The guy on the beach
On the distance between who I was and who I'm quietly becoming
Life has been pretty full lately. The good kind of full, mostly. But the kind that makes it easy to let the writing take a back seat. I was out on a long run through Umstead recently and I realized that I hadn’t stopped to think about how far this running thing has actually come. So here we are.
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.