My First Year on Substack

An in-depth look on my journey so far, what I've done and what I hope to do

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: a year under the influence of Substack.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Suppertime! I promise to feed you only once a week, and never after midnight.

---

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Buffalo Wild Wings

It’s been a whole year of Substacking, of spending my time on this platform that was kind of cool and is now very cool and will soon be too cool. It feels old and new at the same time, a throwback to simpler times. Like taking a long drag from a hand-rolled cigarette outside a Parisian café, the antidote to Instagram’s vape cloud blown into the ceiling fan in the bathroom of a Buffalo Wild Wings outside of Toledo. Point being, it’s been nice.

And none of that would be possible without you. If there’s a gold medal of gratitude that I could give out, it would go to you, whoever you are, reading this. Everything that’s happened so far has far surpassed any expectation I had. I can’t tell you how much it means when I meet one of you in person and you tell me that you read Suppertime. Or get an email when something resonates with you. Or see a comment on a post about how you relate to the topic that week.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, to have this delivered to your inbox each week. I consider it an honor to have your attention, just for a little, and hope I can continue delivering quality writing that makes it worthwhile for you to read.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Soup du Année, Soup of the Year

Of course, I’d like you to make it to The Main just ahead, but If you are new here, I would like to give a shoutout to the things I’ve written over the past year that mean the most to me, the things that will probably paint the best picture of who I am and where I came from:

Fatherhood is Undefeated / All about being a father, still probably the best thing I’ve written on a personal level.

How Running Changed (and Is Still Changing) My Life / My journey with running, which has basically become my life at this point.

Everyone You Meet / Stories of people I’ve met and how meeting people is the number one cure for loneliness, boredom, and dissatisfaction with life.

War, All of the Time / Almost eighty years to the day, I walked down the same streets in Paris that my grandpa walked down in World War II; I was at the Olympics, he was on his way to the trenches of German forests.

Cherishing The Hunted / I think this was a hard read for a lot of people, and I understand why. But it was one of the most personal things I’ve written.

Smoking, I Love You / I love cigarettes, that’s pretty much it.

My most popular posts are different, and I’m also very proud of them. They’re less personal for the most part, but still pretty solid. Quitting Instagram has been a major theme of the world lately, so that one (It’s Time to Quit Zynstagram) did exceptionally well, with nearly 3,000 views. That was my top performing post, in terms of views and subscriptions gained. There’s plenty more where that came from, so here are the most popular posts from the past year.

Course 3

The Main: Nerds Gummy Clusters

For years– decades, really– I had struggled to write consistently. I used it in some aspects of my career throughout that time, but never wrote on a consistent basis on my own time. I read the War of Art, Atomic Habits, Bird by Bird, and anything else that promised to get thoughts on a page. But I never could do it. I’m admittedly horrible at discipline, prone to laziness, and constantly in search of the easy way out. I’m not sure if that makes me a millennial or a grade-A human. Either way, habits are just, like, not my thing. Like Rick Harrison from Pawn Stars making a one-sided deal, when it comes to habits, my brain says: “Best I can do is make sure you floss your teeth each and every day.”

So consider me surprised– shocked, even– to be sitting here a year after creating a writing habit, and find myself still writing. If I’m honest, it’s not a full-blown writing habit. I’m not Road Dahl in his little writing hut behind his house, barred off from children and distractions, something I dream about on an almost daily basis. My habit is more of a skeleton attempting to reanimate. Instead of being buried in the ground, it’s at least one of those shipwrecked-on-a-desert-island, waiting-for-the-Goonies-aka-my-kids-to-find-it kind of skeleton, with a few pieces of tattered Seinfeld shirts attached to its ribcage. Point being, I now have a pegleg to stand on.

When I started this Substack, I wasn’t sure where it was headed. For years, I had preached to people that there’s never a perfect time to start. Your ducks will never be in a row, because they’re wild ducks. They’re going to peck and waddle and fly away, so you may as well just start with the chaos you have. I’ve always preached that consistency is key, that if you show up every day or every week, whether that’s on a podcast or YouTube channel or Substack, you will find an audience. It usually takes years, but it always works. When the audience starts to arrive, the goal is to become a part of their routine, something they can look forward to with their Monday morning coffee or close out their workday with on a Friday afternoon. So show up for them. Because if you don’t, it’s like canceling an RSVP after the appetizers have been laid out.

So that’s what I did.

The concept of Suppertime was to give a few separate stories on a chosen topic each week. For awhile, I stuck to that format pretty firmly. I had a lot to say and could pull something out if necessary. But if I’m being honest– it was hard to churn out three separate stories and tie them all together. I could do it, but it was a lot of stress. I also felt like it was hard to capture someone's attention out of the gate when the point of what I want to say is buried halfway down. I’ve since scaled back that format, but I’m not sure if it was a good decision. I kind of liked the quirkiness of the three-part dinner, attention economy be damned. The ducks, man, they’re just all over the place.

My audience is split between people who found me here on Substack, and people who know me from Believe in the Run, my real job where I’m the editor-in-chief of a running media company, host of a podcast, reviewer of shoes both written and on YouTube. I’ve met many amazing people over the past six years in that role and it’s great to see some of them here. That said, I’ve tried to keep this Substack largely apart from my running life. I run a lot and travel a bit and interact with runners quite often, so of course that’s going to bleed into my personal life. It does show up here, because running is meditative and another habit I’ve been able to keep. It’s also a parallel to life itself. But my life isn’t all running. I have a thousand million other interests and thoughts and stories and experiences all clambering over each other inside my head and they need to get out.

Speaking of getting out, when it comes to writing my Substack each week, the entire process is pretty reckless. For whatever reason, I feel like I operate best when I’m under pressure. I don’t have a backlog of entries ready to go, though maybe I should have one or two saved up for an emergency. What needs to come out, comes out. Before I wrote my Substack, I also wrote (and still write) a weekly email and newsletter for Believe in the Run. It was kind of like my training wheels for Suppertime. No matter what– no matter if we’re working or traveling or stacked up with reviews and other stuff– I make sure that email goes out. It gives everyone our reviews from the week, but it ends with my thoughts on something running related. I never know what I’m going to write until Friday afternoon. I mull around for a half hour trying to come up with something, and then it comes. Sometimes it’s a sarcastic commentary on something in running, other times it’s a deep introspection on the intersection of running and life. Some of the things I wrote for that are honestly some of the best things I’ve ever written, and they come from nowhere, are written in an hour, and then disappear into the depths of an email inbox.

The same thing happens with Suppertime. Each week, I’m not sure what I’m going to write about. Monday through Wednesday are meant for thinking, and usually by the end of that time, something comes to the top. From there, I’ll try and punch out some starting paragraphs on Thursday and Friday, but the meat of everything comes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Then I’ll polish it up and put it together Sunday afternoon and send it out. Sunday evening is for regret, second guessing and re-reading and noticing all the typos that went out in the email. On average, I spend about 6 hours a week putting this together.

The Saturday and Sunday parts are a bit stressful. Getting 2,000-3,000 coherent words out in two mornings before my family wakes up is always a magic trick. But somehow, this has worked. Multiply that by 50 weeks and, lo and behold, I’ve ended up writing over 100,000 words. That’s a whole book! And more than I’ve written in my entire life. You really can eat an elephant one bite at a time.

Having an audience will certainly add a bit of fuel to the writing fire, whether that’s 10 or 10,000 readers. Most weeks I do backflips in my head trying to figure out how to get out of writing. It’s the thing I want to do the most, but it’s the thing I try to avoid at all costs. I’m the king of procrastination, so even if I do have a good idea earlier in the week, I’ll still stall as long as possible. Beating back the beast is a weekly task, but so far I’ve been good at putting it in its place. Once I start, things start to roll. The juices start flowing about 20 minutes in, and I can go for a couple hours before looking up. Things appear that I never would’ve imagined, dots start connecting like those science models of atomic structures. That’s enough to get me to show up again, the promise of things hidden coming to the surface, all those anglerfish and giant squid and oarfish washing onto the beach for a quick suntan before heading back into the deep.

I think I only missed three weeks this past year and that was because of periods of work travel or holiday time with my family. If I miss a week, it absolutely claws at me, because I feel like I’m letting my subscribers down, especially my paid subscribers and those that take their morning coffee with a side of Suppertime. So I try not to do that.

What I love about Substack is that it allows writers to be imperfect. Yes, I cringe when I go back and read something and realize it could’ve used about two rounds of editing to reign in the redundancies. It bothers me that my ledes are usually pretty weak, my transitions too jumpy. It’s not my best writing, that’s for sure. But it strikes a balance between dumping my thoughts out and crafting an artful narrative. In that way, it works, and it seems that my readers don’t care.

Speaking of readers, I have somehow accumulated close to 1,000 subscribers and 65,000 views (anytime someone opens a newsletter) over the past year. When I first started this, I knew I could carry some crew from one ship to another since I had a decent Instagram following on account of my public profile at Believe in the Run. That was a nice kickstart and jumped me to a couple hundred subs in the first couple months. But from there the growth has been slow and steady with some bigger bumps when I wrote something that hit.

I would like to say I’ve harnessed all the Substack tools to grow this thing, but I haven’t. From working on social media and other platforms and building our own business on those, I know how these ecosystems work. Substack is just another language that you have to learn, but once you figure out the flow, the followers will come. I know that utilizing the tools they provide will lead to increased engagement which leads to more subs which leads to better placement within the algorithm, and then all of that snowballs into more subs and more engagement and so on. That’s how you get 10,000 subs in a year. It’s not by showing up and writing, it’s by showing up and writing and posting and noting and podcasting and using the video features and leveraging the paid model vs. unpaid. I know all this, but truthfully, I don’t have all the time for that. I have a job and family and marathon training and dinners with friends to tend to. I haven’t even finished watching the last season of The Bear– you expect me to schedule out Notes?

When it comes to revenue on Substack, I’ve resisted from locking down any of my content behind a paywall because a) I have a day job and my kids won’t go hungry, and b) I want you to read what I write. All of you. However, for anyone who is a paid subscriber, I want you to know that when I see that monthly $5 come from you to me, it means the whole entire world. You’re taking that money that you earned, that you could spend on anything you want– another writer, a Starbucks drink, a bag of Nerds Gummy Clusters– and handing it to me, a guy who routinely picks up trash for fun, who intentionally talks to strangers in airports, who disc golfs unironically– and writes about it.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve accumulated close to 50 paid subscriptions. Some are monthly, some are annual. Some pay once and leave, others stick around for the long haul. I’m okay with either, because we all have things in life. In the ten months of 2024, I made $1,700 from those generous subscribers. Roughly $3 an hour, so it’s really like I’ve time traveled back to waiting tables in an empty restaurant in Grantville, Pennsylvania. Except I’m not waiting tables and tending a breakfast buffet. I’m actually, legitimately, getting paid to write!

Pssst… if you do want to bump up that $3/hour rate (or just subscriber for free), please go ahead and do that right here.

If there’s anything I want to improve upon in 2025, it’s offering more value to those paid subscribers. I have some ideas that I’ll hopefully be rolling out soon that will help enhance that experience. I took the last couple months of revenue and made some Suppertime stickers that I’ll be sending out shortly. I promise to bring back the handwritten notes and custom postcards. Maybe I’ll just take all the money from the whole year and throw a real Suppertime party, here in Baltimore. Honestly, I think I’ll do that.

Of course, I’m not doing this for money. If I were, I’d be at Dostoevsky levels of despair. I’m doing it because a year ago I told myself that I’m going to go plum crazy if another year passes and I tell myself I’ll start writing next year. After awhile, that hourglass starts losing sand at an unsustainable rate.

As with all writing, it’s always interesting to see the difference between what I think will strike a chord with readers, and what actually does. I’ve written things that I thought were absolute gems that fell totally flat, while other things that are offhand thoughts end up with the most engagement and feedback. I’m not sure that’s something I’ll ever figure out, but I try to notice trends and fine-tune everything.

One of the hardest parts about writing, especially on here, is when I have something that means the whole world to me, spilling my guts on the page, and knowing that most people won’t read it, or that new subscribers a year from now will never find it. That’s just how it goes, you can’t think too much about it. Get it out there, the well will refill itself.

I wish I could tell you I had a full outline and goal and business plan for this thing, but I don’t. Not yet, anyway. I write to write. To hopefully give back, to put something good into the world. I want to have a record of what I was like now, at this moment. Before it becomes a “back then.” I’m going to change in so many ways this year, and next year, and in the next ten years. I’ll most certainly hate some of the stuff I wrote on here and wish I never wrote it. But it’s all part of growth.

I hope you’ll grow with me, that we can grow together.

Thanks again for being here, I can’t wait to see what the next year has in store.

This is the best I could do for a birthday post

Course 4

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

Headed up to Boston this week for a work trip, which was both cool and cold. Visited the Puma North America headquarters where we got to check out some cool things coming for both 2025 and 2026. Tested a new race day shoe in their athlete lab against some other shoes by doing a treadmill test with a mask and hose strapped to my face to measure my oxygen intake and CO2 output. Thus measuring my run economy, which led to some interesting results. It was pretty fun, but the mask was hard to get used to. It felt like I was getting waterboarded by Bane.

I’ve been a fan of Puma since high school; I rocked a pair of blue and yellow Easy Riders my sophomore year and was always in search of a vintage Puma track jacket while thrifting. Twenty-five years later, I’m visiting the actual headquarters of the brand and giving feedback on footwear that will go out to the world. Crazy to believe it.

I did get some running in while I was there, and man, that 13 degrees with 3 degree windchill was something else. Icy and snowy, but got it done. Made my 10-mile run on Saturday in 34 degree weather feel like straight-up spring.

Other things I wrote this week:

• On Cloudsurfer 2 Review // Shoe Review for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to the most recent episode here.

Ingredients List

🎵 : I feel like I’m in a music wasteland right now, so if anyone has any good recommendations, please drop them in the comments below.

📖 : “How to Save Youth Sports: A Manifesto” by Steve Magness // Youth sports in America are in a tailspin. From the demise of rec leagues to the pay-to-play Ponzi scheme of travel teams, the industrial youth sports complex is in a death spiral. One that awards entitled parents a thing to brag about, while their kids get burned out and lose the entire concept of team and sportsmanship in pursuit of individualistic rewards. If there’s anyone who can lead the change in youth sports, it’s Steve Magness– acclaimed coach, author, and whistleblower on the Nike Oregon Project.

“Brothers” by Alex Van Halen // Basically the story of Van Halen (not Van Hagar) through the eyes of the elder brother. Definitely could have used a better editor for this (the storytelling skipped around all over the place), but overall it was a good insight into the band and the period of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Glossed over some stuff like the hard drug use and sexcapades (unlike Motley Crue who revels in it), mostly focusing on the growing rift between the brothers and David Lee Roth. But overall it was pretty solid.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

---