Two things this week: One is a follow up to last week’s newsletter where I committed to doing something about a lack of friends. The second is I want to share some screengrabs I nabbed of pro athletes doing things I don’t see men doing much of, and I will continue riffing on my emerging sense of why we should encourage more of it.
First the follow up. Last week, I wrote about my embarrassing lack of friends. I pointed out in my first post that this is common for men, especially middle-aged men like me. But last week, I said I was going to meet a guy I know to go running, and also join a MeetUp group of runners to see if I could begin to change that.
I texted my acquaintance about going for a run, but didn’t hear back. But I won’t chalk that up to a failure as I’ll get to in a second.
The MeetUp group meets Wednesday mornings about a two-mile run from my house. I figured that’s an easy warmup and a good opportunity. But I awoke Wednesday and thought about not going. This is partly because I am so unpracticed at going into groups of strangers that I didn’t want to confront my own awkwardness. Also, I was recovering from having two crowns done the day before and my mouth still hurt. I knew that the jostling of running just wasn’t going to feel good. But I had told Warm Current readers that I planned to do it, so I felt like I “had to.”
I got to the Starbucks where they meet just as the organizer was assembling the group to start off. She immediately pegged me and one other guy as new, and pointed at me and asked me to introduce myself first say what pace I wanted to run, and whether I was training for anything in particular.
In a split second, I felt scared, embarrassed, frustrated. I was scared, because I was confronted with having to introduce myself to people I don’t know. That’s not a terribly difficult thing, but I’ve been living in my head so much and working so hard to be more conscious that I was worried I would drone on too long and say something stupid. Then I was embarrassed because I know I shouldn’t talk down to myself like that, and I immediately went into what I call “the shame hole.” I felt frustrated because I noticed the shame hole situation. So I pulled myself out of it.
I said my name, that I was open to running anything from 7-10 min/mile pace and that I wasn’t training for anything but have been thinking about some ultras for 2026.
“Oh,” she said, with what I thought might be a tinge of disappointment. “We might have some fast people here for you to run with.” Then she asked the other new guy to introduce himself.
I was discouraged. The truth is 7-10 minute pace is a huge gap in pacing, and it’s not what I would consider “fast.” In that moment, I remembered one reason I’ve been running by myself for 20 years is because not a lot of people want to go run at 7min pace at 5am. It’s just not a thing I’ve found a lot of people able or willing to do.
But I’m not running 7min pace very much these days. The 50-milers I’ve done in recent years don’t require a lot of 7min pace running. Nobody outside of actually fast runners are going up 8,000′ mountains at 7min pace. And the ones who are doing that are not running with weekend warriors like me, they’re training with their sponsored teams.
As I fought against my negative “looks like this was a waste of time” self-talk, a guy walked up behind me and told me that another offshoot of this same group met on Saturdays for long runs that he thought I would want to check out. I thanked him.
Next thing I know the group started running. Within a couple of minutes a woman came up from behing me on my left and said, “My partner runs the Monday track group. He’d love to have more people. You should check it out.”
And the acquaintance I texted? He texted me back late yesterday to say he’d been on a job interview in another state, but wanted to go running.
My takeaways from the attempt: two people I didn’t know offered to connect me with more runners, and my acquaintance was going to become a new running partner. Who knows where this will all go, but I think it’s a good start. Progress is not linear, and that’s ok.
Next, I’m trying to come up with a clearer way to express that I think we should be encouraging men in regular walks of life to be more supportive of one another and to show it and not feel any weird societal blowback. And I have some screengrabs to show what I’m talking about.
Here are some screengrabs I took while watching the Fox Sports broadcast of the Seattle Mariners vs Detroit Tigers American League Division Series. And at the bottom is a photo I downloaded from the web (photo credit in the image). The top three are from the night Seattle won the ALDS and the right to advance in the playoffs.
There’s noting particularly remarkable about baseball players celebrating a victory in a big game like this. We see this all the time.
But note the third and fourth photos in particular. When do you ever see a man walk up behind a man and talk into his ear – and the receiver of the message is actually grinning form ear to ear?
And in the last photo by Stephen Brashear, Vlad Guerrero Jr puts his hand on Julio Rodriguez’ hip while they are clearly talking. Their body language is calm. They’re opponents on the playing field, but there’s zero tension in this image. Zero anomosity. Guerrero’s had is relaxed. Rodriguez’s shoulders are relaxed.
I am still trying to figure out how to express the idea concisely. And I’ll return to it. But this is one reason I think “sportsball” is actually important. Athletics is one arena where men clearly feel free to be affectionate to other men. I’m not suggesting that I want your boss to walk up behind you and whisper sweet nothings in your ear. But I think it’s worth encouraging men to show emotion, show support and show care more often than we do. I don’t know how we translate that to the “real world,” but I think there’s something worth encouraging here.
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