Life's Never-Ending Run

A rare non-sports related newsletter for your Sunday afternoon

Good afternoon from the shores of a temporarily tamed Pacific, where yours truly has been ensconced since Thursday evening to escape the zeitgeist for a few days of rest and relaxation.

While I’ve spent much of the last few months cultivating this newsletter to reflect a lot of my feelings about today’s world of amateur athletics, I felt compelled to branch out a bit with today’s post.

After a weekend of socializing with friends both new and old and uttering phrases I never felt were possible like, “going out for a relaxed, five-mile run down The Strand,” I felt compelled to write something on the duality of dread and optimism that led me to come to sunny Manhattan Beach in the first place.

While I’ve been crashing on my best man’s futon this weekend, I’ve had time to reflect on the course of the last few days and see both the impending doom spiral our nation’s hurtling towards, while also enjoying the salve of community in the bucolic South Bay.

Today’s run, for instance, was an example of the latter half of that graph — as I was invited to take part in the Hermosa Beach Run Club’s weekly five-mile trek down the stretch of the Pacific known colloquially around here as “The Strand.”

Seeing as I’m currently training (without much success) to run in my first-ever 5K in January, I agreed to do the five-mile version of the run club’s Sunday festivities, knowing full well that I last ran more than three miles during the latter half of Barack Obama’s second term in office.

Still, a few words of wisdom from Fred Reyes, who runs the coffee shop known as Gitana that puts together the Sunday fun runs, helped inspire me to give it a go come Sunday morning.

Thankfully, my buddy Connor and a friend of his named Sean were willing to sacrifice their own (much faster) pace to slog along at 11 minutes a mile with me, which got me over the hump after a few brief stints spent walking around aimlessly wondering what the hell I got myself into.

The moral of this wandering essay is that the weekend’s activities reminded me that anything is possible if you simply keep moving forward.

After Tuesday’s shit stew of bad news and the doom spiral of news out of Washington, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and angry at what’s occurring around us.

It’s also possible, though, to get outside and put one foot in front of the other, making the best of a bad situation and doing what it takes to make the best of it.

Hey, who knows, maybe you’ll discover that the things you used to loathe (like running) aren’t so bad in the long run.