This week, I’m sharing an update about the work toward my summer running challenge and how I am seeing my own internal barriers to connection popping up.
If you’ve been reading you know my right Achilles is still a problem. Not a catastrophic one, but the kind of thing that quietly colors everything, my mood, my energy, my confidence about what’s coming this summer. I’ve been grinding through it: more rest days between hard workouts, PT exercises, a Strassburg Sock at night, an Achilles brace during the day, NSAIDs, and a general re-commitment to lower leg strengthening. It’s a lot of maintenance for one tendon. Progress is slow, and I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t bled into other areas of life. When the thing you’re training toward feels uncertain, that uncertainty has a way of spreading. At least it does for me.
This morning I was out at 5:15am for an 8×400 plus 4×200 workout. The splits were encouraging, averaging around 1:17 for the 400s, and my ankle brace helped I finished in no greater pain than I started, which counts as a win these days. My splits are below. And you’ll see, the workout got cut short, but not by the tendon.
What happened is two guys wandered onto the track. One was enormous, somewhere around 6’5′, minimum 250 pounds, probably more. And he was wearing a ski mask in 53-degree weather. His companion was husky and singing to himself. They zig-zagged across the inside lanes, occasionally stopping to inspect the football team’s equipment left out on the field. I ran around them for six laps, telling myself they were harmless. On the seventh, I came out of a turn and they’d pivoted to face me and were pointing in my direction. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they were just two guys with nowhere else to be at 5:30 in the morning. But I was alone out there, pre-dawn, near a transit center that draws some unpredictable characters, and I decided the remaining intervals could wait for another day. No shame in reading a room, or a track, as the case may be.
The more meaningful stuff from this past week came off the track entirely.
Three separate guys reached out to ask when my race is or offer a solution to my Achilles problem. Two reached out because they want to come watch. One is a former elite runner I met last winter, sidelined now with his own injury, someone I haven’t been able to train with in months. The other is a guy I met at a school event who took the time to text and get the date on his calendar. Neither asked casually. Both meant it. And the third guy is a reader of this newsletter who sent a link to a tool to help essentially do PT exercises to improve Achilles durability. Wow.
I was genuinely surprised. And then I sat with it for a bit and felt something unexpected: a quiet sadness. Not at them, at myself. I realized that none of these guys had the “friend” label in my head, even though that’s clearly what they are acting like. I have a long-standing habit — one I’m only recently becoming aware of — of assuming nobody would want to show up for me, and so I don’t give people the opening to try. It’s something that goes back a long way, rooted in experiences from childhood that quietly shaped how I move through the world without me realizing it.
Two simple offers of “hey, I’ll be there” cut right through all of that. Men, especially, can spend years building those walls without ever naming them. I’m trying to name mine.
I’m getting better at recognizing it when I do it. And calling myself out here is one way to speak into existence an improved ability to recognize opportunities for connection more.
So, I’m going to buy that device for improving my achilles, and I am looking forward to seeing two friends after I race the mile for the first time in 20 years.