Easy Miles

In last year's post I am a Journaler I pulled on a thread that, with the benefit of hindsight, I realized had run through much of my life. Today I'm going to pull on another.

I ran my first running race in high school. It was a fundraiser 5k for Democrats in upstate New York. I think it was in Auburn or Skaneateles - I remember it being about an hour's drive from my home in Ithaca. I remember running along the lake shore. I remember the race t-shirt. I also remember getting very bad shin splints.

It was several years after that before I tried building a running habit again. I stopped playing travel hockey after aging out of the youth program at eighteen, but played in the 6am before-work beer league for a couple years while in community college. I was also very into bicycling, and commuted 90–150 miles every week on my fixed gear bike to work as a barista (and later as a coffee roaster) after dropping out of Cornell. When I made another attempt at college, it was in New Mexico—across the country from New York—and I wasn't able to bring my bike (my hockey goalie equipment left no space in my small hatchback).

I played hockey for my first year and a half at UNM and then left the team to focus on my final year of school (hockey required lots of travel—driving of eight or more hours each way was the norm each weekend during the season). With no hockey to play and no bike to ride, I found myself drifting back to running.

I did not learn until years later that Albuquerque has a reputation as a world-class running city. Its elevation and favorable weather make it a great place to train. (Josh Kerr, who set a new world record mile time this summer, attended UNM and still lives and trains in Albuquerque). Additionally, there are many miles of paved multi-use trails along the arroyos and through neighborhoods, which are separated from the roads.

And of course the Sandia Mountains are right next door. One of my favorite weekend activities was to run up the La Luz Trail. I'd park at the lower station of the Sandia Peak Aerial Tramway, run 9.6 miles and 3,700 vertical feet up to the summit, and then take a one-way tram ride back down to my car.

I ran my first (and so far, only) half-marathon in Albuquerque too: the Duke City Half-Marathon. This was the race that really made me feel like a runner. I had run 13.1 miles during training in a time of 2:18, and on race day, I shattered that training run with an official race time of 1:56:28.

Six weeks after that half-marathon, I was back in New York for Thanksgiving. My two brothers and I raced a Turkey Trot 5k. After more than a year running at altitude, I ran my fastest 5k ever, by far: 22:34, which included my fastest-ever mile time of 6:43. (I was not the fastest brother, sadly: my youngest brother was a D1 NCAA rower with lungs for days—he beat me in the last few meters).

I kept running as I moved on from UNM: I did trail running and a few trail races at home in central New York, and then after starting graduate school at the University of Kansas, I started running in Lawrence. I didn't run any races in Kansas but I was up to about 40 miles/week at this point, the most volume I've ever done.

Before the end of my first year of graduate school, though, I stopped running. All these years later, I can't be exactly sure why, but I have a theory. At UNM, I didn't work—I was just attending school, and I had plenty of time for things like running. In graduate school, though, I was taking a full course load, I was teaching a class (Russian 101, five days a week), and I was trying to avail myself of opportunities that graduate school had to offer (talks, events, etc). My time was much more limited, and in hindsight I think I just let my running hobby drop.

After that, life happened. In my second year of graduate school, I met the wonderful woman who would become my wife. We left school and got real jobs. We got married. We moved from Lawrence to Kansas City and bought a house. We had a kid. Covid happened. We had another kid. We moved to a larger house. I was biking some, even commuting to work by bike for a while. But I wasn't running any.

I ran exactly twice between January 2014 and July 2023. Almost a ten year period. At the end of July 2023 we were in New York visiting my parents. My son was four and had been learning to ride a bike. At home in Kansas City, he had two bikes: a Strider bike without pedals, and a Trek bike with training wheels. He'd tried the Trek without the training wheels only once - he didn't fall, but he didn't like it, and had me put the training wheels back on. He wanted to ride a bike at my parents' place. They had one, the old Schwinn that I learned how to ride when I was four—but it had no training wheels.

That constraint—the only available bike having pedals and no training wheels—provided the push my son needed. He got on that bike and took off. I ran after him, but I didn't have the shoes for it. That same day, I went and bought running shoes at the mall near my parents' house. I spent much of that trip jogging after my son as he rode the same one-mile neighborhood loop that I ran and biked as a kid.

When we returned to Kansas City, I kept running. Sort of. I ran a little more with my son as he biked, usually on the Trolley Track Trail. And then the weather changed, and we stopped. But then in the spring, I started running again. Slowly, and not far, and not often. But the spark was there. Two and a half years later, I've protected that spark, and I've tried to fan it into a flame. I ran seventeen times in 2024 and twelve times in 2025. I've run 48 times in 2026 and still have four months remaining.

I feel like I've turned the corner this year—running feels like a real habit again. My mental health has improved, my fitness has improved, my weight has improved. But as I've ramped up mileage this summer, I've caught shin splints again. I write this post during a period of no running, while I rest and recover. Tomorrow I am going to go out for a short run and test my shin. Whether I feel like I've recovered, or whether I need to cut it short and take more time off, I'm not going to let this running flame go out. This time, I'm prepared to keep this habit alive.

I've learned something important about running now, you see. The act of running is very simple: you put on your shoes (or not—I had a barefoot running phase in college, as one does) and you put one foot in front of the other. The practice of running, though, is harder: it includes both the act of running, and all the time spent not actually running, and it's the latter where I struggle.

It's easy for me to go all-in on things. It's incredibly hard for me to move slowly, incrementally, sustainably into things. Running requires slow progression—take on too much volume too fast and your body forces you to stop. That's happened to me several times in my life, and each time, it's ended my running practice. This time, I won't let it.

This time, I understand better that sometimes, to be a runner requires not running. I am currently in a period of not running, but I see it differently now. I am becoming a better runner by not running. I want to make running into an activity that I can do for the rest of my life. In a life of running, there will be gaps, pauses, and setbacks: injuries, maybe, or times when life gets busy. I need to be able to get through those periods and come out the other side still running. I am building those muscles now.

Over the last several years I've seen small investments in regular habits turn into tremendous progress. I opened this post with a reference to I am a Journaler, where I mentioned a 155-day journaling streak—that streak is still going strong at 583 days as of this morning. I read every day for at least fifteen minutes—that streak is at 471 days, and that small daily investment let me read 61 books in 2025 and 48 books in 2026 so far.

I don't intend running to become an every-day-without-fail habit like journaling or reading, but the basic idea is the same: an activity that is easy to do by itself, done often, becomes a remarkable practice in a year or two. That's how I'm approaching running now: I'm putting in the easy miles and marking run days on my calendar with an "X", and I'll look forward to checking back on this post in a few years.