Most days, I go for a run.
I recently had a birthday. Turned 49. I did some math, and during my 48th year, I ran around 1,771 miles.
Sometimes I get asked, “Why do you run so much?”
It sounds a bit like a punchline, but the answer is pretty simple:
“Because I can.”
If I was asked to expand on that a little, I’d say:
“Because I can now, and I won’t always be able to.”
That’s abundantly clear to me.
It may be going for a run; it may be over-delivering on a project at work that has particular importance to you; it may be trying to write a song with your friends; it may be staying up a little too late because the conversation is so good; and it most certainly will be kicking the soccer ball with your son or daughter.
There will be a time when you’re unable to do that any longer.
Much of life seems like it’s trying to distract or prevent us from dwelling on that fact, but I think we should welcome it into our lives.
You know, we have so many adversaries these days. Russia and China. Balloons, UFOs, aliens. AI, maybe. The person who voted differently than you in the last election. Meh, I say.
The real enemy is time.
Actually, that’s wrong.
The real enemy is not time. Time is cool.
The real enemy is wasted time.
For me, two things happened about a decade ago that put a spotlight on how ephemeral all of this is.
One of my best friends fell ill with cancer.
And then my dad suffered a severe stroke.
My dad’s stroke was at the end of December. For all of us except my mom, our final pre-stroke memories of my dad are from Christmas morning, just a couple days before.
He hasn’t taken a single step on his own since.
Whenever I think deeply about that, I’m reminded of a Bruce Springsteen song from his album Tunnel of Love. The song is called “Walk Like a Man.”
Bruce has a whole bunch of songs about fathers and sons; this one doesn’t have the anger of some of his earlier studies of the topic, but it’s probably the most pensive and profound of them all.
Bruce sings early in the song,
“All I can think of is being five years old,
following behind you on the beach
tracing your footprints in the sand,
trying to walk like a man.”
Later—after a whole lot happens in between—he concludes,
“The years have gone and I’ve grown
from that seed you’ve sown.
I didn’t think there’d be so many steps
I’d have to learn on my own.
I was young and I didn’t know what to do
when I saw your best steps stolen away from you.
Now I’ll do what I can,
I’ll walk like a man.”
“I saw your best steps stolen away from you.”
Tunnel is Bruce’s best album, by my estimation, though you have to live a fair bit of life to come to understand that to be true.
It was within a week of my dad’s stroke that my friend Phil Potts suggested that The Trainhoppers, a band that we had been in together years ago, should get together to make our second album.
Making a second album was a project we’d always dreamt about, but never had the time for.
As I considered Phil’s invitation, I thought about my dad, in physical rehab, trying to figure out if his arm would ever move again.
I watched the physical therapists on either side of my dad, holding him up and trying to get him to take steps:
“This is how you’ll get there, Mr. Kelley.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe in.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe out.
“Repeat.”
I thought about being in his place.
I thought about how I would feel if I found myself in his place someday, wondering if my body would ever work again.
I thought about how I’d probably be laying there reflecting back to years earlier, and saying “No,” to Phil’s invitation. “No time right now.”
I called Phil.
“I’m in.”
There were a hundred, thousand things like that.
One was exercise.
I got into cycling and bootcamp, and eventually, running.
In some sense, I felt I had to do it—and still do—because my dad would give pretty much anything to do any single one of those things, just one more time.
In my mind, exercise would be a way to honor him, through this human body he gave me, while I could. To fight back against what his own body did to him.
My dad started having heart stuff in his 40s, and since then has had more heart stuff, with more severity, every decade.
I look pretty much just like my dad, and most body things that happened to him, happened to me, too, except about a decade earlier for me than him.
That’ll get in your head.
Plus, like my dad, I made some dumb decisions health-wise—particularly, one dumb decision, which was that I smoked cigarettes, even after seeing what they did to my dad. (I’m 13.5 years smoke-free at this point.)
Exercise became my protest against the rising tide of time. The rising tide of wasted time. Of aging. Of having eaten poorly. Of hangovers. Of that dumb decision.
I want to erase those things from my life, make it like they never happened.
And I guess I think that if I run far enough, maybe I can, and maybe I will.
In early 2013, influenced by some very close friends—my enablers—I found my way to running.
Up to that point in my life, I had never, ever seen myself as a runner, but by that May, I was in the starting gate at my first half-marathon, and six months after that, my first marathon.
In many ways, I’m still on that same run.
Sometimes I’ve run fast and run far, other times less fast and less far; some months I track data and some months I don’t; I enter races one year and scoff at them the next.
My general fitness goal is this: someone could say, “Hey, it’s a nice afternoon. Wanna run a half-marathon?” and I could say, “Yeah, that sounds great. Just let me change my shoes real quick.”
I have just a couple ways I run, and they’re very different experiences.
Sometimes, I run alone.
When I run by myself, I listen to podcasts—usually The Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz (my joyful respite from the rest of life), or a recommendation from a friend.
(Except for during a race, when I listen to loud, loud music.)
The podcasts could be music-centric, they could be orbiting sports and comedy, or they could be interviews and discussions about society, workplace culture, history, politics, art and creativity; doesn’t matter, because courtesy of my friends’ taste (and Dan’s crew), I’m never not enlightened in some way.
Other times, I run with friends. And we taaaaaaaaaaalk.
It didn’t start that way.
It’s just that we were each typically running between 5–7AM, and for safety, as the sunrise got later and later, we just didn’t want to run alone in the dark.
So we ran together.
Headphones were optional, and it was pretty quiet for those first couple runs.
Then one day, one of us said, “Hey, what do you think about…?”
And a conversation started that just…hasn’t…ever…stopped.
We tell stories, share ideas and solve problems.
We laugh. Holler. Release. Improve.
And generally, just feel a little less alone.
A couple times a month, I’ll go so far as to run without headphones or friends.
These runs represent a deep, healing, creative, mind-wandering time for me.
(Which, candidly, I can’t always handle, lol.)
On any solo run, I’m likely to have stopped to record a voice memo or send myself a text.
When I look back at these essays, or concepts for work, or songs the band is working on, or events and gatherings we’ve hosted, it’s quickly clear to me that the initial idea for every one of those things first occurred on a run.
When that happens, I stop to message myself, pace-per-mile be damned, because like a dream—you note it or you lose it.
I’d prefer to be running outside, and I usually am. Snow, ice or frigid temps? Fine. Extreme heat or rain? Not a huge deal; kinda like it.
But please, Mother Earth, breathe easy. I’d prefer wind of less than 10mph. Thank you.
(If forced, I’ll run on a treadmill. But never for more than five miles—unless I have friends along to gab with.)
One way or another, I think that every mile is memorable.
Here are just a few examples.
December 1, 2012, I ran the Jingle Bell 5K at the University of Saint Francis.
My first race.
The morning before, my spin class instructor Mari had asked, “Anyone running the race tomorrow?”
I hadn’t run more than a mile at any one time since Bill Clinton was president, but, it was unseasonably warm, and I figured that since I was regularly doing spin class and bootcamp, I could at least run-and-walk the thing.
Well, I remember exactly two things from that morning:
First, seeing a client at race registration, and her erupting into laughter while incredulously asking, “What are you doing here???”
And second, that I didn’t walk at all.
May 4, 2013, first halfie—the massive Indianapolis Mini-Marathon.
I figured I’d surely walk part of this race, too, so I signed up to be placed in one of the last corrals—the starting area for those running with jogging strollers, or kegs.
Alas, I didn’t walk, and spent the whole race weaving through the immense crowd of runners who I was trying to pass. My watch said I ran 13.7 miles that day—.6 miles of zagging, I guess.
Best part was a finish line hug from my favorite runner in the running club I’d joined.
February 23, 2014, I ran a marathon in Jacksonville FL on my 40th birthday.
The shoes I’d trained in were just foul at that point, because I had to run my final, 22-mile training run on a treadmill (due to an ice-storm), and in doing so basically soaked them in sweat for three straight hours.
I packed the shoes separately, so as to not contaminate my family’s clothes in our shared suitcase. And then, in a carry-on of their own, I accidentally left the shoes on the airplane.
I realized this at 8:45PM the night before the race, just as I was about to do a shake-out jog around the hotel parking lot.
I sped off to a sporting goods store and bought new shoes, minutes before they closed. Other runners milled about in the parking lot. “You’re gonna run the marathon tomorrow morning in brand-new shoes?”
As I crossed the finish line, my feet were fine—and about ten minutes later, the race was shut down due to a lightning strike on the course.
This race ended up being the slowest of the five marathons I’ve run, but, I don’t worry about that all that much.
Because what I found with marathons was that the race was fine—pretty cool, and uplifting—but the real benefit was not the race at all, not the medal, not posting a selfie from the run on Instagram, but rather, the real benefit was the training to get there.
Training for a marathon is a pretty rigorous, pretty wonderful 16-week process. I would always follow the plan with fierce accuracy, worried that missing or shortening a single run would ruin my chance of even finishing the race.
In these post-marathon days, I miss that structure; the variety of the runs, the commitment to making them happen.
June 21, 2014, some friends and I went up to Duluth MN—the North Country—for Grandma’s Marathon.
The day before the race, we road-tripped about an hour away to Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan’s hometown.
We visited the immense open pit iron mines—“the Grand Canyon of the north”—then found and stood outside Bob’s childhood home, before visiting his high school. To our surprise, though it was summer break, the school was open and we walked right in, eventually finding our way to the auditorium—even standing on the stage where a young Robert Zimmerman first performed in the school’s talent show.
That race was unique for me; we were bussed out 26 miles to the starting area, before running back to Duluth along the foggy coast of Lake Superior.
On that run, I listened to Dylan concerts—his 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall set, followed by his Isle of Wight set from 1969.
As I entered Duluth proper and neared the race’s finish, I moved over to a 1999 concert where Bob closed his encore with a cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” I listened to that song as I ran by Duluth’s National Guard Armory—where a seventeen year old Dylan had seen Holly perform, just three days before his fatal plane crash.
With all of that swirling in my mind and my body and my soul, I finished with a PR of 3:25:49.
My half-mary PR was September 29, 2018, at our hometown Fort4Fitness.
I wasn’t running particularly fast in 2018, but I was coaching my kids’ soccer team that Fall, and we had a match at 11AM.
The most important thing to me was that running not interfere with time with my kids, or I’d not do it. (To this day, almost all of my runs occur before the kids are awake.)
I ran the entire race knowing I needed to be on the pitch by 10:30AM, and ended up crossing the finish line at 1:34:34—40th place out of 1,300+ people and faster than I’ve ever run in my life—before continuing to run directly to my car, and then racing to the match. The soccer fields were on the wide, flat grounds behind a seminary. I made it with just enough time to towel off and change my clothes in the parking lot.
Speaking of clothes, a couple years ago, I ran the Fort4Fitness half-marathon in the same clothes I wear to work.
I had recently been interviewed in a local publication, where I was asked about my “fashion style.”
I went with my go-to answer: that, as you now know, I dressed every day such that a person could ask me to hop in a kayak or go for a run and, in either case, all I’d need to do was change shoes.
So I decided to walk the talk.
Or instead, you know, to run it.
All of that is well and good.
But the thing is, you don’t have to peek in the windows of Bob Dylan’s childhood home to have a memorable time.
You just have to go out and do it, whatever it is, and surrender just a touch to gratitude, because it’s all fleeting anyway.
A couple weeks ago a friend and I were on our morning run.
There was a lot going on—it was a busy time for each of us at our jobs; her spouse, her kids, my kids, were each working through their own challenges, and could use some support; the latest dust-up in the local community was creating strife; the national news was as sigh-inducing as ever.
Plus, we needed to be back to the spot we started from—Skyline YMCA—at a very specific and particular time.
(Frankly, I had to clock in to work. There would be a great group of great people waiting for me to do so.)
And yet, lost in conversation, and because because, we missed a turn.
We missed a turn, on a route we’ve run a hundred times or more, a route we’ve run a couple times a week, a route we’ve run in winter and spring and summer and fall, a route we’ve run for a couple years, we missed a turn.
And we never once realized it.
We were telling stories, sharing ideas and solving problems.
We were laughing. Hollering. Releasing. Improving.
And generally, just feeling a little less alone.
When we finally got back to Skyline, we looked at our watches, and couldn’t really figure out what happened. We were, quite literally, lost in it.
Any old run, on any old Wednesday.
We all giggled about me clocking in late, and all went on, better for it.
Went on to all the demands of life, yes, but also went on to the next conversation, better for it.
To the next chance to say yes, better for it.
To the next stretch of time, better for it.
And to the next stretch of time not wasted, better for it.
“This is how you’ll get better, Mr. Kelley.”
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe in.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe out.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe in.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe out.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe in.
“Right foot.
“Left foot.
“Breathe out.
“Repeat.”
Postcript: A Few Recommendations:
Become a regular at your local running store. (Mine is Three Rivers Running Company.) The people that work there are passionate, let’s-do-this-together running advocates, no matter what level you’re starting from. They’ll guide you to the right shoes and the right gear, and they’ll cheer you on at your next race. (Please don’t do the thing where you use them for their expertise, and then just buy from Dick’s or online. You’re gonna find that these are your people. Consider the couple extra bucks you’re paying for the shoes a tip for all they do for running in your community.)
I got YakTrax this winter. Game-changer for running in ice and snow; highly recommended.
I’m a Brooks Adrenaline guy. (But, again, ask your local to help find the right shoe for you.)
Get some running shorts. The ones with the undies built in. You’ll feel like a wild animal out there.
Layer up. But you probably don’t need as many layers as you think, because one mile in, you’re gonna be hot. Promise.
I’ve tried and tried and tried with Beats headphones, and I think they suck. I’ve exchanged or repaired so many pairs; the quality is such a disappointment. (Jaybird are the most-reliable brand I’ve found.)
I love Fort4Fitness and what it means to my hometown—it’s just a beautiful, invigorating, positive day and event. But my favorite race is the Parlor City Trot, in Bluffton, IN. It’s usually about a month before F4F (and has existed for way longer), and is just the best and most beautiful. This year, it’s on September 2. Registration is not yet open, but save the date!
When I was an app-user, I loved Runkeeper—particularly for its built in training plans, which it coaches you through. These days I just use an Apple Watch, if anything. Take it from a person who used to look pretty closely at the data: all that really matters is, did you do the run? And are you glad you did? Well then, onward. You’re already better for it.
As usual, loved this one, Matt. Thank you for the time and thought you poured into it. Those Springsteen lyrics stopped me, as a son and a father. Thanks for sharing them. I enjoyed learning about your Running CV -- you've covered some miles, Matt. And I believe you've honored your father this past decade. Cheers, my friend!
A nice read, as usual. I almost didn't read because it was about running. Not because I don't like running, but, it's something I haven't practiced for quite sometime. But, it really wasn't about running after all...
The unanticipated benefits of pursuing an interest are a pleasant surprise, a bonus gift like that shiny new toaster the bank handed out for opening a new account (That shows my age). And rightfully so, one should be rewarded for seriously committing, and opening oneself, to change.
"Because I can" resonated for me. It is my travel motivator. I realize my ability to solo travel to distant points has an eventual limit. To not do so now, when I physically and financially can, is a wasted opportunity, a lost chance to get another toaster...