a town called Arkadelphia and came home with a state runner-up plaque. That’s a pretty cool way to meet a sport.
Sadly, I lost touch with the sport for a couple of decades or so, but another random encounter with a coach, this time “Coach Rad” at Pepperdine, who invited me to be a volunteer chaplain for his men’s and women’s teams, allowed me to fall in love again. I got to hang out with the coolest kids and tag along on early morning runs in spectacular locations, and more importantly, have a front row seat to witness what makes endurance running special, i.e., the human capacity to push through pain and discover a better version of yourself. A few years later, incredibly, while at Blackburn College, I got to be a college cross country coach myself! What fun it was to spend even more time with inspiring young people and watch them grow.
This weekend, I discovered myself back in Malibu, clear a-“cross country” once again, thinking about my favorite sport. On Friday evening, I was on my computer tracking my friends at Blackburn as they competed in Illinois, and on Saturday morning I was in person at Alumni Park to cheer on the Waves. On both occasions, I noticed that I was smiling.
I guess I’m just happy and felt compelled to share my cross country testimony today. You don’t have to be a cross country fan. I promise that I won’t hold it against you. If beauty and camaraderie and courage and fresh air and holistic health and resilience and smiling in general just aren’t your things, I hear that a sedentary lifestyle is pretty popular these days?
As summer transitions to fall and then an ultimate winter, the days shorten, and as a result my early morning runs now begin in darkness. It is a bit harder to get out the door, but to be candid, the stress of leading through this pandemic confounds my sleep so that it really isn’t that hard to get up and moving anymore.
Recently, I stretched and took off, aging joints creaking as they now do, and jogged down the one-way exit road of our condominium complex toward the freedom of the unlit neighborhood streets. As I did, in that strange sensation when you are arguably awake and seem to be the only one, I had an oddball thought: What if a vehicle turned down this one-way road my direction in the early morning darkness?
Two seconds later, a small pickup truck turned down the one-way road my direction in the early morning darkness.
Hand to heart, stack of bibles, and all that.
I moved over easily, so it wasn’t the danger of the moment, but for the duration of the three-mile run in the shadowy stillness I kept thinking: Did that just happen? Am I awake? And the craziest thought: Did my mind just create that pickup truck?
I concluded that just might be my luck, that maybe we all get one moment in life when our thoughts create something out of thin air, and I wasted mine on a cheap pickup truck turning down a one-way road in the dark.
My favorite musician, John Fogerty, recorded a live album the year my youngest daughter was born that he titled, Premonition. In the title track he sang:
I got a feelin’ way down inside I can’t shake it, no matter how I try You can’t touch it, you just know The earth is gonna shake and the wind is gonna blow Well that’s all right This premonition is killin’ me But that’s all right I must be crazy, I must be seein’ things
I don’t know if anyone saw this year coming, but every part of it has left us all a little jumpy about what will come next. All I have to say is that as we run ahead in such darkness, watch out for pickup trucks.
There’s somethin’ wrong with the world today I don’t know what it is Something’s wrong with our eyes…
If you can judge a wise man By the color of his skin Then mister you’re a better man than I…
Livin’ on the edge… – Aerosmith (1993, inspired by the L.A. Riots)
Jerry Mitchell visited Nashville to promote his new book shortly before the pandemic swept across the United States, and I dropped by his book signing at Parnassus to pick up an autographed copy. Race Against Time chronicles Mitchell’s work as an investigative journalist to reopen unsolved murder cases from the Civil Rights Era, ultimately resulting in convictions of multiple people decades after their terrible racist crimes. It was later during the global quarantine that I took the time to read the book, and although I am aware of the history and reality of racism, I am somehow still stunned by many of its true stories.
With the book still fresh in mind news emerged from Georgia of the unconscionable killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and I had to wonder if anyone is truly winning this “race against time.” As a runner, I was shaken in a new way, forced to recognize that mindlessly enjoying such a simple hobby is yet another unearned advantage that I possess. Even during an unprecedented era of cultural transformation due to a rampant virus, there is unfortunately one thing that remains—the ubiquitous influence of a centuries-long assumption of white superiority.
More recently, I read another book titled, Nashville 1864, this time a work of historical fiction that recounted the Battle of Nashville in the American Civil War. The novel was frustrating in its romantic approach to the Antebellum South while helpfully portraying the terrible specter of war, and it simply reinforced in my mind the terribly complicated history of this nation. The novel describes the decisive encounter of the battle that occurred at Shy’s Hill, which happens to be one mile from my house. I finished the book on Memorial Day weekend, and early on Memorial Day itself jogged over to and up on Shy’s Hill to consider all the lives lost. It seemed random to see a marker for Minnesota on Shy’s Hill in Nashville, Tennessee—random until I learned that more Union soldiers from Minnesota died in that battle than from any other state.
And then the despicable murder of George Floyd in Minnesota was televised on the evening news.
Friends, it has been 156 years since a significant number of Minnesotans died in my neighborhood fighting a war that presumably put an end to the notion that Black Americans were less than White Americans. But it is all too clear that all the lives lost and all the efforts made and all the progress achieved has not ultimately prevailed.
For multiple reasons I chose years ago to post less about issues on social media instead of more. Among those reasons was a desire to read and listen more (and talk less), and to focus on things that carry the possibility of creating actual structural changes so that the reality 156 years from now is different—things like using my advantages to instigate conversations that lead to changes in education systems, hiring practices, and ultimately, changes in hearts.
But in times like this I question whether I am doing the right things, or things that really matter, or, maybe most of all, whether I am doing enough.
So today, for what it is worth, I say aloud that I recognize the deep wrongs screaming at us on the evening news—wrongs that exist in a nation where the two people competing to be its CEO are both White men who have independently and recently managed to offend millions of Black Americans. In such a time and place, I simply say that I stand alongside Black Americans and declare their full beauty and worth as human beings. It matters more whether I live it than whether I say it, but in case it helps or matters, I say it.
I confess that it felt good to get in the car with my wife and drive away for a little while. 2020 has had an inauspicious start. Last week’s tornadoes devastated our community and garnered national attention (and a presidential visit), but the tornadic metaphor—a swirling disruptive force—has characterized the past couple of months at work and in our community.
We weren’t running away, although I can sympathize with an urge to do so. Instead, we drove to Virginia to cheer on our men’s basketball team in their championship game against heavily-favored Liberty with an NCAA tournament berth on the line.
As we drove from Nashville heading east we saw what the storm left behind. We traveled through Putnam County and Cookeville, which took the brunt of the storm, and silently ached with that grieving community. But eventually, thoughts of the storm began to fade as we ventured into new territory.
We skirted the Smokies and entered southwestern Virginia, an area of the country that I had never visited. Although not spectacular, the meandering countryside and hills were charming, and I thought that they just might be spectacular when the denuded winter trees are explosions of color in autumn. We drove through Roanoke, where I tried unsuccessfully to remember why everyone has heard of Roanoke, before arriving in Lynchburg to spend the night.
Early Sunday morning I drove downtown for a run. It was 28 degrees, a fact I share just for a little sympathy, and I did a five-miler along the river and through the cobblestone streets of an historic downtown. At one point I ran up a steep downtown street, drawn toward an impressive building I later learned was called Monument Terrace. When I arrived, I continued huffing and puffing up what seemed like a million stairs, and as I climbed the name of the building became clear as I passed multiple monuments to the city’s citizens who died in wars throughout American history. At the top, I looked back on the hill I had climbed, the river, and the early morning sun.
I got to thinking.
2020 has been a hard year so far. But there have been a lot of hard years for a lot of people. Climbing that hill, climbing those stairs, seeing those monuments of lives lost reminded me of the reality of life and the universality of struggle. The lesson that occurred to me: Don’t stop climbing.
On Friday night, before leaving Nashville, we went to see talented Lipscomb students in a dance concert titled, Elevate: A Heavenly View. That’s what I thought about at the top of those crazy stairs on a frigid morning in what has been a challenging year: When times are hard—Elevate.
Starting to Look Up 