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Showing posts from June, 2023

Southern Summer

After spending the last several hours (days, really) beating my head against a wall here, I’ve decided to just be honest: I’m kind of at a loss for what to write about this week. After a fast-and-furious start to the summer and a few A-list performances from y’all, things have… slowed down. So I’ve decided to write about slowing down. I’ve never spent a summer outside of the South, and while I maintain a certain Southern indignance about just how bad it gets here by late July, I feel pretty confident saying it’s tough everywhere. The days get hotter, the air gets stickier, and electrolytes become awfully hard to keep in your system when you spend every day so ambiently sweaty. But! What you have lots of in the summertime (assuming you’re still a college kid and not an old fart like me) is time. Even with those long, toilsome hours barista-ing to work around, it’s a lot easier to get the miles in when you don’t have the classes and extracurriculars and general shenanigans of a college s...

Welcoming the Unknown

  In the hardest moments of a race, when your lungs are burning and your heart is pounding out of your ears and your legs feel like cast iron and in the edges of your vision you see another runner’s shadow sneaking up on yours and all the sudden there’s another ragged rhythm of oxygen intake sitting right on your shoulder and you tell yourself they sound worse than you do but then again you sound pretty rough yourself, don’t you, but you try not to think about that right now and you stand up a little straighter and up your tempo and try to focus every ounce of energy you have into keeping your shadow just one step ahead of the faceless form nipping at your heels… that’s when you find out what kind of runner you are. I’m not talking about Shea Aquilano ’s 33rd-place finish at Worlds. I’m talking about my experience trying to hold off the 9-year-old boy in K-Mart New Balances who passed me hard 3 miles into a rural 3.5 mile race on Saturday night. Shea probably wouldn’t have let that...