You Should Travel With Kids More Often

Why they belong with you, me, and everyone else

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: take kids everywhere.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Pavement Gatorade

This one is about traveling with kids, but my word of gratitude this week is about my latest travel without kids.

For the third year in a row (but the first time not running it), I headed up to the Boston Marathon weekend with Believe in the Run. It was a memorable weekend on many accounts, including hosting a live podcast at the Adidas running space with the people behind some of the biggest shoes in running (like the upcoming Adidas Adios Pro Evo 2). I got to run a marathon relay at The Track at New Balance, arguably the greatest indoor track in America. A thousand runners came out to our event with Asics before the race. All great things.

But man, the number one highlight for sure was getting front row seats to the finish of the Boston Marathon. Here’s the thing though, it wasn’t the winners that thrilled me. They’re so far beyond my comprehension of running that it almost doesn’t even register when I see them cross the line. Instead, it’s those runners coming in at 3 hours and 4 hours and 5 hours. It starts as a trickle, the real fast ones coming in a dozen meters apart. Before you know it, it’s a torrent of bodies crossing the finish line.

That’s when the real magic starts, because these are bodies of all shapes and size and colors and genders who are at the utmost depths of the human limit for suffering. Cramping across the finish, collapsing in heaps, puking up the last two hours of Gatorade, folding into the arms of volunteers. Smiling, weeping, grimacing, screaming in pain and joy, jumping, hobbling, arms raised, heads lowered, one after another after another.

It goes for hours, all of these people who have sacrificed so much to get here to the pinnacle event of the sport. I’ve been there, I felt this– Boston is the only marathon where I cried when finishing. But to witness it from the other side, right as it’s all happening – it’s one of the more special memories I’ll take with me from being in this running space.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Cooking Directions Change at Altitude

It was only a day into the trip and I was already using my phone-a-friend lifeline on my wife. I was in the midst of one of the more regrettable parenting decisions I’ve ever made: taking my 8-year-old son on a business trip. It comes in second to not buckling him into his rear bike seat on more than one occasion after picking him up from preschool, his little hands clinging on for dear life as I careened around corners coming back home. That wasn’t a decision, though – I just straight up forgot. But pulling him in as a sidekick on a cross-country journey? That was all my doing.

I work in the running space, so the trip in question was a four-day weekend at the Broken Arrow Skyrace, a trail running festival held at Palisades Tahoe. We were tapped to go with Salomon, the title sponsor of the races series. As part of our work commitment, we would lead a couple fun runs, gather content for our channels, and run one of the races, an 11K distance up and down a mountain.

I had previously done a handful of trail races with my son Rye (up to 7 miles), and they were always core memories for us. More of a run/hike than a race, we have great conversations and both come away with a sense of accomplishment when teaming up on the trails.

This race at Broken Arrow would be a challenge, with significant vertical climb at an altitude of 6,200 feet above sea level, just a little bit higher than our whopping 10 feet of altitude here in Baltimore. I convinced the race director that Rye could do it and signed both of us up.

We trained for it in the weeks leading up to it and I felt we were ready. I still think we were. But we weren’t ready for the rest. At least, I wasn’t.

When the idea of taking Rye on this trip came into my head, it seemed logical. I had been traveling a ton for work and wanted less time away from home, from my family. Taking him with me on a trip to the beautiful outdoors of California seemed to be an obvious bridge to reconciling that disparity.

And maybe it would’ve worked, five years from now. But it didn’t.

Leading into the trip, we had a week-long family vacation to Florida, a place that somehow feels more me than anywhere else. We arrived back Wednesday evening before I could wrangle a tarpon while smoking a cig. We left for Tahoe at 5:30 a.m. on Thursday. This was the first mistake.

While we were in Florida, Rye had picked up a terrible cough. The worst cough he’s ever had, and that’s saying something for a kid. It had gotten slightly better, but nevertheless, it persisted. His sleep for the past week was intermittent at best.

The cross-country flight was generally fine, though it had a couple bumps along the way, including a layover in Denver and a drive from Reno to Tahoe punctuated by a grocery trip along the way. Everyone in that part of California looks like they could either be an organic beekeeper, a reincarnated gold miner turned van-life YouTuber, or the Unabomber, and any hardware store looks like someone took a dog kennel and placed some tools inside of it.

We arrived at our VRBO house, everyone got their rooms and Rye started to settle in for the evening. Not so fast – we have a run to attend, my boy. Against his will, we got back into the rental car and drove down to the Palisades village for an evening run. He couldn’t run, his cough prevented it. He stayed back with one of our other trail reviewers, Melissa, a stand-in mother for him who saved the day more than once for me on that trip.

Everything disintegrated from there. We shared a room, but his cough carried through the night. We both got awful sleep. The trail festival village, with plenty of vendors and demos and races and food– had nothing for kids. Which is fine – it’s not a Chuck E. Cheese, after all. I had to do certain things for work, but juggling that with keeping him entertained was proving to be a high-wire act that just made me high wired.

By mid-morning of the first day, Rye was done. He wanted to go home, there was nothing to do, he missed his brother, everything was terrible. And he was right, it was terrible. For him, it was his first time away from home without his brother, who is his inseparable sidekick. There wasn’t anything for him to do– no other kids to play with, no dad to take him somewhere cool, no books to read because he’d already read “Dogman: Grime and Punishment” 34 times in the past month. The altitude and dry air was absolutely wrecking him and his cough. I had a headache and felt like trash for the same reasons (I’d also picked up the cough). The time zone change and playing pin the tail on the donkey with sleep was the icing on the cake.

We had a mutual breakdown in the rental car. I pleaded my case, told him I’m trying my best to make this a good trip. He wanted it to be over. I called my wife and asked her to throw us a lifeline long enough to get us back home in one piece. By the end of the conversation, we decided to cut the trip a day early, which seemed to offer a glimmer of hope.

While things didn’t totally resolve, it got marginally better from there on out. He was in no shape to run a race– he could barely hike and running more than 50 feet would trigger a brutal coughing attack that would last for a couple minutes.

I had this idea in my head that I was enough, that being around me and seeing what I did for work and being in a cool new place and spending time together would somehow carry us for four days on the other side of the United States. Any parent knows the foolishness of this thinking.

It wasn’t fair to ask him to shoulder the burden of putting on a good face in the most boring of circumstances. So I had to meet him in the middle, at the very least.

We spent Saturday evening getting pizza, using the hot tub at the place, and him watching Netflix on the TV in the house. On Sunday, we bought tickets for the gondola to the top of the mountain, where he got to see snow, which I promised from the very beginning and seemed to be a sticking point for him. We cheered on the runners in the race before making it back down and heading back to the airport.

I’m pretty sure what he remembers most about that trip is the slot machines in the Vegas airport. Which makes sense because the whole trip was a gamble that didn’t pay off the way I had hoped. But it was a good lesson to learn. That kids are humans and resilient and malleable and open to new things, but you have to meet them where they are. If you’re going to put them in a new environment with adult expectations, it’s going to fail unless you have a plan to integrate their patterns into yours.

Don’t bet the house unless you’re willing to lose it. Which I did – just once – but we eventually found each other since the Palisades village isn’t that big.

We survived, and that counts for something.

Pizza solves everything

Course 3

The Main: The Promise of Pizza and Coca-Cola

A few weeks ago, we traveled internationally for the first time as a family. Family trips aren’t anything new, we’ve tried to integrate our kids into a variety of modes of travel.

We took our 9-month-old with us when I ran my first marathon in Houston back in 2017. Later that year, we road tripped back with him from Florida in a single shot. Soon after, we had another kid and since that time we’ve driven to Maine, flew to Florida, gone to California, and boarded the train to New York City. Right now, our travel roster is two parents aged 42, two boys ages 6 and 9.

The trips have been filled with non-stop streams of rice puffs on plane rides, ears popping, constant vigilance while sharing a stall in an airport public bathroom. Frenetic energy from the backseat mitigated by a quick Google search for elementary schools or parks right off the nearest exit so they could go crazy on a playground for an hour. Sugar spikes followed by deep naps. Story Pirates podcasts and road trip trivia. Frenetic energy from the backseat and me yelling at them to stop playing with the window switch for the fourteenth time followed by an hour of silence as they read their books or just look out the window. Me, wondering what they’re thinking about. Wondering if it’s the same things I thought about in the back of my parents’ station wagon, if they’re moving their heads slightly so a dot on the window would trace the treeline as the car goes down the highway.

Taking a kid on a trip is cumbersome.

It involves packing an entire other human’s belongings with needs other than your own. Teddy bears and graphic novels and activity books and headphones for the on-flight entertainment (the only time we allow screens while traveling). Oh right, also clothing. Strollers and car seats and kid carrier backpacks.

As with everything involving kids, your expenses will give birth to more expenses, especially if you’re flying. Your ultralight solo backpacking tent won’t work for camping trips. A king size bed is no longer enough in a hotel – you’ve relinquished the crown for a double double.

Then are the mood swings, the “are we there yet?” questions which will forever span generations. There is the constant, ceaseless, unending hunger of children that cannot be sated for more than an hour at a time. Bathroom trips that only happen while the plane is in its final descent or right before getting on an amusement park ride for which you’ve waited an hour in line.

It’s not like herding cats, it’s like herding children, which is markedly worse. If I lose a cat, I just say “oh well” and still have a great day. If I lose a kid, I hope they remember my phone number, know they probably won’t, and pray they wind up with a nice Swedish family.

And yet, you should still travel with kids. As much as you can.

I didn’t travel much as a kid. My dad worked a blue collar job, my mom took care of us at home and cleaned houses on the side. I had three younger siblings. Once a year, we would load up the family station wagon, hitch our pop-up camper to the back and head off to the beach. I went to Missouri twice with the Boy Scouts-style organization from my church, a two-day road trip in the dead of summer. I mostly just remember stepping on my glasses and breaking them, seeing a dead armadillo, and using a public shower. I didn’t fly on a plane until I was 15, on a mission trip to Europe with my youth group. I’m still not entirely sure what the mission was, but it was a great experience with all of my best friends. I flew to the Dominican Republic my senior year of high school, again to visit a missionary family. Point being, if you really want to see the world and are dead-ass broke, go join a church.

It really wasn’t until I went to college that the world really opened up to me. In those four years, I met people with different viewpoints from all around the United States and even the world. At one point, I ended up with a nice Swedish roommate (it comes full circle). I lived in the attic of a Chinese professor’s house. I learned a lot from other cultures, which only whetted my appetite to learn more. My first priority was mastering every character in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but after that I’d explore the world.

I’ve been lucky enough to do exactly that as I’ve moved through adulthood. Before I had kids, the thought of traveling with kids seemed abysmal. Really, for all the reasons I mentioned above, as well as the crying. Surely, having a kid would derail the entire experience.

Yes, if you’re traveling with kids, it’s going to look different. You’re probably not going to pull them onto a barstool in Golden Gai and offer them a hand-rolled cigarette while the bartender serves up yakitori on a stick. You may not tell them to hold on for dear life as you navigate your motorcycle up and down the rutted dirt roads of a mountainside in Costa Rica. A preschooler isn’t going to be “gung-ho, let’s go” about trekking the Camino de Santiago for a month of their life, unless their name is Kilian Jornet.

But you may get to see them try Spanish paella for the first time while on a terrace overlooking a lush green valley as it sweeps away towards the Mediterranean. You may get to sit outside a back alley café in the morning with a chocolate croissant and cappuccino and watch as the neighborhood interacts with each other. You may tell your kid to jump in the front seat of a four-door hatchback as you drive a stick shift a couple miles up a mountain, a relatively mundane moment that I promise you they will remember forever. They’ll willingly join you on a short hike to a tall waterfall with your best friend and his family, the same friend who you shared a bedroom with on that trip to Hungary back in high school. And, after some coaxing, your kid will go down the natural water slide and into the cold, deep pool below and come out proud that he did it (I just asked him and he said that’s not true, he still regrets doing it).

Those are all things we got to do a couple weeks ago when we traveled together as a family to Spain.

When my brother told me he was having his wedding in Spain, I was somewhat annoyed. It would cost roughly $4,000 to cover flights, lodging, car rental, etc. After it was already set in stone, I regretted not offering him two grand in straight cash to change his mind. Our original plan was to have my mother-in-law watch the kids, which she initially agreed to. She then asked us to reconsider, that maybe it would be a great experience for them to travel with us to a wedding in Spain. I had serious doubts.

As much as it pains me to admit this: she was right.

It was one of the best experiences we’ve ever had as a family. After the wedding, which involved music, dancing, amazing food, endless drinks for all ages, ice cream and tiramisu, and all the groomsmen and kids jumping into the pool in our wedding attire to end the evening, our oldest son Rye said to us: “I thought all adults did was yap, yap yap, I didn’t realize they were fun.” (Side note: Kids should also always be invited to weddings, but that’s a whole other essay.) In the end, our kids were great travelers, waking up at weird hours, rolling with jet lag, joining us on morning and afternoon and evening walks. But we met them where they were. They swam in the pool, we spent an afternoon at a playground, we got them souvenir Lamine Yamal jerseys that they haven’t really taken off since we got them. We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a universal love language. Leaving Spain, they woke up at 4:30 a.m. to head to Lisbon, where we had a long layover and spent six hours walking around the city. For our last meal in Europe, pizza and Coke were promised, and the promise was kept.

Through it all they got to try new foods, experience and embrace other cultures and other patterns of movement. They adapted to new situations and scenarios and learned that good things can come out of unplanned difficulties (something I’m not always great at). They may have even learned a few Spanish words along the way.

There’s a weird discourse right now (at least in my algorithm) about where kids belong: weddings, planes, public in general. Some of the aggravation is warranted, but I’d mostly blame it on screen parents or the general laissez faire approach to parenting these days. Bad behavior is one thing, but kids acting like kids– I’m sorry, but that belongs in society. Sometimes it will be messy, sometimes they will be crying, sometimes they will walk straight into your directional path from ten feet away, like a heat seeking missile directed at your shins. I know, they do this to me every day. It’s annoying and dumb.

But you were a kid once and you didn’t know anything. You spilled drinks and pissed your pants and wiped snot on a door handle that someone missed a whole week of work from. Life is messy, so are kids, and adults are even worse. We all get over it. Or should, anyway. Despite not being perfect, hopefully you were lucky enough that a parent said to you: “You’re mine, you’re my favorite thing in the whole world, and I want you to see that world with me so you can become the best person you can be as you move through it.”

That’s a good way to grow up.

Course 4

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

I pretty much recapped everything from the past week in the first course, but yes, the Boston Marathon weekend was as good as ever. It really is the Super Bowl of running, honestly probably better. Any given morning you can go on a run along the Charles River and see literally every pro doing the same thing. We passed Des Linden on our Sunday morning group run and she acted like we were the celebrities.

Thanks to all of you who I met there, whether in passing or at an event, who also told me they love reading this Substack each week. Especially paid subscriber Kim, who I randomly ran into in the starting corral for the B.A.A. 5K on Saturday morning. Great meeting and chatting with you.

I almost went to London for a whole 36 hours, but I’m kind of thankful that I didn’t as Boston was pretty tiring. Kudos to our video guy Karl for shouldering the “burden” of spending a few days in London covering Adidas. And congrats to both Thomas and Meg for having strong finishes at the London Marathon on a very warm day.

Other things I wrote this week:

Nike Announces 4-Minute Mile Moonshot with Faith Kipyegon // Believe in the Run

Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 2: First Look & Thoughts // 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 recap of our Boston Marathon weekend here.

Ingredients List

📖 : “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class” by Rob Henderson // I’m almost finished with this book, but I really think it’s a great perspective of the rare person who comes from the worst conditions a child could grow up in (the carousel of foster care) and eventually graduates from an Ivy League schools (Yale and Cambridge) and how that looks when levied against certain belief systems and power structures held by the elite class (spoiler: his definition of trauma is much different than the kid who grew up in Nantucket with two surgeons as parents). The book could’ve used another round of editing and the storytelling is a bit halting, but it gets its point across.

“Why Every Father Should Bring His Toddler Out on a Mini Adventure” by Stefen Chow // I read this almost a decade ago, and for whatever reason, the story of this dad and his two-year-old daughter going on an 8-day trip through Taiwan has always stuck with me. I forgot most of it, but the sentiment always remained: that taking a kid on an adventure isn’t as difficult as you think it will be and you will both grow closer because of it. I would think about this Medium post all the time, especially when my kids were younger, and still think about it often today.

📺 : “Interstellar” // I’ve seen the memes, I’ve listened to the Hans Zimmer soundtrack over and over again while working. And yet I had never seen the movie until last night. It’s so good.

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.

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