How Running Changed (and is Still Changing) My Life

A thing once hated has now defined my life story

Jun 23, 2024

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: once a never runner, now an always one.

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

Ingredient List

🎵 : This was my original running playlist from my first year of running. I still think there’s some really solid songs on here.

📖 : Still reading “Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir” by Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Really enjoy seeing his process of building the magazine and especially his stories with Hunter S. Thompson. Interestingly, I never knew he also started Outside magazine as well.

This Past Week

It was a whirlwind of a week and I’m honestly trying to just get through it. From the high humidity and deep heat of Florida to the arid and elevated climate of Lake Tahoe, it’s been a lot. For whatever reason, I’m horrible at adjusting to elevation and I’ve also been on the tail end of a cold and cough, so it feels like I’ve just had a brick on my head for the past three days.

Nevertheless, the scenery is beautiful and we got to hang out with friends while running the 11K distance straight up a mountain at the Broken Arrow Skyrace. We’re here doing a partnership with Salomon, so it’s been really cool getting to meet some fans from all over the country while running on some gorgeous West Coast trails.

2,000 feet of climbing to the top, cool wooden finisher's medal

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 manner. You can subscribe here.

And now, onto the dinner service.

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Football Beers

Nearly seven years ago, I was at a bar on a Sunday afternoon, watching a Cleveland Browns vs. Baltimore Ravens game with a couple friends I had met through running. One of them was Ryan, and one of them was Thomas, who founded the Faster Bastards (the running crew I ran and still run with) and Believe in the Run, the website I was writing shoe reviews for at the time (and still do, as you will see).

Over the course of a few drinks and a string of conversations, we started talking about Believe in the Run, and I mentioned that my dream would be to somehow have a job that revolved around running. Thomas said, that’s interesting, because we’re possibly looking to hire another person at Big Run Media (the parent company of BITR which focused on digital marketing for races and social media management). The seed was planted.

I had been working as a technical writer/Sharepoint editor/command line script writer at the U.S. Coast Guard for the past six years. Cubicle life was safe and even as a contractor it was relatively secure. The pay and benefits were pretty great, but it was repetitive, and government work was unchallenging. It was a good job to get my financial feet back under me (let’s be real they were never under me), but I felt like it had run its course. I was becoming restless and anxious and kind of depressed, probably cause half my work day was spent working on pointless technical manuals the engineers never used and half of it was scrolling through Twitter. The mission loses its shine when you find out they keep awarding contracts to a ship manufacturer that cuts every corner, resulting in entire classes of cutters relegated to target practice, hundreds of millions of taxpayer money literally sunk into the depths of the ocean.

So I made the decision to leave, to take a leap into the unknown. It was a financial risk as I had to take a significant pay cut, but I gave myself a goal to get back to that number within five years. It worked out.

In the beginning, I was supposed to focus on the run and race marketing side of things (which I did), but I wouldn’t be lying if I said my true passion was for building Believe in the Run. Much to Thomas and Meg’s chagrin, I spent a lot of time (probably too much time) obsessing over BITR, clawing at companies to work with us. The first company to take a chance on a proposal I built was COROS, the GPS watch brand. I’ll always be thankful for that, because I knew we had something, even if it was small. From there, it was just a matter of gaining more and more traction; everything snowballed then blew up exponentially once the great running boom of Covid took hold.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

Right before I left the Coast Guard, my contracting officer from Cherokee Nation pleaded with me to stay. I was the top contractor on his list, the one that the Coast Guard wanted to stay at all costs. I probably could’ve asked for anything and they would’ve said yes. He said to me: “You really should rethink this. I’ve seen people make these types of decisions before, to go and live their dream, and they regretted it and came back looking for a job.” I could see in his eyes he was only saying this for himself, hoping that he wouldn’t have to find another warm body.

I told him no thanks, and then set out to prove him wrong. Which I did.

In the end, I couldn’t have done any of this if Thomas and Meg hadn’t given me the chance and the free rein to go wild. They basically saved me, and as a team we probably saved each other.

And for that I am thankful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Shoe Wine

I wish I could say I was always a running shoe connoisseur, but I’m going to be honest– I’m cheap AF. Before I started reviewing running shoes, I was a bargain hunter, tracking down last season’s discounts or scouring the shelves of Gabriel Brothers and TJ Maxx or the Nike and New Balance outlet stores.

I always loved shoes and shoe design, even as a kid; it’s just that my years of being dead broke while in a band preconditioned me to spending as little money as possible in every area of life.

My first pair of running shoes, or at least the first pair of shoes I tried to run in, were a pair of Nike Shox that I picked up at Goodwill for $5. The Shox system did the opposite of everything it was supposed to do. Instead of light and springy, it was heavy and dead. It was a beast of a shoe and was my only sneaker for about 7 years, which speaks to both my f-ed up frugality and utter lack of athletic endeavors.

Once I started taking running seriously, in training for my first half marathon, I also took my shoe game seriously. I came in at the right time. Shoes were getting lighter, foams were getting bouncier. Things were still a bit thin (Hoka was still a fringe trail brand at the time), but footwear was trending in the right direction. Nike’s Lunarlon foam was one of the better ones out there. I didn’t know that, I just knew I wanted to wear Nike, and Runner’s World said that the Nike LunarGlide 6 was one of their top picks.

That’s what I went with, and I ran that shoe into the ground for my first year of running. From there, I ventured into the Pegasus 32 and Pegasus 33 and eventually the Nike Epic React, which is still my favorite shoe of all-time*.

Of course, my collection has grown significantly since those humble beginnings. Over the past six years I’ve tested hundreds of running shoes, from the budget Brooks Revel to the top-tier Nike Alphafly. I remember reading an interview with Justin Bieber once, and he said he had so many pairs of underwear that he only wore them once because he’d never run out. I found that to be shocking. I never dreamed I’d be in the same position, just with shoes (though we of course wear them a handful of times for testing purposes). I’m one of probably five people in the world who have tried almost every running shoe in existence. Brands change shoes based on the words I write. That’s actually insane.

Having that many shoes in one’s possession– I think people think it’s cool, and it is, to an extent. But I’m here to tell you that all that lusters loses its shine. At the end of the day, a shoe is a shoe, and many of them are quite similar. If I really fall in love with a shoe, I can only wear it sporadically, during the small window of slow times between shoe seasons. If I don’t love a shoe, I still have to wear it for at least 20 miles, for review purposes. The steady flow off the UPS truck sometimes feels like I’m living in the Dursley’s house, but instead of Hogwart’s letters coming through the fireplace and air vents, it’s just shoes. I’m not entirely sure they’re not multiplying while I’m sleeping. Living in a 1,100-square-foot row home in Baltimore, I’m purging constantly, distributing old pairs to other runners or local high schools. Sometimes I’ll show up to Christmas parties with a duffel full of random shoes and people lose their minds, as if Santa himself plopped down a bag of goodies. Are you sure? Trust me, I’m sure.

As it stands, I currently have around 150 shoes in my house, and those are only the ones that I truly love or that I’ve set aside for archival purposes. That’s absurd by any measure.

However, I now possess a strange talent– the ability to pick up nuances in any shoe, like a wine sommelier who moonlights as a foot fetishist. What a certain shoe means for a runner, how they’ll feel on race day, if it’s worth their money to grab a pair at its base price. The tannins in the insole, the notes of carbon fiber and the touch of jacquard, which year produced the greatest harvest. So that, come race day, you’ll experience a clean finish.

*In case you’re wondering, my all-time favorite running shoes are the Nike Epic React, Norda 001, and Asics Superblast.

Course 3

The Main: Pancake Breakfast Buffet

Many of you have probably heard this story in one form or another, whether on our podcast or in passing, or referenced in other things I’ve written. Let this be my will and testament to the beginning of my running.

I loved running as a kid. I was athletic and fast and running felt free. On my final day in kindergarten at Northside Elementary, I won the field day race by a country mile. In baseball, I never paid attention to the third base coach’s signals when I was on base– I just always stole because I knew I’d never get caught.

And then I just stopped. I ran when it was required, in games of capture the flag or freeze tag or touch football. If you placed running within the bounds of competition I could go forever. But I never just ran. I wasn’t really part of any group, kind of floating between everyone in high school, so I only skateboarded and played Legion ball in the spring and summer. It never crossed my mind to run, and anyway, by that time I hated it.

In college, I remember running once, a distance of three miles with my roommate who was on the soccer team. I thought it was a monumental achievement. I remember eating breakfast with a kid on the cross country team who he had just finished up a 10-mile run on a cold February morning. There was snow on the ground. I was astonished by the feat, with no way of wrapping my head around it. He also ran five miles every other day of the week!

Once I started smoking and drinking as a way of life, running was out of the picture. I tried lacing up those Nike Shox a couple times, in an attempt to counteract the poisons I was regularly consuming. I ran-walked the sidewalk in my neighborhood, once. I don’t think I made it even a mile. For my cooldown I had a cigarette.

My first ever race was a Color Run 5K held at Camden Yards that my wife signed us up for. I trained a handful of times, but again, I was still smoking, so just finishing the distance while getting gobsmacked with colored powder seemed like a cause for celebration. I finished in 34-ish minutes, which I thought was pretty solid. I told this to a friend of my wife’s who was an actual runner and she told me it was not. Thanks for the honesty, Laura.

I figured that was about that for my running career, but the winds of life blow at odd angles.

Around 2014, I got an email saying I had been approved to be a bone marrow donor. I never recalled volunteering myself for such a cause, but when I looked at the date and location for when they swabbed me, I could see a faint picture through the fog of my memory.

It turns out, I was in New York City a few years earlier, with some bandmates and other friends as we drank our way through Lower Manhattan and Chinatown, likely en route to some early morning Crown Chicken off the Jefferson Street stop in Brooklyn. Somewhere along this blur, a friend of mine who was perpetually in med school, stopped us cold in our tracks. There was a bone marrow donor pop-up, and the good doctor that he is, announced: “We’re doing this, get in line, we’re all signing up!” We followed orders, got swabbed, were rewarded with a lollipop, and went on our way.

Then I got matched. I had no idea what the whole thing entailed, but apparently it’s a big deal. I figured, what the hell, I get a couple days off work and I get to save a life– seems cool to me. (If you’ve read about my medical testing exploits in Never Let a Good Side Hustle Go to Waste, the ease of this decision should not surprise you.)

On an average Tuesday, I drove down to Georgetown University Hospital for my screening. The whole thing is pretty intensive, involving blood draws and questionnaires and X-rays. I guess they want to make sure if your bone marrow is going to save someone, it probably shouldn’t kill them. During the whole battery of tests, the overseeing nurse pulled me aside and told that some of the things on my chest X-ray looked concerning. Namely, that my chest lymph nodes were enlarged and that she was going to refer me to the University of Maryland Cancer Center for more tests.

I got more tests, including a CT scan. They said that yes, my chest lymph nodes were abnormally large and also I had a pancreatic mass. Of course, I immediately googled “mass on pancreas” and all signs pointed to death, if not that year then sometime that decade. The chest cancer doc confirmed it, and sent me over to the pancreatic surgeon, who also confirmed it. He put his hands on the area of my pancreas and said, yep, he could feel it all right. It wasn’t small either– it was the size of a clementine orange. All of this took months to complete, and I kind of just went along, day to day in a resigned limbo. What else could you do?

Eventually, they knocked me out and put a camera or whatever down my throat for an endoscopic ultrasound. When I awoke, I was very concerned with whether or not Mario had saved the princess. The report came back: no abnormalities found.

I’ll withhold my vitriol for that particular cancer department and maybe the state of healthcare as a whole. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and thank the good Lord for performing a holy ghost miracle in the hour of my need; surely it wasn’t just a few arrogant doctors who carelessly read a single CT scan which led to months of mental anguish and a cascading series of medical appointments resulting in a final hospital bill totaling $20,000. In all seriousness, I will thank God that we had incredible health insurance at the time, which covered 90% of that clusterf*ck.

In any case, the whole ordeal was a wake up call. I quit smoking, I started biking for fun, and eventually I just wanted to run.

Originally, I did it just to prove that marathon wasn’t that big of a deal. That all these weirdo runners were just that– weirdos. It just wasn’t that cool. My friend who had told me that my Color Run 5K time was trash also told me that I should probably do a half marathon first. She was right, again.

My first runs were absolutely terrible, as you know, whether or not you’re a runner. I remember trying to run two miles, and playing the alphabet game with car license plates to try and distract myself from the agony of it all. Each week, a new muscle rebelled. Each day, I thought I should probably stop. But I kept going, and then a funny thing happened. It started getting easier. I started getting faster. I was actually enjoying it.

As any runner knows, I went head over heels into the whole thing. Finding training groups and run clubs (of which there were few back then), reading every book in the library on running, from the always fantastic “What I Think About When I Think About Running” by Haruki Murakami to “Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America's Greatest Marathon” by John Brant, an account of the battle of Dick Beardsley vs. Alberto Salazar on one of the hottest days in race history at the 1982 Boston Marathon. I cringe for all the forlorn souls who managed to get caught in a conversation with me back then at a party, because you know where that conversation was headed– a one-way ticket to the rundrums, a place where runners bore unsuspecting passerby to death.

But let me tell you about that first race.

I did run that first half marathon, the Rehoboth Beach Half on the coast of Delaware (a great December race, by the way). I forgot to bring socks and stopped at Walmart on the way. In the starting corral, I put in my corded earbuds and fired up my training playlist. Instead of starting in the middle of the pack, I thought “wait, there’s nobody back here at the very end, I’ll just start here.” Soon after crossing the start line, I learned my first lesson in racing as I weaved from one side of the road to the other, trying to pass people.

Overall, I paced myself well and felt relatively strong. I don’t believe I had any kind of hydration or nutrition strategy, but I think I took one gel that I brought, and then one on the course. I was passing people at the end, so I guess it worked.

Two hours and one minute later, I crossed the finish line. I was too nauseous to eat the pancake breakfast buffet at a local bar. Laura said it was a great time, and she was right, again. It was the first of many.

Course 4

Dessert: Run Gels

I promise you that if you give it room to breathe and you give yourself room to dream, life can take you to the most unexpected places. I’m a living testament to that. I know it’s part luck, part timing, part hard work, and part building relationships, but to be here, in this moment of running, is nothing short of surreal.

Somehow, I got into running at the beginning of a new boom, both within the sport and within general culture. It was just before the dawn of the carbon-plated super shoe, a golden era in which we’re still living and seeing incredible advancements. That kind of technology would lead to the pursuit of a sub 2-hour marathon, an attempt by Eliud Kipchoge that was (and still is) a pinnacle in run history. We somehow had the scoop of the decade on the shoe he was wearing, after we were tipped off to its publicly available patents. That story was essentially picked up by news outlets around the world, and give us a greater legitimacy within the sport.

Then Covid came, which shut down everything but running– the one thing we could all still do. We knew it was big at the time, but we didn’t realize how big. The shockwaves from that keep building and building, and if you look up today you’ll see you’re in the shadow of a running tsunami. Over 800,000 people applied for the London Marathon, an absolutely staggering number. Run clubs and run crews are popping off in every city and town in America. I one hundred percent feel like we were a huge part of that cultural shift, and it was all organic and real and from the heart.

Because we never did it for the clout or the fame or the money. I literally couldn’t care about any of those things. I am perfectly content in just creating and living and giving it out. It all comes back in one way or another.

The way in which it’s come back has been humbling, and if I’m being honest, it freaks me out a little bit. I do feel uncomfortable with the level of influence my words have on the sales of a shoe. I often forget that 15,000 people a week hear me talk about how a warm Maurten gel wrecked me and I had to pull an emergency stop at a construction porta potty, then give a step-by-step walkthrough of the entire scenario. I feel weird when people ask to take a picture of me while walking through New York City during marathon weekend– I’m the same as you!– I say; my kids drive me nuts (but I love them more than anything), every few months I have to get the oil changed on my car (sometimes I do it myself) and I misplace my keys three times a day (sometimes only once).

I just don’t feel like I deserve that, because I’m really just another guy who wants to have a good time, all the time. I want to love everyone and tell everyone to their face how much they mean to me, which is probably why I absolutely must reply to all Instagram DMs, even though it’s really, really time-consuming. But they all matter to me and they all have given me this wonderful gift of a really perfect life.

And it’s the same thing on here. I’m only three months into this thing, but I’m nearing 500 subs, which is really humbling. I know it’s a lot to read, and I totally understand if you haven’t gotten this far. You probably haven’t. But I’m so thankful for you (especially if you’re a paid sub– I promise some cool things are coming soon).

However you found me, thanks for reading, thanks for following, and I hope to share some miles (or smiles) with you sometime soon.

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