Last weekend I lined up at the Zion 100km. An ultramarathon through one of the most gorgeous landscapes I’ve seen in my life.

I’m a big believer in not waiting. I think of waiting as one of the easiest things to avoid regretting later in life. Too many of us get stuck coming up with reasons and excuses on why this isn’t the right time, and what it ultimately does is rob us of the experience our soul is calling for us to do. When it comes to Zion, that waiting had taken me a little over 4 years to finally get to.

I first heard about the Zion 100km when my Dad and I were doing 29029. A challenge where you hike up a mountain repeatedly until you have accumulated the equivalent elevation gain of Mt. Everest (29,029ft). It was an incredible experience I’ll never forget, and it was during that trip that someone first told me about the Zion ultramarathon. Ever since that day I’ve had this race sitting on the mental shelf of options, but couldn’t make the dates work. So as I was sitting down at the end of last year thinking about which races I’d go all-in on for 2026, I was excited to see that the calendar was finally open for me to head west. Back out into the desert. A place that has pulled me back again and again over the last 6 years.

When I started training for Zion in January, I had two real goals. Get in the best aerobic fitness of my life. Don’t get injured. Having worked with multiple coaches over the years and completed several 50+ mile ultras, I went into the block optimistic that I understood how to do both.

The hardest part of preparing for race day wasn’t the miles or the hard workouts. It was the early mornings. And I mean real early. Due to the way my calendar is set up, and doing my best to protect weekends for my family, I moved my longest run of the week to Fridays. The only problem with that was I still had a full workday ahead of me, so each Friday over the final 8 weeks my alarm went off at 2:00am and I made the 2-hour drive out to Umstead. The closest thing I have to real hill training, which matters in races like this. I’d arrive at the trailhead in the dark, strap on my headlamp, put in 3 to 4 hours on the trail, and drive the 2 hours back home in time for my first meeting. Those mornings got harder the deeper into the block I got. But I did it. Not missing a single week. Not hitting snooze once. Not waiting.

As the training wrapped up and I made the final early morning drive out to Raleigh, this time to the airport, I did so with a quiet optimism. A weekend in the mountains was on the way. A return to my happy place.

I flew into Las Vegas, about a 2-hour drive from the Zion area. If anyone was prepared for that kind of drive after a flight, it was me. I was practically a professional at those highway sprints by now. Loading my bags into the rental and pulling away from the airport, I looked out at the hotels lining the strip. The younger version of myself would have made a beeline for one of those casinos and put money on red. On this day I was focused on the road.

The thing that gets me every time about the west is the scale of it. The east coast has its beauty but the horizons are close and the mountains are soft. Out here everything is enormous. I first felt that kind of size in the mountains of Afghanistan, then again in Yosemite, and eventually it captured something deeper in me while I was living in the shadow of Montara in Pacifica. Driving north on I-15 the world outside my window slowly turned red. Massive sandstone walls off in the distance, then closer, then towering on both sides of the highway as I cut directly through them. There is something about that scale that a photo never fully captures. You feel it in your chest.

Once I got to the hotel I settled in quickly. The Hurricane area was exactly what the reviews had promised. Quiet, nothing fancy, everything a runner needs and nothing more. I threw on some shorts and a t-shirt and headed out for a short shake out run, just enough to get the travel out of my legs.

Friday was about staying off my feet and handling any final prep. My hotel was 20 minutes from the start line, which made the expo trip easy. I didn’t spend much time there but it was well put together. Nutrition vendors, massage tents, recovery equipment, and a lot of people talking with each other about what was coming the next day. The trail running community is filled with people who are genuinely just as crazy as you. Over the years I’ve met some pretty cool people and heard some even better stories, and the expo is always the first taste of that energy.

Back at the hotel I laid out my gear. For this race I’d be solo with no crew, which meant a drop bag at mile 34. Everything before that I’d need to either self-carry or pull from aid stations. My primary fuel was Precision Fuel and Hydration. Their gels and salt tablets have been a major part of my fueling strategy for a couple of years now. At the aid stations I planned on grabbing candy, chips, and maybe some hot food if I felt up for it.

After a final gear check it was time to find dinner. I usually do a big pizza or rice and plain chicken the night before a race. There was a pizza place nearby but they told me it would be a 2-hour wait. For once I had a legitimate excuse to wait for something, but I didn’t have 2 hours to give. I fell back on rice and chicken. Nothing exciting, but nothing that would wreck my stomach either.

Then it was time to lay down and do my best to sleep. A long day was coming.

The alarm went off at 4:00am. I slept okay, which is about as good as it gets the night before a race. The eagerness takes over. I lay in the dark for a moment running through the day in my head before crawling out of bed and making my way to the desk. Standard rice breakfast, an energy drink, and a full serving of Precision’s 1500 electrolyte tabs. A pre-load for what I knew would be a long day in the heat.

After loading up my gear I set off for the start. There was a long line of headlights stretching out ahead of me in the pitch dark, hundreds of people who had circled this race on their calendar and were now, like me, just minutes from finding out what all that sacrifice was worth.

As I got closer to the parking lot, attendants guided us in with flashlights. That was the first of many moments that day where I noticed the volunteers. People who show up at odd hours for no pay to help strangers finish something hard. There is a lot of good in that.

The start line area was the only thing lit up for miles. A handful of floodlights cutting through the dark, hundreds of headlamps bobbing in the crowd, breath fogging in the cool desert air. As the final seconds ticked down I did one last rewind of everything that had gone into getting to that moment. The early mornings. The long drives. The hard workouts. The finding room for all of it inside an already full life. Now was the fun part. Well, fun for now.

The first few miles were along rolling jeep roads, the sun barely beginning to push color across the tops of the plateaus. By the time we hit the first singletrack of the day, Wire Mesa, the sky was turning pink at the edges. One of four loops I’d run that day.

It wasn’t long before the lead group I was part of caught up to the back of the 100-mile runners who had started 30 minutes ahead of us. The singletrack was tight and passing was hard, so I settled in and used the forced slowdown as an excuse to actually look around. The canyon walls. The deep red against the early morning sky. Oh, those views! I’d say that to myself over and over throughout the entire day, just genuinely in awe of what I was running through. Whatever the day threw at me, I kept coming back to the same thought. What a privilege it is to explore this part of the world on your own two feet.

Around mile 8 I hit the first aid station. Filled my bottles, grabbed some Coke and a handful of chips, and kept moving. Things were feeling good. The Wire Mesa loop had the same jaw-dropping views, which I was beginning to accept was just the baseline out here.

After completing Wire Mesa, runners from all distances folded in together on the main road connecting the loops. 100 mile, 100km, 60km, 30km, all of us sharing the same stretch. Getting to run alongside that many people was one of the better parts of the weekend. Back home in Bridgeton I rarely see another person out running. Not on this day.

As I made my way back toward the start area and the back half of the course, people were lining the sides of the road holding signs and calling out names. I missed Felicia and the girls in that moment. They couldn’t make it on this trip, which meant the distance was entirely on me. No crew. No familiar face waiting at the next aid station. Just me and however well I could manage myself out there. What I didn't expect was how many messages were waiting for me every time I checked my phone at an aid station. Friends, family, people tracking my dot from home and encouraging me to keep going.

From the turn near the start, we headed toward Gooseberry Mesa, the loop I had been most uncertain about going in. Roughly 11 miles of slickrock. If you aren’t familiar, slickrock is essentially running on boulders. The uneven kind. Up and down and sideways. By this point the sun was fully overhead and the rock was radiating heat from below as well as above. Some sections brought me within a foot of drop-offs I’d estimate at close to 1,000 feet. I moved carefully and didn’t get close to the edge!

Around mile 30 I started to feel the day catching up to me. The extra electrolyte bottle I’d carried on this section earned its weight in my pack. Toward the end of the loop a few of us spotted a rattlesnake just off the side of the trail. Far enough away not to be a threat, but close enough to get the heart rate up for a few steps.

Getting back to the Mondo Z aid station at mile 34 was a relief. Drop bag retrieved. I had been averaging around 90 grams of carbs and about 36 ounces of fluid per hour. I was feeling okay but the slickrock had clearly done some damage to my quads. I grabbed a bite of grilled cheese, about six orange slices, washed it all down with a Coke, grabbed more of my gels, topped off my bottles, and headed toward the cut.

The Mondo Z descent was absolutely the crux of the day. Roughly 1,200 feet in half a mile, all loose rock and soft dirt. Foot placement was luck and my quads were screaming for the entire thing. I passed a few runners on the way down and at the bottom found the water monster, a massive multi-gallon tank sitting out in the open desert. I soaked my face, arms, and the back of my neck, held my hat under the spigot, and then kept moving. Twenty miles to go.

On my way to Virgin Desert at mile 43, I could feel how much the first half had taken. I tried to run the early part but it became clear fast that I needed to pull back and work in some walk/jog intervals. My spirits were still reasonable when I rolled into the aid station and the volunteers helped me get sorted on food and electrolytes. I was spent. But I knew one thing… as long as I walked out of that tent, I was finishing Zion.

The next aid station was only 2 miles away but they were the longest 2 miles of the day. The sun was directly overhead with nowhere to hide, and the wind was steady enough to pull sweat off my skin before I could feel it happening. I was losing more than I realized.

At Virgin Dam I sat down for the first time all day. The folding chair felt incredible for about 30 seconds. I drank some Coke, got down a handful of chips and a few pieces of candy. My stomach was starting to shut down, and I knew what that meant for the final 15 miles. This was going to get really hard.

What really stung at this point was that the section from Virgin Dam through the town of Virgin and back to the water monster was some of the best singletrack I’ve run in years. Gentle, slightly rolling downhill. On any other day that terrain would have had me grinning the whole way through. Not on this one though. A large part of the next 10 miles was spent walking. My legs just couldn’t turn over. I’d get a jog going for maybe half a mile before having to walk it out again. My body was shutting down. I was in trouble.

I knew going into the race that around mile 50 I’d hit a 2-mile stretch of road near a highway. What I didn’t know was that there’d be a brand new gas station sitting right at the turn. The sight of it felt like finding water in an actual desert. I peeled off the course and went inside. Lucky for me I had a bit of emergency cash on me. The air conditioning hit me and I stood there for a moment before grabbing an icee and a Gatorade to drink. I sat down outside the door and gathered myself. Mondo Z was still 5 miles away. The finish line was 10 out. On a normal day that’s nothing. On this day I was fighting to get through the next few feet.

I stood up and started moving. I had come out here alone. I had spent all those Friday mornings in the dark at Umstead alone. Quitting didn’t register as an option. I jogged down the 2-mile road stretch, turned right, and got back onto the jeep road. Up ahead was the same gnarly section I had come down hours earlier. This time I was climbing it.

By the time I hit the base of the climb at mile 55 I knew what I was getting into. Not the hardest I’ve ever done by any objective measure. I’d handled bigger at CCC a few years back. But I was running on fumes, and nothing had stayed down in hours. Ten feet at a time was about all I had. I’d find whatever flat rock I could, get a few seconds of rest, and move again.

Halfway up my stomach finally had enough. I dropped to all fours on the steep trail and dry heaved for about 20 seconds, doing my best to not slip down the mountain. It wasn’t pretty. But when it was over something shifted for me. A strange second wind came out of nowhere. I stood back up, moved through the rest of the climb, and walked into the Mondo Z aid station at mile 55. Five miles to go.

Another runner hobbled in just ahead of me. He looked completely broken, eyes glassy, not quite sure where he was. I said a few words to him but he just stared past me like he’s seen a ghost. The volunteers got him into a chair. I stood there for a moment watching them before chugging most of a 12-ounce Coke. The sun was getting low. A breeze was picking up and the temperature was dropping.

Over the next 5 miles I traded slow jogs with power walking, doing whatever I could to keep moving forward. With about a mile to go, the finish line still not in sight, I looked up.

I’ll never forget what I saw.

The stars. The brightest I have ever seen them, so dense and close it felt like they had lowered themselves toward the desert floor. I turned off my headlamp to get a better look and just stood there. Back home in Bridgeton I love standing on the back deck at night and looking up. Even in the dark out there it doesn’t come close to what was above me at that moment.

With a quarter mile left I turned a corner and entered the finisher’s chute. I found whatever was left in my legs and ran it in, doing my best not to trip on the rocky ground. When the medal went over my neck all I wanted to do was sit down.

It was a day that asked for everything I had. Much harder than I had expected. But I was proud to have battled through it, and when it was over the only thing I could feel was grateful.

The day after the race I spent in Las Vegas on a pair of very tired legs. First stop was the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop from the TV show, something I’d always wanted to see. Lots of memorabilia, cool to walk through, probably not quite as dramatic as what makes it onto the screen. Later I spent some time on the casino floors at the Venetian and did some people watching along the strip. The younger version of me would have found a table and played some hands. All I wanted was to sit somewhere quiet and wait for my red-eye home to NC.

Not because I have to. Because I get to. That’s the thing I keep coming back to a week after the race. I’m in a place in my life where I can sign up, train, and take time away to go do something like this. To have something hard on the calendar that requires real sacrifice to reach. The effect that kind of thing has on the rest of my life is hard to measure, but it’s real. It changes how I show up when things get difficult in ways that have nothing to do with running.

The Zion chapter is officially closed now. The road to Javelina continues.

So I’m going to spill it. All of it. Because I think I have something to say here that most people don’t.

Nearly 20 years ago I enlisted in the US Army. My official job title was 13F, Forward Observer. In its simplest terms, my job was to call in air strikes, artillery, and naval gunfire onto enemy targets. I was one of the most lethal assets on the battlefield. In Vietnam, the average lifespan of a Forward Observer was seven minutes. Seven minutes. Because the enemy knew exactly who you were and what you were capable of, and they were coming for you first. I was damn good at what I did.

After boot camp I went through Airborne school and was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina. Within weeks of arriving I had two duffel bags packed and was loaded into the back of a military aircraft on a one-way flight to Iraq. Baghdad, specifically. It wasn’t until I landed at Forward Operating Base Taji that I learned I’d be going to COP Callahan, a remote outpost in the heart of one of the most violent neighborhoods in Baghdad, right on the edge of Sadr City.

We arrived under the cover of darkness. What I remember most is the moon casting light across the side of an abandoned building that my unit had seized a few months before I got there. Dark spots covered the walls. The next morning someone told me those were from the rocket strikes that routinely hit the building. We were not liked. This was my new home.

Iraq was a complete shithole. There’s no softer way to put it and I’m not going to try. But I was young and impressionable, there to serve my country, and I did what I was told and tried to do it well. It was my first real look at the world outside our protected American bubble. I got up close and personal with a version of life that most people back home couldn’t imagine on their best day. Some people loved seeing Americans in their city. Many did not. And it would take years for me to really understand the dynamics at play in that part of the world. What I came away with from Iraq was simple and it hasn’t changed. The mission to win the hearts and minds of those citizens was a waste of time. I still believe that with everything I have.

In 2011 I deployed to the eastern mountains of Afghanistan. Another shithole of a country, at least the parts I was in. People who wanted all of us dead. Not some of them. Most of them. They shot at us. They tried to blow us up. And, they succeeded at times. They made every single day a grind that wore you down in ways that are hard to describe to someone who hasn’t been there. It was also on that deployment that I knew with complete certainty I would never re-enlist. I was done.

Then came the day that broke something open in me that has never fully closed.

Two black bags on a table. I was told to grab the handle of one of them. Inside those bags were Sgt. Born and Sgt. Conrad, who minutes earlier had been shot and killed by an Afghan Army soldier. A soldier who was supposed to be on our side. Part of the mission. Part of the whole reason we were there, to build up their military so they could one day defend themselves. Instead he put multiple rounds into two of my brothers and disappeared into the crowd of protestors gathered just beyond our barbed wire perimeter.

The Blackhawk came in low and fast, dust kicking up in every direction. I lifted the bag, did my best to stay upright as the weight of what was inside and the weight of what I was feeling nearly buckled my knees. Loading it onto the helicopter, I set my hand on top for just a moment and said a few quiet words. I didn’t know if it was Born or Conrad. It didn’t matter. They had paid the ultimate price.

And for what?

That question has really bothered me ever since that day. What the hell were we doing over there? What was the goal? What did success even look like and who was supposed to tell us when we’d found it? Just hours before, these two men had been going about their day. Proud. Present. Doing their jobs and trusting that the mission they’d been handed meant something. And now they were going home for the last time, to families who didn’t know yet, to funerals that would happen on American soil while the country that sent them over argued about things that didn’t matter.

That day changed my perspective on war. Not just how I thought about the Middle East, but how I thought about the people who send other people to die.

And now we’re doing it again.

When I heard that the 82nd Airborne Division was being mobilized in what looks like the beginning stages of a ground assault of Iran, something inside me went cold and then got really angry all at once. That was my unit all those years ago. The patch I wore when I loaded onto that aircraft to Baghdad. The same division that’s been showing up in the news lately for reasons that made my stomach drop before this even started. Seeing those maroon berets on the screen doesn’t feel abstract to me the way it might for someone watching from their couch. It feels like watching the next chapter of something I lived get handed to a group of kids who have no idea what they just signed up for. Fourteen years since I came home from Afghanistan and here we are, right back at the edge of the same cliff, about to jump off for the same reasons that never held up the first time.

Did we learn nothing from 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan? Nothing at all?

These countries do not change. They haven’t changed in thousands of years. The culture, the religion, the tribal loyalties, the distrust of outsiders, it runs deeper than any military campaign can reach. We spent two decades and trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives trying to reshape two countries and we left them exactly as we found them. Hell, Afghanistan is run by the Taliban again. The same Taliban we were there to dismantle. And when we left, we gave them our vehicles, our equipment, our facilities. As a parting gift. To the enemy. To honor the sacrifice of every man and woman whose family buried them with a flag in their hands.

What did we accomplish? Someone tell me. I genuinely want to know.

And now we’re being asked to look at Iran and nod along like this time will be different.

Most of the people who are making this call have never carried a body bag. They’ve never sat in a helicopter with their hand resting on someone they can’t bring themselves to fully think about. They’ve never looked into the eyes of a local in this part of the world and tried to figure out in real time whether that person wanted to shake your hand or kill you. They’ve never come home and tried to explain to someone who loves them what it actually felt like over there. They make decisions from the other side of the world, from air conditioned rooms, with no skin in the game and nothing personal on the line.

That’s who is sending our next generation into Iran.

And the justifications have already started shifting and we’re barely into this thing, which tells you everything. First we were told we had to go save the Iranian people from their regime, the same people who have chanted Death to America for four decades. Then it was about toppling that regime and installing a pro-West government, which we have never once done successfully in that part of the world, not even close. Then it was the nuclear program, the same nuclear threat that Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning was weeks away from being realized since the mid-1990s. Thirty years of weeks away. Go look it up. And didn’t we obliterate that program six months ago? Weren’t we told that? Somehow they’ve rebuilt and accelerated it at a speed that defies basic physics.

Now it’s the Strait of Hormuz. The strait that wasn’t closed six months ago. The strait that sits in the exact theater of war we decided to start. We lit the house on fire and now we’re suiting up to fight the flames like we’re the hero of this story.

And through all of it, where is Congress? Where is the open debate? Where is the honest accounting to the American people of why we are preparing to send sons and daughters into a country on the other side of the world that did not attack us, that posed no existential threat to us here at home, that we are entering because of intelligence from the same partner who promised us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

I’m not naive about Israel. I’m not writing them off. But I am paying attention to the pattern.

I know what war looks like. I know what it smells like. I know what it does to the people who fight it and I know what it does to the people who wait at home for news that may never come.

What I’m watching right now, from a country that I love and that I once put on a uniform to defend, is a nation sleepwalking toward something it doesn’t understand, led by people who have never had to understand it. The television will make it look one way. The press releases will frame it another. And somewhere over there, a kid who enlisted six months ago because he wanted to serve something bigger than himself is going to be handed a mission with no clear objective and told to go execute it.

And some of them won’t come back.

My hope is that common sense finds its way into this before it gets worse. Before more families get the knock on the door. Before more hands get placed on more bags and more quiet words are said in the middle of a dust cloud in a country that never asked us to be there.

But hope is a hard thing to hold onto when the people making the decisions have never had any reason to know what they’re risking.

The dirt, the sweat, the blood. It never gets on their uniforms.

Umstead in March is a particular kind of alone. The trail is familiar enough that my legs know what to do before my brain catches up, rolling and hilly, and the kind of terrain that asks for patience more than speed. On this morning I was out there four hours by the end of it. Gloves on. Tights. A long sleeve shirt I hadn’t needed in a week, because two days ago it had been in the eighties and now the temperature had dropped back down to near freezing, reminding me that winter wasn’t finished. My headlamp was casting about five feet of light in front of me. I didn’t see another person the entire morning.

I am in the thickest part of the training block for the Zion 100 kilometer race next month. Sixty-two miles through the southern Utah desert, a place I have wanted to run through for a long time. But Zion is really a stepping stone. What I am actually building toward is the Javelina Jundred in October, one hundred miles in the Arizona desert. Finish Zion and I earn a lottery ticket into Western States, which is the race I want most. Sub-nineteen hours at Zion gets me that qualifier. So when I say I am training, I mean I am out on a dark trail at five in the morning, alone, building something I cannot fully see yet.

My head, somewhere around mile seventeen, got stuck on an argument between two thinkers I had stumbled across recently. Sartre and Camus. And the argument goes like this.

Sartre says this training block is a project. That every choice I make, the alarm, the trail, the suffering I keep voluntarily signing up for, is lacing up a new version of myself. You are not born with a fixed identity or a pre-assigned purpose. You arrive, and then you build. The life you construct through your choices is the only meaning there is.

Out on Reedy Creek in the cold and the dark, I felt that. Nobody is making me do this. Nobody is grading the result. I chose Zion and Javelina and the particular kind of long hours that comes with building the endurance needed for these long distances. Sartre would say those choices, stacked one on top of the other, are quietly writing a “self.” That the person I am becoming is a direct consequence of what I decide to do when there is no audience and no applause.

I ran with that for a while.

Then somewhere in the middle of that, my mind left Umstead entirely.

I am standing at a start line in the Utah desert. It is 5:30 in the morning and the dark here feels different than the dark back home. Bigger. The red rock walls rising around me are invisible in the pre-dawn but I can feel them, the way you feel a room even before your eyes fully adjust. There are other runners. Headlamps scattered like low stars across the canyon floor. I woke up a few hours ago in a small hotel twenty minutes outside the park, tumbleweeds drifting through the parking lot in the quiet. I made my rice, jasmine with soy sauce, the same thing I always make before a long effort. I ate it slowly and thought about the hundreds of mornings that led to this one. The dark miles at Umstead. The long runs out of Bridgeton on trails nobody has ever heard of. All of it culminating into this moment, standing in the desert waiting for the race director to count down.

Sartre would say this is the project made visible.

The gun goes off and within the first hour the sun begins to rise and I understand immediately why people talk about this place the way they do. The light comes in sideways, painting everything red and orange, the canyon walls catching fire in slow motion. The course winds along slickrock plateaus, the terrain dropping away on both sides into nothing. Each footstep deliberate. Each step a small negotiation with gravity and red dirt and whatever my body decides to say about it.

Then Camus pushed back.

Camus says the project is a lie I tell myself to make the miles feel less empty. His argument is that Sartre’s move resolves too cleanly. You find the uncomfortable fact that life has no inherent meaning, and instead of actually facing it, you immediately convert it into a sort of construction project. Problem found. Solution applied. Camus thought that was a flinch. A way of making the discomfort manageable rather than real.

What he wanted was for you to look directly at the fact that none of this adds up to anything predetermined, and keep going anyway. Not because you convinced yourself it leads somewhere. But because you choose to move inside the contradiction without softening it. He called it the absurd. Not a wound to heal, but more of a condition to live inside of.

I pushed back on that too.

Because if you know nothing means anything and you go out anyway, what are you actually doing? Just enduring? That starts to sound like giving up with better wording. I did not want a philosophy that asked me to feel the void. I wanted the ladder. I wanted to believe the miles were adding up to something.

But the problem with the ladder is that you’re only as good as the next rung. If the project is the only thing giving the miles meaning, then the moment a rung breaks...a rolled ankle, a sidelined season, a race that doesn’t go your way...the whole structure collapses. Sartre gives you the tools to climb, but he doesn’t tell you what to do when there’s nowhere left to go but down.

I pictured mile forty at Zion.

The heat by then will be unforgiving in the way that only open desert can be. No trees. No shade. Just red dirt and exposed sky and the sun pressing down on my back like it has something to prove. I have spent months preparing for this in sauna sessions back home, baking myself in the early spring Carolina heat, trying to teach my body in advance what is coming. But knowing a thing is coming and standing inside it are different. At mile forty I will not be thinking about Western States. I will not be thinking about Javelina. I will be thinking about the next step, and then the one after that, and whether I have enough water to reach the next aid station.

That is the most honest version of the Camus argument I can imagine.

Not the philosophical version. The practical one. At some point on that course the project disappears. The ladder disappears. There is no construction happening at mile forty in the desert heat. There is just a body moving through space, choosing to keep moving for no reason that would satisfy a philosopher, and every reason that would satisfy anyone who has ever pushed past the point of comfort into something that mattered anyway.

By mile twenty-seven, my legs were starting to bark at me and Camus was making more sense.

Because I do exactly what he is describing. The training block leads to Zion. Zion leads to Javelina. Javelina leads to Western States. That story is useful. It’s a sturdy ladder that gets me out of bed at two in the morning. But underneath it is the question I kept circling...Would I still do this if the ladder were taken away? If there were no finish line, no lottery ticket, and no “version 2.0” of myself waiting at the end?

I know my answer.

I would.

Not because I am disciplined or wired differently or built for this. But because running is not the vehicle for something else in my life. It is the thing itself. It has changed how I process pain, how I make decisions, how I show up for the people I love. Strip away every race on the calendar and I am still out here, because the person I am when I run is the person I am trying to be everywhere else. I cannot separate that from the person standing here right now. I would not want to.

And that is where I think the argument between them quietly ends.

Maybe Camus is not arguing against building. Maybe he is arguing against needing the building to justify the showing up. The run does not need Zion to matter. Zion does not need Western States to matter. But I am still going to run Zion. I am still going to run a hundred miles in October. Not because meaning demands it. Because I choose it, freely and fully, without needing the universe to co-sign the decision.

And there is probably a version of Sisyphus out there somewhere with a GPS watch who understands both of them.

I picture myself somewhere in the back half of that canyon course. The relentless heat. My legs carrying the memory of every dark mile at Umstead, every long run out of Bridgeton, every morning I chose to get up when the alarm started beeping. Each footstep not a march toward meaning but something quieter than that. Proof of a choice made freely, repeated until it became a life.

The finish line is out there somewhere past the edge of my headlamp.

I am not ready to see it yet.

By the time I got home the sun was up and Felicia and Dakota were already at daycare and work and the ordinary rhythm of the day was in full swing. I took a quick shower and logged into my first meeting. The person on the other side of the screen had no idea I had just spent four hours alone on a dark trail, working something out that I still haven’t fully resolved.

And I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

I found myself thinking about time. About how far back the thread of my running actually goes. And the longer I ran, the further back I went.

It starts in Pacifica.

Mid-2020. Peak Covid. Felicia and I were living in a small duplex on a hilltop that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. Our marriage was in a really tough spot. I was working from home, the world had gone quiet, and Payton was on the other side of the country. I had no idea what the next chapter looked like. So I started walking. Morning walks. Afternoon walks. Multi-hour walks with podcasts in my ears and nowhere to be.

I looked forward to it every single day.

It was on one of those walks that I stumbled onto trail running and ultramarathons in a podcast. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact episode. But I do remember hearing about these people who were running these long distances and something in me resonated with it. I liked being outside. I liked walking for long stretches of time. And these people were essentially walking fast in order to complete these distances. To see more of the world.

So I started jogging a small stretch of beach at the base of Mori Point. Mostly flat. The occasional gentle climb to remind me how out of shape I was in. Waves crashing a few feet away. The crisp, cool air flowing as I moved through it.

I was never what you would call a “runner”. Sure, I grew up playing sports and being active, but that was completely different than this. When I was in the military we’d run nearly every day of the week. I absolutely despised it. It felt performative. You ran because someone told you to run, at a pace someone set, toward a standard that had nothing to do with you. There was no joy in it.

But being outside along the side of the mountains in a small little beach town, with some of the most gorgeous sunsets and views I’d ever lived in made the jogging fun.

It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with it.

That was five years ago. And the distance between who I was on that beach and who I am now, as a runner and as a person, is hard to put into words without sounding like I’m overselling it. But I’m not. Running found me at a moment when I needed something to be consistent for, and it held me accountable in ways I never could have planned for.

The races I’ve lined up at along the way have been extraordinary. Long hours in beautiful, unforgiving places. It’s the kind of suffering that becomes clarifying and fun in a weird way. Type 2 fun as they say. I remember crossing my first finish line at the Black Canyon 60km in early 2021 and standing there thinking I couldn’t believe I had actually done it. Not in a proud way. More like genuine disbelief. The guy jogging that flat stretch of beach had no business being here. Salty tears slowly forming behind my sunglasses. The best kind of tears.

But what I kept coming back to on that Umstead run wasn’t the races or the emotions of crossing finish lines.

It was what makes them possible.

Consistency. And not the Instagram version of it, which I’ve largely given up on (it’s now been over 2 months since I’ve been on social media). Not the highlight reel or the early morning alarm clock photo. I’m talking more about the real kind of consistency. The kind that’s mostly invisible, and more importantly, the kind that’s almost impossible to measure while you’re inside of it.

How the growth doesn’t really arrive in any particular moment. Instead, it accumulates so slowly, so quietly, that you don’t actually notice it happening. You just keep showing up. You string together enough days, enough miles, enough early mornings where you had to talk yourself into lacing up, and then one day you look up and realize you are not the same person anymore.

But you can’t point to when it changed. Because it didn’t change. You just grew.

Right now I’m in the heaviest block of training for the Zion 100km, a race through the southern Utah desert in early April. This stretch of training has no fanfare. Nobody is watching. Most days it’s just me, the trail, and a quiet internal negotiation about whether I want to go or not.

Some days the answer is easy. A lot of days it isn’t. But I go anyway.

And that’s the whole thing.

We are usually the last ones to recognize our own progress. We move from one goal to the next without pausing to acknowledge the journey that got us there. The bar resets before we’ve even caught our breath. We treat consistency like a tool we pick up and put down, instead of recognizing it as the thing that’s actually been shaping us the entire time.

Nobody tells you that one of the hardest parts of staying consistent is just figuring out where it lives in your day. We all get the same 24 hours. But when training gets serious, those hours start to negotiate with each other. Early mornings. Lunch breaks. Evenings after everything else settles down. Sometimes all three. I had to decide that this time was non-negotiable before I could actually protect it. That it wasn’t selfish, it was necessary. That the version of me who runs is a better husband, a better father, a better everything. It took trial and error. It took real conversations with Felicia. And honestly it’s still a work in progress. But that’s the deal you make when something matters.

I started this ultra running journey on a flat beach in Pacifica with nothing but a podcast and some old sneakers. And here I am, years later, deep in a training block for a race through canyon country. A stepping stone toward something I’ve been quietly building toward for a while now. My first ever 100 mile race this October. Not because the distance is impressive. But because I want to know how far I can actually push my limits. To maximize what I’m capable of as a human. To practice navigating hard things physically, not just mentally. I love this. I genuinely love this. And yet some mornings I still have to talk myself out the door.

Both things are true. And the miles don’t care either way.

They just add up.

It isn't a letter or a message. It’s just a man standing in a kitchen, talking to a room with no one in it. Or maybe he’s talking to everyone who’s ever stood in their own version of that room.

I don’t know him. But I think you might.

There’s a man standing in a kitchen at 5:30 in the morning. The coffee maker hisses and pops through its last few seconds, that familiar gurgle before the pot goes quiet. The yellow glow of the microwave clock is the only light. The house is still in the way houses are still when everyone else is still dreaming. He’s not thinking about anything important. He’s just standing there, bare feet on the wood floor, hands flat on the counter like he’s bracing for something.

He doesn’t know it yet, but this is one of the moments.

Not the kind anyone photographs. And not the kind he’ll tell a story about at dinner. Just a man in a kitchen, scanning the silence out of muscle memory, existing in the last few seconds before the day starts asking things of him. His youngest will wake up soon and call out from her crib. Not crying, but more so just announcing herself to the world the way she does every morning, like she’s surprised to still be here and delighted about it. His oldest is down the hall, fourteen and already becoming someone he doesn’t fully recognize yet. Not in a scary way. But more in the way a song changes key and you realize it’s been building toward something you didn’t hear coming.

He’ll walk into the little one’s room and she’ll reach for him with both arms. That never gets old. It won’t get old for another two years, and then one day she’ll just climb out of the crib herself and wander into the kitchen on her own, and he’ll be proud and a little wrecked by it at the same time.

His oldest will come downstairs eventually, earbuds already in, existing in that teenage frequency where she’s both entirely present and slightly unreachable. He’ll say good morning. She’ll say it back without looking up. And he’ll remember a version of her that used to sprint across the living room in Hawaii and crash into his legs when he walked through the door. He misses those sprints.

There’s a version of this man ten years from now who’s standing in a different kitchen. Maybe it’s in Texas. Maybe somewhere else. His youngest is eleven and has decided she has authority over everything from which animals belong in captivity, to why oat milk is morally superior, and why her father needs to stop trying to use slang he learned from the internet. She’s funny in a way that catches him off guard. She’s sharp, quick, and has the kind of humor that makes him realize she’s been paying attention to things he didn’t know she was watching. His oldest is twenty-four. She calls on Sundays, sometimes. But not always. He doesn’t take it personally, but he also takes it personally. He doesn’t say so.

His wife is somewhere in the house, and the fact that she’s there…still there, after the ups and downs and the long conversations about whether any of this is working…is the thing he’s most proud of and least likely to say out loud. Not necessarily because he doesn’t feel it. But because some things are too big for words and he knows it, so he just makes her coffee too and sets it on her bed side table where she’ll find it.

There’s another version of the man. Further out. He’s sixty-something and the house is quieter than he expected. Not in the good way. In the way that makes him understand why his parents called so often. His youngest is somewhere building a life he can only see the edges of. His oldest has kids of her own, maybe, and he watches her with them and sees every mistake he made and every lesson that landed and he can’t tell which ones are which because they all turned into the same thing eventually…her, becoming herself, in spite of him and because of him in equal measure.

He’s still running. Slower, but still out there. The trails look different when your knees have opinions. The mornings look different when the house is quieter than it used to be. But he’s there. Feet on the ground. Still moving forward.

And he writes. He never stopped writing. That surprised him more than anything. The blog became a journal which became a record which became the thing his kids didn’t care about in their twenties and couldn’t stop reading in their thirties. The thing that made his youngest call one random Tuesday and say, “Dad, I just read the one about the walks we used to take in that little town in North Carolina. I don’t remember any of it. But I feel like I do now.”

That’s the line that breaks him. In the good way.

The coffee maker pops one last time. The yellow light reads 5:34.

There’s a man standing in a kitchen, and he’s been telling all of this to no one. Running through futures he can’t control and pasts he can’t change, narrating a life to an empty room like someone practicing a speech they’ll never give.

And then he realizes something.

The room was never empty. He was talking to the only person who needed to hear it. The one who keeps wondering if he’s doing enough. If he’s present enough. If the mornings and the walks and the writing and the miles will add up to something his daughters can hold onto when he’s not the one making the coffee anymore.

He picks up the mug and takes a sip. The little one calls out from her crib.

He’s not sure he’s getting it right. But he’s in it. And that’s the part he doesn’t want to miss.

A couple of weeks ago I was out on a long run in Umstead State Park when that question sort of popped into my head. Every now and then my mind wanders to weird things like this, where it makes me think a bit more in the abstract than maybe the usual reflections on life and where I’m headed or where I’ve been.

I stopped for a second and put the song I was listening to on repeat. It’s a little tactic I use when a deeper thought or idea hits me mid-run. The music becomes more of background noise, almost like white noise, and it lets my mind drift somewhere else. My legs are still moving, but my mind is sort of gone. Running becomes the container and the thought becomes the thing I’m actually doing. I know, that all probably sounds strange…

And so the thought of… What if time travel isn’t about people from the present going into the past, but about people from the past already being part of the future really got me thinking.

(I know how that sounds. But stick with me.)

We assume time travel means departure and return. Someone leaves the “now,” visits the “then,” maybe messes something up, then races back to fix it. It’s always framed as a round trip from a fixed address. But physics…and I should be clear I’m not an expert in this but have spent a fair bit of time researching these sort of things…doesn’t actually support that framing. Einstein showed us that space and time aren’t separate things. They’re woven together into spacetime. And what counts as “now” depends entirely on where you’re standing and how fast you’re moving. Two people can genuinely disagree on whether something has already happened or hasn’t yet.

There’s no universal clock. No shared “present moment” ticking forward for everyone.

Some physicists seem to take this further. They call it the block universe theory which states that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, like every frame of a movie already being laid out on a reel. We experience time as motion through it, but the whole structure is just, well, there. Already complete.

If that’s true, then “someone from the past” isn’t really from anywhere. They’re just located at a different point in the block. And in some sense, they’re already embedded in what we’d call the future too. Not traveling. Just.….connected across something we don’t have good language for yet.

I’ve thought about this more since that run. Mostly at night.

When we moved to Bridgeton, I picked up a habit of stargazing. Our little town has almost no light pollution and I like to stand in the backyard after Dakota and Felicia are asleep, look up, and just observe the sky full of stars. The kind of big sky that makes you feel small in the best way. Living in big cities never gave me this type of mystery to observe.

And it’s across these last couple of years that I’ve learned something about looking at stars, which I think links back to this thought. You’re not seeing stars as they are. You’re seeing them as they were. The light hitting your eyes left those stars millions of years ago. Nearly all of it started traveling before humans even existed on this planet. When you look up, you’re literally looking at the past.

And yet, there it is. Right now. In the present tense. The past arriving in real time, mixing with your current moment like it was always supposed to. It’s a strange realization that the light hitting your eyes isn't a memory but more of a physical arrival. It’s the mechanics of the universe delivering the past directly to your doorstep.

It makes me wonder how much of reality works this way…time folded and layered in ways we’re just not wired to perceive or understand. Even our own bodies are a map of this. We think of ourselves as new, but we are made of ancient carbon and recycled stardust. We are walking museums of the past, functioning in the present, planning for a future that…if the block universe is right…is already waiting for us to arrive.

Maybe this reframe has stayed with me because it removes the violence of time travel. The idea that you’re punching a hole in reality to go somewhere you don’t belong. Instead, it suggests the connections were always there. The loop was built into the architecture of consciousness. You’re not breaking anything. You’re just finally seeing what was already true to begin with.

It also makes me think about memory differently. And intuition. And those moments where something feels familiar before it happens…not in a mystical sort of way, but in a way that makes you wonder if consciousness is just a narrow flashlight moving through a structure that doesn’t care about our preferred direction.

What if memory and foresight are both just...a signal bleeding across something larger than we can perceive?

I finished that run without any answers. I’ve stood in my backyard a dozen nights since, still without them. Not having the answers doesn’t change how I live tomorrow. I’ll still make my morning coffee, do a little Me Time, show up for the work in front of me, try to stay present. But being present feels different when you consider that the present might not be the only place you are.

But okay…..that was a bit more than I thought I'd get into with this one. I didn't set out to rewrite the laws of physics! Just figured it was something worth writing down and sharing out with a few more people.

I’m learning sometimes that's all it needs to be.

I’m standing in a model home in a suburb north of Austin, and my mind has gone somewhere else entirely. That thing that happens when your body stays in the conversation but the rest of you drifts off, chasing a thread you didn’t know you were holding.

She’s asking about drainage grades now. Or maybe it’s HOA fees. I should be paying attention. This matters. But I’m stuck on something I can’t quite name yet.

Why does this feel so important?

It’s just a house. Just dirt and a floor plan and decisions about where the windows go. People do this every day. It shouldn’t feel like it means something bigger than that.

But it does. And I’m standing here trying to figure out why.

There’s a version of life where things just happen to you.

You end up in a city because that’s where the job was. You stay because leaving is often complicated. You look up one day and realize you never really chose any of it. It just sort of accumulated around you, decision by decision, until it became, well, your life.

I lived that way for a long time. Following the current instead of steering the ship. Saying yes to whatever showed up because it was easier than asking what I actually wanted.

And it worked, mostly. I’ve built a successful career. I’ve had good years. But there has always been this low hum underneath everything. This sense that I was living inside something that wasn’t quite mine.

I think that’s why the house matters.

Not the house itself. But what it represents. The chance to choose first. To start with nothing and build exactly what fits.

I guess I’ve never fully trusted the things I inherited.

That sounds dramatic, but I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that somewhere along the line I learned that the only things I can really count on are the ones I built myself.

The job I walked into that was already broken? I had to take it apart and rebuild it before it ever felt like mine. The city I landed in because the opportunity was there? I spent years adjusting to it instead of asking if it was right. The version of myself I was handed by my twenties? I had to tear that down too. Piece by piece. Rebuild it all from what was left.

Maybe that’s why new construction makes so much sense to me right now. No previous owner’s decisions hiding in the walls. No shortcuts I’ll discover later. No wondering why they did it that way or wishing they hadn’t.

You start with dirt and a plan. And every choice from there is yours.

The sales rep is talking about timelines now. Six months to completion. Something about supply chain delays and permit windows. Felicia is nodding, doing the math in her head. She’s good at this part. The details. The logistics.

I’m still somewhere else.

I’m thinking about Bridgeton. The small town in North Carolina we’ve been living in while she finishes her time in the Navy. Four hundred people. A post office. A gas station. The kind of place where everything is always quiet. Too quiet.

We’ve been there a few years now. It’s fine. I don’t necessarily have anything bad to say about it.

But it never felt like our place. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I needed to live somewhere that didn’t fit to finally understand what does.

I like being around builders. People with ideas. People trying to make something better than what they found. That energy does something for me I didn’t fully understand until I was living without it. It keeps you honest. Makes it harder to drift.

Bridgeton was clarifying in that way. It taught us what we want by showing us what we don’t.

I’m still standing in this model home. Felicia has moved on to questions about upgrades. The countertops. The flooring. The difference between the standard package and the premium one.

And I’m thinking about Dakota.

She’s one. She won’t remember Bridgeton. Won’t remember this tiny little farmhouse we’ve been living in, or the long drives to the grocery store, or the way the town goes dark early and stays that way. Wherever we land will be her first real memory of home.

The streets she rides her bike on. The backyard she plays in. The sky she looks up at when she’s trying to figure out the world.

That’s certainly not lost on me. Felicia and I talk about it all the time. We’re not just picking a house. We’re choosing the backdrop for her entire childhood.

I didn’t get this right the first time. When my oldest, Payton, was born, I was in a different season. Less present. Less intentional. I was there, but I wasn’t always there. More caught up in the current than steering anything.

I look back on those early years and I’m grateful for them. But I also know I missed things I can’t get back.

With Dakota, I have a second chance. Not to be perfect. I gave up on that a while ago. But to be deliberate and intentional. To pick up the pen and write the story instead of letting it write itself around me.

The sales rep is wrapping up now. Handing us a folder. Talking about next steps and deposit timelines. Felicia is already asking follow-up questions, already three moves ahead.

I’m finally coming back into the room.

And it hits me, standing there, that the most important part of building something isn’t really the thing itself.

It’s choosing where to put it.

The ground. The foundation. The city. The life you’re building it inside of. I think most people skip that part. They build wherever they land and just hope it works out.

But for us, we’re not going to skip that part.

I don’t know if Austin is the answer yet. We’re still sitting with it. Still figuring out what it means to leave everything familiar behind and start fresh somewhere we’ve only known for a week.

But something clicked there. I felt it. And now we just have to decide if we trust it.

And what I know for sure is that we’re not going to end up somewhere by accident. We’re going to choose. We’re going to look at a map and point to a spot and say that’s where we’re building.

A home. A life. A childhood for a little girl who deserves parents who were paying attention.

That’s the plan, anyway.

And for the first time in a long time, it actually feels like our plan.

Since moving to the area a few years ago, I’ve logged over a thousand miles here. And it’s on all of those loops that I’ve thought about so much. Work. Family. Who I’m becoming. Who I’m not. The repetition of those loops does something to my brain. Same trail, different thoughts. Or sometimes the same thoughts, finally making sense.

On a recent outing, a thought surfaced that I haven’t been able to fully get through. I’m not sure why it popped up. Maybe the cold air. Maybe the fact that I’m nine months out from attempting a hundred miles. Maybe turning forty this year. But the question landed and it stayed with me the whole run.

What would remain of who you are if you stopped choosing hard things?

I’ve been thinking about the scaffolding of my life lately. The structure I’ve built around who I am. The miles. The sobriety. The routines and rituals I’ve put in place that keep me pointed in the right direction.

My first instinct with that question was to deflect. To say something like “that’s not going to happen” and just move on. But the whole point of writing here is to sit in the discomfort long enough to learn something. So I stayed with it…

I think it’s because the hard things are loud and visible. They’re the parts of me that feel most earned.

When someone asks what I’ve been up to and I mention I’m training for an ultramarathon, there’s a reaction. When I tell people I haven’t had a drink in three years, there’s a reaction. These things announce themselves. They carry weight in a conversation.

But when I really look at what fills my days with meaning, it’s much quieter than all that.

Dakota doesn’t care that I’m training for Javelina. She just turned one. She doesn’t know what an ultramarathon is. What she knows is whether I’m on the floor playing with toys with her or not. Whether I’m present or checked out, staring down at my phone. Whether my energy says “I’m here” or “I’m somewhere else.”

Payton is fourteen. She knows exactly what a hundred miles means. She was there when I crossed the finish line at Burning River back in 2024, fifty miles through the Ohio heat. She saw what that looked like. The exhaustion. The emotion in the final miles. The whatever-that-was on my face when it was finally done. But the thing I keep coming back to is I don’t think what stuck with her was the finish line itself… At her age, she’s not just watching what I do. She’s almost certainly watching why I do it. She’s forming her own ideas about what discipline looks like, what presence looks like, what kind of person she wants to become. And whether she’d ever say it out loud or not, she’s taking notes.

Two daughters at completely different stages. One needs me on the floor. The other needs me to be someone worth paying attention to. Neither of them cares about my mile splits.

Felicia didn’t marry me because I can suffer well. She married me because of something else entirely. Something I honestly still don’t fully understand (I’m a lot to handle!), but I know it has nothing to do with streak counts or finish lines.

The people I love aren’t keeping score of my discipline.

So what would actually remain if I couldn’t run another step? If I woke up tomorrow and the hard things were off the table?

I think the curiosity would still be there. That restless need to understand why things work the way they do. Why people make the choices they make. Why some systems work so well and others fall apart.

The writing would still be there. I've been journaling privately for a few years now. It's how I process. How I work through the stuff that doesn't have anywhere else to go. This blog is newer, and I'm still figuring out what it wants to be. But the underlying habit isn't about building an audience or proving I have something important to say. It's simpler than that. Someday I'll be gone, and in the rare event that my kids or their kids ever want a deeper look into who I actually was, it'll be there. A regular guy just trying to make sense of things in real time.

And the part of me that wants to be a good father and husband... that would still be there. That’s not something I’m doing because it’s difficult. It’s something I’m doing because it’s the whole point.

And so I think where I keep getting stuck thinking through it all is that I’m not sure I’d have access to those softer things without the structure the hard things provide.

Quitting drinking wasn’t just a challenge I took on to prove something. It was the prerequisite for being present at all. Before I stopped drinking, I wasn’t on the floor with Dakota because Dakota didn’t exist yet. But more than that, I wasn’t really on the floor with anyone. I was there, but I wasn’t there if that makes sense. The absence of alcohol didn’t just remove something. It made room for everything else.

The training isn’t about proving I’m tough. It’s about creating the container that keeps everything else from spilling out. The early mornings and long runs give me a structure that holds the rest of my life in place. Without it, I’m not sure I’d be as patient, as grounded, or as available for the people who need me.

So maybe the hard things aren’t the point. But maybe they’re also not separate from the point either. Maybe they’re the trunk that the softer, quieter, more meaningful stuff grows on.

I’m going to turn forty later this year. And I think the question that found me out on that gravel loop is actually the question of this next chapter approaching.

Not “what hard thing should I do next” but more of a “what kind of person do I want to be when the hard things are eventually done?”

Because they will be done eventually. The body will eventually slow down (hopefully not anytime soon though!). The races will end. The Strava streaks will stop. I won’t be running these trails forever.

And what I want to remain is not just the memory of someone who could suffer. I want what remains to be the presence I brought to my days with my family. The way I made people around me feel. The words I left behind that maybe helped someone else sit in their own discomfort long enough to learn something.

I don’t know who I am without the hard things.

But I’m becoming more and more certain that the hard things aren’t the point.

One of the most powerful things I’ve learned over the years, especially when it comes to accomplishing a goal, is that if it’s not on the calendar it doesn’t exist. A small but mighty action that can either make or break you ever doing that thing you tell everyone you are going to do.

For me, that big date on my calendar this year is October 31st. The date I will run 100 miles through the Arizona desert. And yes, it scares the crap out of me just thinking about it.

The 100 mile distance is what first inspired me to start this weird, yet incredible fascination I have with endurance running. Watching the documentary Unbreakable one evening in Pacifica, I was in awe of these people who were running 100 miles through the California back country. It was that same night that I signed up for the Black Canyon 60km, my first ultra marathon.

Back then, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing with this sport. But, we never do when we begin something for the first time. I think that’s one of the cool parts of just getting started … you get to learn so much. All the stuff is new and exciting. Maybe a little challenging, but still full of lessons.

Finishing that first ultra in the Arizona desert and feeling both physical exhaustion, but also a euphoric feeling of self confidence that came with it, is something I’ll never forget. The magic feeling that finishing something really, really hard does to a person is hard to describe, but if you’re ever accomplished something that pushed you to your very core, you understand this feeling deeply. And, you only get that feeling the first time you accomplish that thing.

Over the years and through all the different races I’ve done, the 100 mile distance has always sat way out in the distance. It was something that maybe I’d do one day. Almost as if I was waiting on the right conditions or the right time to sign up. I’m sure many of us struggle with that feeling when it comes to starting a new goal.

That’s why the calendar becomes so important. It serves as the forcing function that determines whether or not you mean it. Whether or not you are willing to do the work that is required to accomplish that goal. For me personally, I’ve always found the days between signing up for something new and the day I accomplish it as the most meaningful parts of the goal.

Most people call this the journey, and there's a reason that word gets so much attention. It requires us to evolve…to leave behind the old version of ourselves in order to meet the demands of the goal ahead. It's the intentionality behind how we live during that stretch of time. And that tends to stay with us long after we cross the finish line.

In the months ahead, I will document a bit of the training and my approach to getting ready for this, to include some of the micro dates on the calendar that will be important to the process. But most of all, as a record for what it takes to put myself into the best position possible to achieve the outcome of traversing 100 miles in the hot and dry Arizona desert.

Now that I have the date locked in on my calendar and the contract with myself is signed, it’s time to get to work.

December 30, 2022. I had just gotten home from the Notre Dame vs. South Carolina bowl game in my hometown of Jacksonville, FL. The effects of a day spent drinking were catching up fast. Shortly after, I found myself hugging the toilet for hours.

It was in that exact moment…head down, body absolutely wrecked…that I knew it was over. Alcohol had run its course for me personally. I’d reached my I’ve had it moment.

The truth about that time in my life is that I’d known I needed to quit for a while. Not the casual “I should probably cut back” kind of knowing. But more of the kind that had been whispering for months and finally got loud enough that I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it. And I think that’s one of the key ingredients to actually making a change…awareness. You have to see it clearly before you can do anything about it. But awareness alone isn’t enough. The other ingredient, the harder one, is discipline and consistency. Knowing you need to change and actually changing are two very different things.

So I stopped. Cold turkey as they say. And as I ring in another year of living without booze, I wanted to share some of what this decision has taught me. Partly for anyone circling a similar choice, but mostly as a way to memorialize what I know to be one of the most profound journeys I’ve taken as a man.

Most of my 20s and early 30s were spent using alcohol the way a lot of us do…as a regulator. A way to soften the edges of things I didn’t want to feel. The traumas, the guilt, the general low-grade unhappiness that I couldn’t quite name. Alcohol was there for all of it. It was reliable.

That’s the thing about numbing. It works. Until it doesn’t. Until you realize you’ve built an entire life around avoiding the very emotions that are trying to tell you something. Coming to grips with that…especially early on…was the hardest part for me. I had to face the fact that I’d been running from myself for years, and booze had been my preferred vehicle.

Three years later, I’m still surprised by what’s changed.

Self care actually means self care now. For someone who spends hours and hours each week training for ultramarathons, it never made sense that I’d turn around and pour alcohol into my body. From a practical standpoint, it’s about as counterintuitive as it gets if your goal is peak athletic performance. But there I was, day after day, doing exactly that. It wasn’t until I stopped that I realized just how significant an impact alcohol has on recovery. I wasn’t just training harder without booze, I was finally letting my body heal instead of making it work overtime to fight the poison I’d put inside it.

Life is hard. It’s harder with alcohol. I’ve read countless articles over the last few years about how difficult things have gotten for people financially. The cost of living is up, and the dollar isn’t stretching like it used to. But for me? My cost of living went down…significantly. And a lot of that came from stepping out of the alcohol ecosystem entirely. When I go out to eat now, I don’t add a few drinks to the bill. At the grocery store, I’m not grabbing a bottle of wine and some beer for the week. My weekends aren’t spent parked at a brewery waiting for the latest collab release. That ecosystem was expensive in ways I didn’t fully see until I left it.

I’m in control. The thing I’ve learned about alcohol over this time is what it actually does to your brain…how it suppresses the decision-making parts and leaves you vulnerable. You’ve probably seen the random drunk person at the bar stumbling or slurring words. Maybe you’ve even been that person. I know I have. That version of me wasn’t fully coherent to the world around him. He’d lost control. And going back to a place where that could happen again? I’ve just outgrown it. The older I get, the more I want to be fully present in my own life.

No headaches. Seriously. In three years, I haven’t had a single one. Every morning I wake up with a clear head, ready to operate at my best. I’m no doctor, but I imagine it has to do with swapping out a dehydrating option for water before bed. My brain actually gets to rest now instead of going to war with whatever I drank a few hours before. Better hydration, better sleep, no more headaches. Simple math I wish I’d done sooner.

Here’s what I’d tell someone who’s been circling this decision the way I did for that last year: Take the leap.

I kept telling myself this was something other people do. Not me…not the guy whose identity was wrapped up in weekend breweries drinking 8% IPAs. Me, give that up? Nah.

But what I’ve found to be true about this life is that the people willing to take risks often end up ahead of those who play it safe. Even if it doesn’t work out the way you envisioned, you still walk away with something…a better story, a clearer head, a version of yourself you didn’t know was waiting. Taking the leap and facing the uncomfortable part of change is a lesson I wish more people would lean into. The discomfort is temporary. What you find on the other side usually isn’t.

Three years in, I’ve found other outlets for the emotions I used to drink away. This blog is one of them. Running is another. The stuff I used to avoid? I face it now. Not perfectly, but more directly.

I’ve got some regrets from those years. A few “what ifs” I’ll probably always carry. But I also know that path led me to a moment where I had to decide. A moment that I think we all only get a handful of throughout our lives…to keep going and face the health consequences, the relationship strain, the slow erosion of potential…or be brave enough to fight back and face the uncomfortable part of changing.

I’m glad I chose the latter.

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post. And if I’m being honest, I’m not even quite sure what I want to write about with this one. A lot has been going on the last few months and the idea of taking the time to sit down and write has been something that has not surfaced a lot in my weeks. But I also recognize it’s something that I’ve found a lot of enjoyment in over the last few years … Having a space to spell out the noise that rattles around in my head.

So, what’s new? Well, if I think back to the last post, I had just taken a wrong turn at Grindstone… And in hindsight, that took a pretty big toll on me mentally. The result of putting so much of your effort into something to only come up short. It’s hard to explain in words, but I’m sure this isn’t something uniquely me … The feeling of not meeting the expectation we put on ourselves. It was a humbling experience for me and really reinforced the importance of detail in the pursuit of my goals. Paying attention to the small things.

Shortly after Grindstone, Felicia, Dakota and I went out to San Francisco for a week. The trip was a week after my birthday and a close friend was getting married, so we decided to make it a full week trip. We stayed in Pacifica, right along the pier. For Felicia and me, this was a really special little week as we got to relive a bit of our favorite memories there, this time with Dakota. Watching her take in the ocean. Walking the streets that meant something to us before she was born.

Dakota turned 1 last month and we celebrated with a Wild West theme. Felicia’s family came in town and we also had some local friends join us. For me, this past year with her has been emotional. It’s a period of time I missed when Payton was younger … being deployed to Afghanistan for her first 6 months made this second time around really special for me. Working from home allowed me the ability to see her in between meetings, to eat lunch together, and just see her smile.

But outside of that, most of my days the last few months have been, well, just life. Quiet mornings with coffee before anyone else is awake. The usual work and family rhythm. Nothing that makes for a great story, but all of it adding up to something that feels pretty good when I stop long enough to notice.

Looking ahead to this next year, I’m aiming for it to be a big one personally. I turn 40 next October and I’ve got some fun projects I’m planning out. Some big endurance stuff that’s going to challenge me in ways I haven’t been challenged before. I’m not ready to get into the details yet, but I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.

For now though, that’s the update. Nothing super profound but hopefully enough to kick me back into gear with some consistent thoughts here 😎

Imagine studying for months for an exam. On test day, every answer feels effortless. You walk out of the room with a big smile knowing you nailed it. A few days later you get the news … it didn’t count. You forgot to put your name on the paper.

That’s sort of how my 2025 Grindstone went.

The alarm on race morning went off at 3:50am. In the dark hotel room, I quietly slipped into my Janji tights, ate a bowl of rice with some soy sauce, and drank some electrolytes while Felicia and Dakota did their best to keep sleeping. My parents were in town for this race and so my Dad picked me up a little before 5 and we drove through the dark and rolling country backroads to the start line.

I remember having a slight smile as I walked into the starting chute. I felt loose. Confident. Calm. As they played the National Anthem, I replayed all the hours I’d spent over the last few months getting to this point. I felt a sense of gratitude for arriving healthy and with the fitness needed to have a really great day.

The first handful of miles were smooth out of the campgrounds, through rolling country roads, then up into the mountains located just outside of Mt. Solon. At Wolf Ridge and then the Sand Spring aid stations, I refilled bottles and kept moving. I felt incredible and by mile 21, I add settled into a great rhythm. My legs felt strong. My fueling plan was dialed and working as planned. I was somewhere in the top 20.

I couldn’t have asked for a better start to the day.

Leaving the Sand Spring aid station at mile 21, I followed the white course markings down a long gravel service road and onto some single track. My watch said I was on pace and that the next aid station was at mile 25 … where I’d see my family for the first time. The GPX file on the watch face showed I was on course as I hit some rolling hills. Somewhere along this single track I had a couple of the 50km leaders pass me in almost the same place they had the year before.

But then the miles started ticking by. I hit twenty-five and was now out of water and gels. Then mile twenty-six... where is the aid station? Twenty-seven…. Finally, I saw tents up ahead and felt some relief as my crew would be waiting.

Only… it wasn’t the North River Gap aid station like I was expecting... It was Lick Run #2. The mile 60 aid station!

When one of the volunteers said to me “You’re at the wrong aid station”, my stomach sank... I immediately knew what this meant and it was the type of mistake that completely wrecks your day. I’d need to backtrack to get back on course. However, this wasn’t me going a mile out of the way. I’d need to backtrack another 7 miles, putting me at a 15 mile roundtrip wrong turn.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been following the markers all morning. Yet here I was, miles off track. What the hell happened?! Where did I make a wrong turn?! Nothing was making any sense to me.

I turned and pushed back toward the ridge as anger and disbelief filled my mind. Months of preparation, all slipping through my hands because of one missed detail. A lapse in focus.

After backtracking for close to 90 minutes, I hit the gravel road where I should’ve gone straight. Earlier when I made that turn, I was in no-mans land on this long stretch of gravel road … no runners in sight up ahead and a gap of roughly 60 seconds behind me. Now, where the gravel road and single track meet there were volunteers, signs, and cars were in place … none of which had been there hours earlier when I first came through. That was the mistake. That was where it all unraveled.

Adding to the confusion was that my watch GPX file showed I was on course, because technically I was. Later in the race, runners make their way back through that part of the course as they approach the final miles of the race. The view I had on my watch wasn’t the navigation specific view because I didn’t think I needed it… the course flags were well spaced and visible.

By the time I stumbled into North River Gap at mile 25, I had 40 miles in my legs but only 25 that officially counted. I was wrecked. I had about ten minutes until the cutoff, and nothing left to give. I tried to push back out, but the tank was empty.

My race was over.

This sport is hard, especially when you approach a race wanting to get the most out of yourself like I did at Grindstone. To come into the race with great fitness and with a nutrition plan that had been put to the test in some of the most rigorous conditions over the months leading in, only to come up short due to a wrong turn is a really tough pill to swallow.

I’m ultimately proud of the way I approached the process of training for Grindstone, and even for the way I battled through the realization of the wrong turn on race day.

In the weeks since I’ve laid pretty low. Doing my best to recharge the batteries a bit. Spending more time at home with family.

It’s been a good change of pace.

I'm sitting at mile 40, staring down at my untouched gel packet, my body completely drained of energy. The aid station volunteers are asking if I need anything, but I already know the answer. I'm done. Not just with this race but maybe with all of this.

The folding chair feels too comfortable, too much like surrender. My family is probably wondering why I'm not moving forward on the tracker. But moving forward requires something I don't have anymore. Not just fuel in my system, but fuel in my spirit. The joy that used to pull me through these dark moments has quietly slipped away, leaving me with nothing but the mechanical act of putting one foot in front of the other until my body finally says no.

That was September 2024. That was the last version of myself I want to be.

This Saturday, I'll return to that same starting line. But everything … and I mean everything … has evolved.

The thing about passion is that you don't realize it's fading until it's nearly gone. For months leading up to last year's Grindstone, I was going through the motions. Training felt obligatory. Race day felt like something to endure rather than embrace. I showed up with hesitation and doubt, carrying the weight of half-caring into 65 miles of Virginia mountains.

When I dropped at mile 40, I felt oddly at peace. Riding back to the start line in the support vehicle, I wasn't angry or disappointed. I was relieved. I told my family afterward that this might be the end for me and ultra distances. That I'd keep running, but differently … more casually, without the drive to show up fully. Because if you can't show up fully, what's the point?

For the next couple of months, that's exactly what I did. Easy running with no clear goal. Just trying to keep some version of the flame alive, even if it was barely flickering.

Then Dakota arrived in November, and life rewrote itself overnight.

Those sacred sunrise runs I’d grown accustomed to … the ones that used to fuel my entire day … became 4:30pm evening miles after Felicia got home from work. My watch transformed from a performance tool tracking splits and heart rate zones into something more basic… a clock measuring how much time I was away from home. Running didn't disappear, but it got rearranged, repositioned, and redefined in my life.

The first half of this year was all about routine and repetition. Base building without the pressure of a specific goal. Spring and early summer filled with simple loops close to home … 50-60 miles a week of just showing up, throwing on my shoes, and logging time on my feet. No race pressure. No grand ambitions. Just the quiet work of keeping that flame from going out completely.

Those runs became something different than they'd ever been before. Not training runs, exactly, but thinking runs. Processing runs. The kind where you're not worried about pace or effort, where your mind has permission to wander and work through whatever needs working through. They became my version of paying myself first … Me Time … that protected hour where I could check in with myself and remember who I was underneath all the other roles I was playing.

Late June, sitting on my couch watching Western States 100, I felt something shifting. Not excitement, exactly, but something closer to regret. Not immediate regret, but the deeper kind … the thought of how giving up on this dream of running Western States might feel ten or twenty years from now. The realization that I was slowly allowing something important to die, and once a flame goes out, it's so much harder to get it back.

Western States is the race that pulled me into ultra running in the first place. It's the one that still represents everything I love about this sport … the challenge, the community, the way it strips you down to your most essential self. But to even have a chance at one day lining up at Western States, you need a qualifying race for the lottery. Grindstone is that race for me.

That night I went online and signed up. Part of it was proximity … 4 hours away in Virginia's Shenandoah Mountains. Part of it was ego … wanting another shot at the race that had nearly sent me into ultra retirement. But mostly, it was about evolution. About not letting the story end on a note I couldn't live with.

This training block has been unlike any other I've done. Not just in the miles or the workouts, but in how I've approached the entire process. It's been about confronting the thing that's limited me for years… the fact that I never learned how to properly fuel my body for these efforts.

I'm a heavy sweater. In mild conditions, I lose 40-47 ounces of fluid and 1,700-2,000mg of sodium per hour. But for years, I was only replacing about 1,200mg of that sodium. July and August brought brutal conditions … 95-degree days with 80% humidity pushed me to 70 ounces of water, 2,500mg sodium, and 100g carbs per hour.

My entire fueling strategy evolved. Gone were the high-sodium sports drinks that never quite did the job. In came highly concentrated salt tablets with water and separate carb gels … a system that trained my gut to process far more than most athletes ever attempt. Several 4+ hour runs in that brutal heat left me feeling stronger than I'd ever felt, recovering faster than seemed possible.

For the first time in years, I didn't experience the nausea that had become normal during long efforts. This wasn't just a training breakthrough but rather a complete rewriting of what I thought my body was capable of. That mile 40 bonk last year? That wasn't me hitting my genetic ceiling like I’d thought. That was the predictable result of chronic under fueling. A critical lesson that I needed to realize in order to evolve as an endurance athlete.

The irony isn't lost on me. All those years of thinking I wasn't built for ultra distances, when really I just hadn't learned how to take care of myself during them.

This return to Grindstone isn't just about redemption or proving something to myself. It's about showing up as a completely different runner than I was twelve months ago. Not just physically … though the proper fueling has been a game-changer … but mentally and emotionally.

Last year, I approached the race with the weight of obligation. This year, I'm approaching it with curiosity. What happens when you show up fully prepared instead of hoping to survive? What's possible when you've done the work not just in training, but in understanding why the work matters?

The goal this Saturday is simple: have fun surrounded by fellow ultra runners in those beautiful Shenandoah Mountains. No hard time target, just finish … ideally before sunset, roughly 12 hours for 65 miles and 11,000+ feet of climbing. But more than that, it's about honoring what this sport has given me over the years. The way it's taught me that most limitations are self-imposed. The way it's shown me that the middle of hard things … not the beginning or the end … is where you meet who you really are.

Here's what I've learned about passion over this past year… it doesn't die all at once. It fades gradually, so gradually you convince yourself it's still there when really you're just going through the motions. But it can also return, sometimes stronger than before, if you're willing to do the work of understanding what made it fade in the first place.

My relationship with ultra running has evolved from obligation to curiosity, from something I had to do to something I get to do. Dakota's arrival didn't end that relationship … it forced me to refine it, made it more intentional, more precious. Those evening runs after work became sacred in a way the sunrise runs never were, because they were harder to protect, more deliberately chosen.

The training, the fueling breakthroughs, the long runs in brutal heat … all of that was just preparation for something bigger. The chance to show up as the fullest version of myself, to honor both the sport and my own evolution as a human.

Saturday isn't just about crossing a finish line or earning a lottery ticket for Western States. It's about proving that second chances are real, that evolution is possible, that the story isn't over when you think it is.

Last year I walked away with doubt. This year, I line up with fire, purpose, and the quiet confidence that comes from doing the work when no one’s watching.

Time to see where this evolution takes me.

See you on the other side. 😎

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

It was 2:00am this past Saturday morning, and on the calendar this particular day was a 4 hour long run in Umstead, a state park in Raleigh, NC. I rolled out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and then turned on the coffee machine. A single light on, just enough to navigate the early morning hours while also not needing to squint my eyes from the harshness of the lights which reminded me why I was up so early to begin with.

Ah, that first taste of coffee in the morning … it is something that as I've gotten older is a must have before the day gets going. If you enjoy coffee like me, you are probably nodding your head in agreement. As I sat down on the couch and took those first few sips I started thinking about the Middle Part … the place in the journey where our dreams often die.

See, one of the things I've learned over the years in training for ultra marathons in some of the most remote and beautiful locations around the world, is that the middle part is the most important of the process. It's the part in between the motivation of getting started and the accomplishing of your goal. It's where the work really happens, often alone. As I get deeper into the training block for my upcoming race at the Grindstone 100km next month, I find myself firmly in this part of the journey.

Before leaving the house I do a double check I have everything I need, toss it in the back of the car, turn on some LoFi beats, and slowly exit the driveway. The trip out to Umstead is a 2 hour straight shot West from my front door. The drive is fairly boring, passing through the heart of North Carolina's farming community. On this particular drive, however, the road would be silent … dark, tunneled vision driving.

The stillness of this drive gave my mind permission to go deeper into what I'd been wrestling with all week … this idea of the Middle Part. That stretch of the journey where the truth gets exposed. The beginning of any new goal is intoxicating, often fueled by the rush of excitement and possibility. The finish line is magnetic, pulling us forward with the promise of pride and the relief of achieving the goal. But the middle doesn't give you either. The middle is quiet. It's the early morning alarms when no one is awake clapping for you, the solo grind when no one even knows you're working, the stretch where results aren't visible yet and quitting feels reasonable.

And I think that's exactly why it matters the most in the journey. The middle is where we meet ourselves. Not the version of you that signed up when it sounded exciting, not the version daydreaming about the finish line, but the raw, unfiltered you … the one who has to decide if you meant it when you said you wanted this.

This is where resilience is built, where discipline replaces motivation, and where you learn the difference between being interested in a goal and being fully committed to it. The middle is what separates those who only dream from those who finish. It's not just the hardest part. It's the most sacred part of the journey. Because if you can survive the middle, you'll never question if you deserved the finish.

As those thoughts flowed through my now caffeinated mind, the first signs of life emerged as a car approached in the opposite lane. And just like that I was snapped out of the thought, refocusing on the run I had coming up in another hour.

This year has looked a lot different for me as far as my racing goes. Last November when Dakota was born, I took a break from racing in order to be closer to home for her first months. During that time, I've continued to run, just without a clear goal race to train more intensely for.

That all changed this past June as the lead up to the Western States 100 got under way … my social media filled with stories and posts from runners who would be toeing the line at the world's oldest ultra marathon. It is this race, and the documentary UNBREAKABLE: The Western States 100, that got me into the sport back in early 2020. It's without a doubt the #1 race on my ultra bucket list, as well as tens of thousands of other runners around the world, as made evident each December when the lottery results are announced.

The WSER uses a lottery system that provides roughly 360 runners each year an opportunity to race 100 miles from Olympic Valley, just outside of Lake Tahoe, down to Auburn, CA. It is this race that continues to pull me forward in the sport each year because in order to get into the lottery, a runner must first complete another race that is a qualifier. These are typically 100 mile or 100km distances around the world.

That being said, the lottery is very competitive. Each qualifying race you complete, you receive a lottery entry. Each year you complete another qualifier and your tickets double in the lottery, until you are selected. This process can take up to 10 years before you are selected. I'm in year 3 of pursuing this. The Grindstone 100km is a WSER qualifying race, and is the reason I am training for it. Hopefully that all made sense!

As I pull into the dark parking lot just before 5:00am, I notice that no one else is here … the quietness briefly interrupted to the sound of some crickets off in the distance. I do some activation drills, load up 4 hours worth of Precision Fuel & Hydration gels and electrolyte tablets, turn on my headlamp and head off into the darkness.

Running at night with a headlamp is very isolating. Your field of view is narrowed to about 2ft to the left and right, and about 10ft out in front. The rest of your world is darkness, a lonely place that was tough for me to get used to in my earlier days of training for ultras. I remember some of those runs in Pacifica going up Montara … I used to think every predator would want to eat me, "what a dummy for making myself so visible with that headlamp in a sea of black."

As the years have gone on, I've replaced those worries with thoughts about life. And on this run, those thoughts were back at the Middle Part. I couldn't get it out of my head, but at this point I started to think more about the brutal honesty of what it actually takes to get through it.

The Middle Part isn't just about showing up … it's about accepting a hard truth that most people refuse to face.

In life, no one will ever truly care about your desire to succeed. No one cares how much time and work you put into becoming great … it's all irrelevant.

At the end of the day what people see is a winner and a loser. You either accomplished your goal, or you simply did not.

And everything leading up to that … the heart, the work ethic, the dedication, it all remains solely with you. It's a byproduct of the contract you signed with yourself. To go through hell. To fight in the trenches even when you are seeing no immediate validation. Which will happen. If success came with the snap of a finger, everyone would be running 4 minute miles and driving Ferrari's. But that's not the way the world works.

When you make the decision to be different. To give up temporary comfort for something greater, you've committed to the ride of your life. And when the time comes, and you cross the finish line first, or you realize success in whatever capacity, you can smile at the world as they look at you like some miracle … completely oblivious to the price you paid for this. But you know. And there is no greater gratification than that.

It's been said that it takes ten thousand hours to perfect your craft. Ten thousand hours of walking away from immediate satisfaction to enter this sentence of solitude and dedication. It's where you weed out mediocrity. It's where you carve out your place in history. And if you are waiting for someone to come along and just make that happen for you, it'll be a long wait my friend. Because it's your flame, and if you don't keep it lit, it will die. And a flame can be a fragile thing. Weakness, doubt, uncertainty, failures, they all want to put it out. And if you are not bigger than your body, they will.

Trust me, you'll fail. Time and time again. It may not be until your 100th attempt that you even begin to see success. But if you don't have the foresight, and that persistence to see past the bumps in the road, you will never know.

That relentlessness … it's how you separate yourself from the people who feel sorry for themselves and watch the world from their bedroom window. But that's not what you signed up for. Nothing good falls into your hands, it's why every day is so important.

Think of every hour as a piece of paper. By itself, very little weight, very little significance. But committing to the grind, every day causes each piece to stack up and before you know it, you've transformed yourself and your ability. And that's what people don't see. That stack being built, piece by piece.

What they see is the finish line as it's crossed one by one. They see 30 seconds. They didn't see ten thousand hours.

But you did.

It's why you hold your head high. It's why you smile to yourself when people talk about you "being born with talent".

It's these thoughts that I wrestled with over the course of those hours in Umstead. The awareness of the Middle Part has become critical to me achieving some of my biggest goals over the years.

The realization that you are in this stage of the journey is important if you are going to achieve what you set out to achieve. Of knowing that those 2:00am wake ups when it would be so much easier to just stay asleep, are what's needed to build the path required to get to the end of the journey.

With a little over a month until race day I'm as locked in on the goal as I've ever been … finishing the Grindstone 100km. This distance excites and terrifies me equally. I've struggled over the years of completing this distance without suffering greatly. I guess in some ways, I'm in the Middle Part of figuring out how to fix that.

But that's the truth about every big goal. The question isn't whether you'll hit the finish line … it's whether you'll keep showing up in the middle when no one's watching.

One month to go.

For the last eight years, I've been obsessed with time.

It didn't start with some dramatic life event or a brush with mortality … it started with a train ride.

In 2018, I was living on the edge of San Jose's Japantown, commuting 100 miles roundtrip to San Francisco and back every day. To avoid the Bay Area's legendary traffic and squeeze in some exercise, I chose to bike five miles to the train station, ride the train north for an hour with my bike in the rack, then pedal another five miles to the office. Three hours daily. Fifteen hours weekly. Over two years of my life, just getting from here to there. I'd claim a window seat and let my eyes drift over the Santa Cruz mountains, the soft rumble of tracks feeling almost meditative until the conductor interrupted to check for tickets.

Somewhere on those rides, I started feeding my mind differently. I'd read that the average American spends roughly 35 minutes in their car every day … commuting, errands, kid pickup … and if you spent those 35 minutes learning something that mattered to you, within a year you'd have the equivalent of a doctorate in that subject. It made perfect sense. I'd been listening to music my whole life and could recite every lyric to my favorite songs. I thought to myself, why not put that time to better use?

So I turned my Beats headphones away from music and toward podcasts like The School of Greatness and Impact Theory … podcasts that were focused on entrepreneurs, athletes, and thinkers talking about career, relationships, setbacks, and building a life worth living. Real conversations about the stuff that actually shapes how your days feel and helps you think outside of your own little bubble.

One episode I remember in particular featured John Maxwell, one of the world's most respected leadership coaches. He said something that really got my attention… "We are all a book with blank pages … and we each hold the pen." Meaning, we have the power to write our life story, not someone else.

That line has stuck with me over the years. At the time, I was filling my own pages with other people's agendas, timetables, and expectations … and I didn't want my life book to read that way. It felt like I was handing over the pen to everyone except the person who should be holding it … me. My story wasn't being written in my own voice.

I didn’t have a name for it yet, but those train rides planted a seed. I knew I needed a space in my day that was mine … a place to think, reflect, and refill my own tank. That seed would eventually grow into what I now call Me Time.

Now, I think it should be noted that this isn't a story about mortality … though I'll probably get to that at another time! This is more about how I redefined my relationship with time and built a habit that still shapes my life today.

Me Time is simple at its core: every day, we all get a fresh twenty-four hours. Society likes to convince us that most of those hours aren't ours, that we're too busy, that we have "no time." But that's just not true. What I've found to be true is that most of us are just terrible at managing the time we do have.

Yes, there are fixed obligations like dropping kids off at daycare, work hours, sleep. But the rest? We give it away far too easily to social media, mindless scrolling, and things that don't actually make us feel alive. And if you're reading this thinking, "Mike, I literally have no free time," I'd challenge you to pull up your calendar and prove it to yourself. In eight years of practicing Me Time, I've found space in every single person's day who has ever told me that.

It's a hard lesson I had to face too. For years, I used "no time" as an easy excuse that hid my own insecurities … my unwillingness to admit I wasn't really in charge of my life when I actually was, and instead just choosing to ignore the problem out of comfort. Confronting it would mean I might actually need to change something, and for most of my early adult years, that felt too bold and too risky.

Here's how I think about it now… Most of us understand financial budgets or at a minimum are aware of the concept of a budget. Most people do a budget backwards … they pay themselves last. We get paid, then pay our bills and hope something's left to save. Any great financial advisor will tell you to pay yourself first. The first ten to twenty percent of your paycheck goes straight into savings or investments, something that builds your future. Automate it so you never even see it. Then live on what's left.

Time works the same way. If you don't pay yourself first, your hours will always get eaten by something or someone else. Your attention … aka your time … is the most valuable commodity every company and social influencer is desperately trying to capture. They've built entire business models around stealing your time.

This idea around budgeting my time was crystallized when I discovered Ramit Sethi's Money Dial concept in I Will Teach You to Be Rich. His take is centered around spending more on things you love, while cutting back on things you don't. Hate shopping but love to travel? Spend more on trips and less on clothes. Simple math that honors what actually matters to you.

It was through this concept that I realized I could dial my hours the same way.

So in 2018, I decided to start treating my time like my money. Every day, I would pay myself first … a non-negotiable one-hour block to do whatever I wanted, as long as it filled my cup and was something I wanted to do. No guilt. No apology. No exceptions. Then the remaining twenty-three hours could go to work, errands, family, sleep, and everything else life demanded.

I started small, protecting that hour like it was sacred, experimenting with what filled me up versus what just killed time. Some days it was reading. Other days it was longer walks around the neighborhood. I was learning what my version of paying myself first actually looked like in practice.

Then COVID hit, and everything sort of shifted.

We'd just moved to Pacifica, a tiny beach town most people blow through on their way from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. Remote work suddenly eliminated my fifteen-hour weekly commute … those train rides that had started this whole journey were gone, replaced by masks and more than a dozen hours in my week. Getting those hours back felt like found money, and I wasn't going to waste them.

Every day, I'd walk the neighborhood for an hour, podcasts in my ears, ocean in view. Those walks turned into jogs, which became runs, which eventually led me to ultra trail running. Not through some grand training plan, but through Me Time … one protected hour that grew into something I never saw coming.

Over time, Me Time transformed how I live. Running became my space to process life's hardest questions. It was during Me Time where I wrestled with and eventually decided to quit alcohol. It's where I worked through how to repair my marriage, and pictured the kind of father I wanted to be. It became the space where I reflected on what I was already proud of instead of always chasing the next achievement. More recently, Me Time has expanded into writing … documenting the thoughts that rattle around in my head, giving them shape and purpose.

Here's what I want to leave you with… once you start treating your time like this, you also get better at saying no. No to things that drain you. No to commitments that don't matter. No to the idea that being busy is the same thing as being fulfilled. You start recognizing the difference between motion and progress, between filling hours and filling your life.

The ripple effect of this approach is real. When you protect time for yourself, you show up differently everywhere else. You're more present with your family because you're not silently resentful about never having space to breathe or do the things you love to do. You're sharper at work because you're not running on fumes. You make better decisions because you've given yourself room to think.

As you finish reading this I want you to take a look at your own calendar. Are you paying yourself first, or is society writing your pages for you? Can you carve out at least an hour a day for something that makes you feel lighter, stronger, or more alive? And if you can find one hour, what happens when you turn the dial up even more? What would your life look like if you stopped prioritizing everyone else and started to focus on filling your own cup first?

If you want an intentional life, you have to make intentional choices. Most people just drift through their days, reacting to whatever demands the loudest attention, wondering why they feel empty despite staying busy. They eventually arrive at the end of their life wondering why they didn’t do more of the things that make them feel alive, happy, fulfilled.

Me Time is how I write my story … one hour, one choice, one day at a time. And if those train rides taught me anything, it’s that if I’m not the one holding the pen, someone else will.

It’s been a year since Kona passed away. A whole year since I last felt her presence pressing against my leg as I stood at the kitchen counter, pouring coffee in the early morning silence.

For almost 12 years, our mornings started the same way. I’d shuffle half-asleep into the bathroom, splash some cold water on my face, and open the door to let her out. It was our routine. Simple and automatic. And yet, when she passed, that one part of the day … something so small .. was the first domino to fall.

Immediately, the mornings felt colder. The house a little too still.

I knew the day was approaching and suspected the grief would be hard, but I wasn’t prepared for the type of grief that came with losing Kona. She was my first true family dog. My first loss of a direct family member. Not in blood, but in bond. She was woven into everything. My career changes, my moves across the country, my divorce, marrying Felicia, my healing from alcohol addiction, my journey to becoming a man I could be proud of … She was there for all of it.

She knew me during the worst of it and still loved me. That’s the kind of loyalty only a dog can offer, and the kind of love that carves itself so deep into your spirit that when it’s gone, it doesn’t just hurt … it unravels something in you.

This is my attempt to bring the impact she made on my life to a wider audience … to put into writing how mans best friend defined my growth into the man, husband, father, and friend I’ve become.

It’s taken me days to get through this story … having to pause and wipe away the tears that form at nearly every sentence I type. But it’s an important one to share.

No one really tells you beforehand what happens at the end of a dog’s life. Had I known it would feel like my soul would be ripped out, and in its place a constant injection of incredible pain and grief, I might have never found Kona. Our paths crossed at what I later figured out was fate … it’s the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with.

“Saint Bernard Puppies”

I still remember seeing that ad on Craigslist back in 2012. It was a period in my life filled with emotional confusion on my part, and my inability to cope with it in a healthy way. I’d had dogs before this point but I’ve lost count of them all. It was as if I was a revolving door, taking in a dog or puppy for a few months before finding it a new home. I guess that was my immaturity in action, not quite ready for a commitment like that ... For a true family dog. Had you asked me back then I probably would have told you Kona wouldn’t make it off the island of Hawaii … almost guaranteed to meet a similar outcome that all the other Eyl dogs had.

Walking into the house where Kona was, it was a bit chaotic to say the least. At least 8 of her siblings immediately charged the door when I arrived, including what I can only describe as a bear like creature I would learn was the Dad. He had to be over 200 pounds easily, but he was very gentle, almost too much. As I was scratching his head, smiling at the puppies around my feet, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye … Kona.

At the time I picked her up, I don’t believe she had a name. My memory recalls them having their own collars with a unique color for identification. I’m not sure what color Kona’s was, but what did jump out to me in those first few moments of eye contact was the sense of calm she seemed to cast over the room. Unlike her siblings, Kona sat in the back of the room, her tail softly waging in excitement. As I got close, I met the Momma, who wasn’t quite as large as Dad, but was equally gentle and welcoming.

The traits I observed from both parents as well as Kona, helped me make the decision that Kona would fit into my home nicely. She was so calm, a stillness to her that in a lot of ways was needed at that point in my life, I just didn’t realize it yet. I would learn in the years that followed just how important the observations I made that day would be for the journey I needed to take.

The next 12 years were filled with moments … messy, hilarious, meaningful … that I’ve never forgotten. I call them The Kona Moments. I wrote a list of these out shortly after she passed, worried that I might forget all that we shared together. And over time, I plan to share some of those stories. Not just to remember her, but to relive the joy, the growth, and the way she quietly shaped me into who I am today.

In her final 18 months, Kona had slowed significantly. Losing her hearing was the first real sign of the aging creeping in, followed by the inability to stand up on her own, the Dr’s telling us it was due to severe arthritis … sticky socks, like the ones kids wear at the indoor trampoline parks, would need to be introduced to keep her from falling as she slowly, and very gingerly, walked around our home. Eating became an every other day occurrence, she preferring to just sleep instead of using the energy needed to stand up and go to her bowl.

It was a tough thing for me to witness in particular. Just a few years before we would run down our San Jose apartment hallway after our walks outside … her tail wagging, a playful little string of drool hanging from her mouth.

Later, in her final weeks, I would need to help carry her outside to go potty, her legs too fragile to climb the stairs or take more than a few steps before collapsing. The look in her eye as she starred up at me was heartbreaking … one that I could only believe meant she was tired, and ready for the Rainbow Bridge journey.

We’d spend a lot of time over those last few days outback in the yard, just the two of us. Me just holding her in what I inevitably knew was going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. The life talks, even if just one-sided, were coming to a close.

I wanted so badly for those moments to never end.

I remember every detail about August 8, 2024.

The way her panting sounded like an engine straining, the way her eyes searched the room, locking onto me and Felicia as if she already knew why we were there.

We were told the first injection would make her sleepy. The second would stop her heart. That’s how they explained it … soft, clinical, detached.

But there was nothing soft about it. My eyes had been filled with tears for hours leading up to it.

As the sedative took hold, I cradled her face, whispering the same reassurances I’d offered her a thousand times before. She slowly lowered her head, placing it on the floor in her usual spot. A familiar position in a moment that felt anything but.

And just like that, within a few minutes, she was gone.

No muscle twitches or spasms like they said might occur. Just a silent, aching stillness that filled the cold room and broke my heart.

I removed her brown leather collar for the last time, kissed the top of her head, and then stood up and walked out of the room. I was having a hard time even breathing in those immediate moments after, the flood of emotions so incredibly strong that I needed Felicia’s help to get back to the car. An empty car that had, just an hour earlier, been filled with the smell and pants of my Kona. It was the worst car ride of my life.

Coming home that first day without her I was in a state of shock … it had to be that. I felt numb and the house felt so empty.

She’d been the rhythm of my routines. The heartbeat of the home. Her absence was deafening. It didn’t matter how many times I reminded myself that she was at peace or that it was “the right thing” to do. Logic has no place in grief.

I didn’t think it was supposed to feel this disorienting, this heavy … but it did. Because she wasn’t just a dog. She was the thread that wove so many seasons of my life together.

The cross-country moves.
The late-night walks.
The strawberry snacks.
The sock surgeries.
The morning butt rubs.
The moments no one else saw.

There’s a difference between letting someone go and learning how to live without them. I’m still figuring that part out.

What would follow over the next 3 weeks were the loneliest days of my life. Felicia worked all day, and Dakota wasn’t born yet. The silence in the home would pierce my heart a million times an hour. The spots she used to lay in were now empty. Her food bowl no longer needing to be filled up. Her sticky socks lay on the floor, never to be filled again with her Frito smelling paws.

About a month later, I received a call that her ashes were ready for pickup. We elected to also have a cast of her paw print made, a symbol of sorts of the impact she had on our hearts. We placed her alongside other family members who have passed over the years, a special sort of space in our living room.

I’ve thought about when and where I might place those ashes down the road, a final resting place, but I’m not there yet. And honestly, I might never be ready.

Maybe it’s because of something I heard years ago and that’s been living in my head ever since: That we die three times.

First, when our body stops working.
Second, when we’re buried or cremated.
And third … when our name is spoken for the very last time.

That third one … that’s the one that gets me.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t let go fully. Maybe that’s why I still find comfort in seeing her name etched on the urn, her paw print cast in clay, her sticky socks tucked in a corner like she might still need them. Her food bowl still sitting in the same place.

Because some part of me believes that as long as I keep telling her stories, well, she hasn’t really finished her journey yet.

And maybe when the time does come … when I finally feel ready to lay her to rest … it won’t feel like letting go. It’ll feel like passing the stories forward, so she can keep living in the hearts of others too.

One year later, I’m doing better. But I still look for her.

In the quiet moments, in the corner of the room where the sunlight hits just right, I sometimes still expect to see her curled up, snoring away. Vacuuming our home I still find her hairballs, a subtle reminder that she’s still with us in spirit.

And maybe that’s the thing about grief. It doesn’t really end. It just finds new corners to live in. Softer ones. Less jagged.

But I’ll say this … Kona made me a better human. She guided me from being a clumsy, stubborn boy trying to figure out who he was, and into the man I have become. She was a witness to so many of my ups and downs.

In the months ahead, I plan to continue to share more of The Kona Moments. I hope those future entries feel lighter than this one … because they’re meant to. They’re snapshots of who she was … playful, weird, wise, loyal. And they’re stories about who I became because of her. Not just a better dog owner … but a better man, husband, father, and friend. If this piece is the goodbye, then The Kona Moments are all the beautiful hellos that came before it.

And while I’ll always miss her, I also know that the best way to honor her isn’t to live in sorrow … but to carry forward the quiet lessons she taught me … about loyalty, presence, joy, and unconditional love.

So that’s what I plan to do. I’ll keep writing about her. I’ll keep remembering. And piece by piece, through those short stories, I hope to show you the dog who helped me become everything I am.

I love you, Kona.
I always will.

This morning on our walk, Dakota pointed at a bird like it was the first one she'd ever seen. I smiled and pointed too. For a few minutes, we just walked like that … slowing down, noticing everything that was moving or making noise. And somewhere between her giggles, I thought to myself that these are the good ol' days.

We usually head out before 8:00am, before the thick southern heat turns our shirts into a soaked mess. If you’ve spent any time in the South during the summer, you know the feeling.

Our little country town has no street lights. It’s the kind of place where people still walk down the middle of Main Street and wave. We pass by a Baptist or Southern Methodist church every other block, and sometimes hear our cranky neighbors yelling at each other across the yard. Lately, Dakota's been pointing at everything … squirrels, birds, the neighbor's tiny Chihuahua whose bark is way too big for its body … and I find myself smiling, trying to make sense of what she sees through her eyes.

These moments are what I missed with Payton. I was deployed to Afghanistan during her first year and didn't get back until she was over 6 months old. This time around, I get to see the smiles, the firsts, the chaos, the giggles. I get to watch Dakota discover that mashed bananas and avocados are apparently the funniest thing in the world, and I get to play with the same toy 47 times in a row because that's what elevates her little, perfect dimples.

I can't help but think these are the good ol' days. The days you don't typically realize you were in until later.

But I think I'm realizing it now, while I'm in them. The slowness of my life the last 9 months is giving me that gift, and it makes this moment in my journey feel sacred in a way I wasn't expecting.

Somewhere between the walks and the mashed fruit, I started writing more. Mostly reflecting, trying my best to capture the moments and thoughts I don't want to lose ... to create a record of my life for my kids. What started as private pages in my leather-bound journal is slowly morphing into something a bit more public … my own corner of the internet where I can process life as it's happening. To share more often with my family and friends of what I'm up to as I explore the world of being a new Dad all over again.

The shift from writing for myself to writing for others feels vulnerable in a way that has surprised me. But maybe that's part of the slowing down and paying attention more … being willing to let people see the messiness of figuring things out.

For years, I was constantly chasing the next promotion, the next big move, the next proof that I was heading somewhere important. Now I find myself saying no to opportunities that would have excited me a few years ago, not because they're bad, but because they don't fit the intentionality of the season I find myself in. The hustle has simply shifted. It's less about proving, and more about protecting. Protecting my energy for those morning walks. My attention for Dakota's bedtime routine. My evenings for conversations with Felicia that don't revolve around whose turn it is to change Dakota's "stinky binky".

That doesn't mean I'm not pursuing individual goals and passions, or pushing myself to achieve meaningful results in those areas, but rather that I'm more selective of what qualifies ... and I'm more than okay with that.

I know this isn't the kind of exciting stuff that gets giant applauses, but it's everything to me.

And so I think what I'm learning is to embrace the chapter I’m in, whether or not it feels like the most important one, or the most ideal. To allow myself to feel the moment I’m in, before it becomes another memory. Maybe that’s the real challenge of this life … to find that balance in our days, where the world slows and you feel more of the emotions. To sit with it, even if that is only just a few moments.

I think that's what I'm most proud of these days. Being a dad, a husband, a man in the messy middle of it all, and still showing up with a smile on my face. Not perfectly, but consistently. And maybe that's what the good ol' days really are all about … not the big moments but the ordinary daily ones we're actually living.

I’m just glad I’m paying attention during this part of the story.

Last week, I was on a long run in Atlantic Beach, training for the Grindstone 100km, when I heard something that really made me think…

It came from a podcast I had playing … 41 Harsh Truths Nobody Wants to Admit. The sun had just started creeping over the rooftops, the streets were still half asleep, and I was deep in that zone where my body moves on autopilot and the mind can actually think.

Hormozi was talking about cosmic irrelevance … the idea that when you zoom way out, nothing we do really matters in the big, universal sense. Earth is a rock. We're just a blip. There are stars out there older than human civilization. We measure our lives in decades. The universe thinks in billions of years.

And for someone whose been keeping score his whole running life, that line hit differently.

Every training cycle, I’ve been chasing something. A time. A milestone. A sense that I was doing it “right.” But lately, I’ve been asking myself, right by whose standards? What am I actually trying to prove? To who?

This training block for Grindstone feels different. I still care. I’m still putting in the work. But I’m not clenching so tightly to the outcome this go around. I’m not obsessing over the splits. I just want to finish feeling good.

And weirdly, it’s this idea of cosmic irrelevance that’s helping me get there.

Because if none of it really “matters” in the big sense … the time I hit, the miles I miss, the pressure I put on myself to perform … then I’m free to make it matter in the way that actually counts: how it feels to me.

It’s like dropping the weight of trying to impress some invisible scoreboard. I run because it clears my head. I chase the thing because it’s mine to chase. I stop needing validation to justify the effort.

That’s what running does for me. Always has since I started taking it more seriously 7 years ago. It’s the one place I can hear myself think … not in a noisy, spiraling way, but in a quiet, truthful one. The rhythm of my feet gives my mind room to breathe each day. It’s where I process life, uninterrupted.

And that morning, as the miles added up, something loosened a bit more and drove a sense of clarity I think I needed at this point in the training block, and, well, life as a whole.

Nobody at my funeral is going to care about my finishing time. But I’ll remember how it felt. And that’s enough.

I wrapped up the run and rinsed off the sweat with the cold hose water on the side of my parents house, made a coffee, and sat on the floor with Dakota while she played with her toys … and I thought, this is the same thing. Showing up. Being here. No scoreboard. Just my presence.

I guess cosmic irrelevance doesn’t mean nothing matters.

It simply means the little things matter more.

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For the longest time I’ve thought about creating my own personal blog. It sort of makes sense as someone who has found writing to be a fun way to process my thoughts and ideas over the years. Mostly for myself to look back on one day — or maybe my kids too. Either way, creating my own blog has been something that I’ve had penciled on my to-do list for quite some time.

Recently, I found myself using ChatGPT to figure out how much screen time I was spending scrolling on social media and how that translated into actual time in my life. I wanted to get very deep and direct in that research in a way that might open my eyes and force me to make a change. The results were pretty overwhelming to say the least:

• I was spending 6+ hours a day on screens, which adds up to nearly 8 full years of my life over 30 years.

• That’s almost 40% of my waking life — gone to apps, feeds, and pixels.

• Most of us are unknowingly trapped in this loop, with over 70% of adults admitting they feel addicted.

• I’d lose nearly a full year of time with Dakota over the next 5 years due to looking down at a screen instead of looking down into her growing eyes.

Instead of scrolling, I’m choosing to write, reflect, and reclaim my time — and that starts with this blog.

I’m moving away from the social pressure and addiction that comes with social media apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Any apps on my phone that are designed to be addictive rather than useful, are being deleted. A new chapter in my life story set to begin.

So what do I expect to get out of writing here? What can someone reading this expect from me? If I’m being completely honest, I’m not entirely sure yet. On the one hand the idea of writing and putting my thoughts on the screen sound “cool”. On the other, I’m a bit afraid of being vulnerable and sharing things that have typically only showed up in my journal. I guess the fun in writing here will be in finding the balance in all of that… sharing enough to make this space meaningful and real as an archive of my life’s most important moments.

Unlike other blogs, I don’t have a specific niche I’m focused on writing for. This is my blog and my approach to it is one of sharing thoughts as they come in — of processing life in a natural way that leaves footprints for where I’ve been and where I’m excited to be going next. The victories and successes as well as the lows and disappointments.

The promise I will make is that what I share here is all real and all directly from me.