Finding Purple

Colors change me. Mentally, emotionally, maybe spiritually. Especially blues, purples, greens, but really any color found and experienced fully. It's hard to explain, but it's unmistakable when felt.

After running the Seaside 10-Miler in Ocean City, Halloween Saturday morning turned into walking trails, dunes, and beach on Assateague. I had Alice Walker's words in my head seeing flashes of purple like soul breadcrumbs:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

It was everywhere, scattered like puzzle pieces, wanting to form one larger purple spectrum, like there was some larger purple shell that had been shattered and wanted to be put back together again.

So I gathered a few, to have some puzzle pieces to remember, study, ponder. And I left some for the next folks who come along to find.

What I kept (and keep) thinking about is the purple that connects them all, not the separate shells. And that got me mulling Oscar Wilde:

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

When I first read that thought from Wilde, my mind went to the sky or the sea, where there are expanses and variations of unspoiled color, without form. All-encompassing. But the shells were carrying it also--through broken, partial forms, it was something about the color itself, what connected them.

I'm going to make a little leap here, if you'll permit me. Let's secretly replace color with Love (capital L Love), and swap out the shells for people. There are times when maybe we all feel like we have some part of that purple within us. Whether for kids, parents, partners, pets, I hope there are moments when everyone has felt something like that. Our own part of the purple.

But what about the larger purple that runs through everyone. If we all have that purple within us, and from time to time, we recognize that purple, that love, the commonality, in someone else. Or in everyone else.

There are times when I have felt that purple in a gathered group, that I can't explain any other way. When Bobby Banks sang a hymn at my great uncle's funeral, I swear I felt connected to everyone else there around me. It was a profound, sublime, visceral experience. When I crossed the finish line of the JFK 50-Miler after 11-plus hours of forward motion, I was so overwhelmed and felt so humbly and greatly connected to everyone around me. And it can come in silly, unexpected ways, seeing a video of people doing something for others, an unexpected act of kindness; a glimmer in someone's eyes; a smile about to become a laugh.

I can't explain it, but it was there. I think in the best and deepest moments I've contemplated life, religion, the Universe, sometimes, when I'm lucky, a feeling that goes further than where my thoughts can reach is there. Transcendent and underlying.

I won't swear to it, but that connecting thread, that piece that ties us altogether, it's not impossible that it's Love. Or purple :)

Warbling

The sun is preceded by streaks, sharp smears of light across the sky. It likes to be announced before coming on the scene.

If you're quiet, frogs and birds are deafening in this last gasp of dark. It's like walking late into a cafeteria, impossible to follow any given conversation through the noise.

My new-found fascination with birds does not lend itself to fast running times. I stop to take a picture, or watch a red-tailed hawk in the tree, or see where a cardinal or eastern bluebird lands. It does lend itself to some unexpected interval training.

I'm more obsessed with warblers these days than personal running records. More taking in and being part of my surroundings than running through them. Which is not to say I don't feel transcendent when quick-stepping down winding singletrack trails, or dropping the throttle for the last mile or half-mile of a run.

There is something to walking out of breath through the back door, pouring a water, and grabbing Peterson's Field Guide to cool down on the back deck and try to figure out what bird I saw in the brush along the road; or trying over morning coffee to ID the yellow-headed newcomer to the feeder.

Forrest Gander's "Science and Steepleflower" has been on my bookshelf for a couple years. I've started and stopped in it a few times. Books open themselves at the right time. Gander goes vertical, deep into things. He knows the names of things, but doesn't lose their wonder for the science.

... Can you smell
where analyses end, the orchard
oriole begins? 

I dig the notion that getting at the thing itself, the sublime nature of something, comes on the other side of science.

I have no idea what it is about warblers or if I have ever seen one. Certainly not consciously and been able to name it. But that seems to be where I am with this whole bird thing--learning, fascinated, possessed by a beginner's mind, curiosity, and opportunity. And it doesn't hurt that I can walk the yard and the treeline with a Dale's, a notebook and pen, look and listen, and breathe in sun and sound.

Woods, Visions, Sons, Kings, Runs

There were sheep in the woods. Right next to the road on Baileys Neck on Christmas Eve. Big Foot might have been there as well, but daughter Anna couldn't catch him in the photo. We stopped along the road and did a double-take. This particular stretch of woods, I run by on three sides on one of my running routes and drive by everyday. I haven't seen them there before or since. Maybe it was a Christmas miracle.

The first weekend of the New Year has been a reclusive one for me. I got out of my truck with groceries on Thursday and won't get back in a vehicle until Monday morning, to take the girls to school. It has been me, running, lifting, yoga, reading, coffee, a couple meals, reading, writing, cooking out with my dad for the Ravens game, and binge-watching Sons of Anarchy.

Sunday (this) afternoon, I wanted to stretch the legs and the soul, so through on running shoes and went for a back road 6-mile run, running by the sheep hallucination woods along the way.

Running clears my mind as much as it does anything for my body. There is a stillwater pond at the corner of the sheep woods, more tranquil and likely more stagnant than my mind on a run. I was feeling good, but still slowed to take it in. Up the road 50 yards or so was a hawk feeding on a deer carcass in a ditch. I know hawks and buzzards--the buzzard came in after I startled the hawk. I stopped again, this time playing chess with the hawk in the trees--he made one hop as I moved closer, I tried to keep from spooking him, just to watch him.

I got back to normal running pace, focused back in on my music, zoned out scanning the woods for sheep or hawks, when I scared a heron out of the ditch just ahead. If you've read along just a little here, you know I have a thing for herons. Spirit animal typed thing. Nothing major. But I took my cue from the Universe here to slow down and walk a stretch, not be in so much of a hurry, even though everything felt good. Heart rate was up, back covered in sweat, slowed down to walk the road along open fields and listen.

I got thinking about Sons of Anarchy, storytelling and Jungian archetypes, and life.

I've written about SOA here before. Among other things, Sons is the story of Jax Teller, the son of one of the founders and former Presidents of the Samcro Motorcycle Club. It's the story of him as Vice President, struggling with his father's legacy and the man who has helped raise him since Jax's father's death. This stepfather figure is the President of the club, who took over after Jack's father died. I give you all this to say that part of the storyline is the story of the prince becoming the king. I dig Carl Jung. Archetypes and myths factor into my thinking and the way I view storytelling.

To some degree, I think the story of every man's coming of age is dealing with, the struggle with that transformation of going from prince to king. Jungian psychologist Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette say that there are four archetypal male energies that are in all of us XY folk: king, warrior, lover, magician. They wrote a book about it that a lot of people seem to dig. The king archetype is the most important and generally the last to develop in the personality.

When you hit 42 years old, lose a job that was the result of 15 years of moving in a solid career direction, and wonder about work, vocation, passion, what direction you want your life to go, there is no shortage of shit that can occupy space in your head. I don't have ready answers, but occasional vacancy in my head, you bet.

It seems to me the struggle, to become and embody the king, that isn't something that happens like childbirth and there you are. Perhaps more often than each day, the boulder rolls back down the hill and you have to go get that fu**er and roll it back up again. It's not just given to you, you have to manifest it. You've got to own that shit.

Father and son relationships are some of the coolest, strangest things on the planet. I've been asked more than once why I am not an accountant like my father. In my mind it's a bit like asking why I am not an NFL offensive lineman: because I am not, it's not how I am wired or built. But the two of us can sit around a family dinner table and spin stories with the same humor and the same outlook on life, and we can watch the Ravens play and scream the same profanities at the television.

Life, visions, the Universe, archetypes, they are spinning through my head like a slot machine. I speed up, get back to running. I come back by the deer carcass and the stagnant pond. Jane's Addiction's "Mountain Song" comes on. I drop the hammer coming up Locust Grove, decide to run hard through the end of the song. I pass a blue Volvo, the drive waves, I wave back, but I have to think he is wondering what the vagabond in the red ski hat and green shorts is running so fast for--likely running from the cops.

I hang on redlining as the song comes to an end, looking forward to a slower interval. But it's Damian Marley's "Move" that cues up next. Another song I can't run slowly to. I shake my head, laugh out loud, mumble, "Motherfu**er!" and try to hold the pace. "Exodus" was the first Bob Marley song I ever heard. Still one of my favorites. "Move" is Damian reworking the chorus of his father's song, but making it his own. I get thinking about that as way of building on a father's legacy. As much as I dig the song for running, it also can't touch "Exodus" as a song, so what does that mean for a legacy? All Bob's musician sons will be forever in his shadow.



I don't give it much thought because I am trying to follow Damian's advice and move. I wind around a couple of bends. Maybe Junior Gong has a set of stones to dare to try to follow in his father's musical footsteps. He is wired for it. He is not a pioneer, but I listen to him all the time.

Generally, the home stretch of the run is where I run hardest. I like to finish spent. Today's run has been different--there were stops, walking stretches, intervals. As I get to where I can see the driveway, Katastro's "That Place You Know" comes on. I have no idea why, but this song makes me unreasonably happy and at peace. It makes me smile. Today it puts my mind to park benches, Newman and Redford in "The Sting," mix tapes and kindness. I ease the throttle, to run in light. Katastro aren't the deepest dudes, and the song isn't memorable so much for its lyrics, but its vibe. But still I hear this:

Back to the place you know
where all you have to do is come this way
Back to the way you run,
And I'm just gonna let you know
that I'ma be here and do my thing
that's just the way I know.

That's just the way I know.

Back Road Peace, Dark Wood and Rebirth

Runners are creatures of habit. For the past 10 years, I have had known running routes mapped out in my head. When I walk out the front door, I know specific routes from two miles to 20 miles and everything in between. I know where to turn around for a 10 mile route. I've tread many of them many times.

Saturday I ran a new route, on a new road. It's a road I've driven and been driven on since before kindergarten, with friends that have lived down it. But I had never run it. Back roads, tree-lined, almost full shade. During a 6-mile run, two cars and a tractor passed. Some deer. The tail end of a fox making scarce. I went without music; the roads are narrow and I didn't want to end up an unwitting hood ornament.

There is a peace on running a back country road that exists nowhere else. Most of my road miles have been run on Oxford Road or St. Michaels Road, with cars and trucks whirring past. Or through Easton with small town hustle all around.

Saturday was a reset button. A new route. Solace. Back road peace.

Dark Wood. Tree-lined roads lead my mind to Dante. After studying the Inferno in college, Dante's dark wood has stuck with me.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.
How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

Dante gives us the perfect losing our way metaphor. The opening lines to the most poetic mid-life crisis in history. I have a framed print of Dante and his guide Virgil navigating the dark wood together.

I frequently have those dark wood moments. I wonder if I am on the right path; I wonder if I am lost or have wandered astray; I wonder; I wander. My paths are more meandering than direct. Rather than the one true path, I often feel like mine is a singletrack trail or a country back road. Where do back roads lead?

Rebirth. Spring gets all the credit for new life and rebirth. It's the easy sell. But fall has always been my season for rebirth. Each fall is a new school year. A new grade for the girls, the clock turned back to zero, on top of the foundations they have built in the past years. New teachers. And new students for teachers.

Cooler weather, sloughing off the tired heat of summer. Needing to pull on a sweatshirt or sweater in the evening. Stout beer salivating. My energy usually resets in the fall as well. Fall races for our running peeps. Field hockey for the girls. Football taking over Sunday televisions.

For me, fall is about rebirth. It's about new running routes. It's about reconnecting and navigating the dark wood in the journey of our life. Dante will tell you about it. But nobody named a football team after the Divine Comedy.

Scenes from a Run

Running is my repetition. It is my practice. It is what I do to reset my mind, body and soul. When I walk out the front door, running shoes, shorts, t-shirt, skull cap to keep my cheap ear buds in my ears, tunes on the phone in my hand, I both know what to expect and have no idea what I will find. My daylight runs generally start on the rail trail near our house.

It's a foot bridge now, but at some point, trains crossed over this stretch of stream. They were faster than I am and I can remember them. I am running, so I keep running, but I fight the urge to stand in the middle of the bridge and watch and listen to the wind.

When I turn off Rails to Trails, I am a ghost. My shadow is the only proof that I was here. But if you look for it, you won't find it. Shadows are slick like that.

Speaking of ghosts, it's Memorial Day. That's why I have time on a Monday for a daylight run. It's a day to remember, to hold in our memory those that have died for our country. Those that have died so that I can go for a run; so that I can drink coffee in the morning; take the girls paddleboarding in the afternoon; hit the grocery store; grill steaks out back; feed my family; and then sit on the front steps sipping Jameson's while watching our younger daughter ride her bike around "the loop" in our neighborhood. I owe it to those who have died, to make my life, and theirs, count for something.

Jack White's "Freedom in the 21st Century" is playing as I run by the church. Stone churches and wooden barns are sacred architecture to me, just as forms, even stripped away from what goes on inside them. They elevate my thoughts.

Back on Rails to Trails, I run hard, to feel my heart, to feel sweat pour down me, to make the run count. This run was the same and different from every other. Running is my repetition. Repeat.

I'm a Timex

I'm a Timex. Nothing fancy or newfangled. Nothing too impressive, but to those that run, those that don't throw money at watches, those that know, just right. If I won the lottery, I'd still wear a Timex and drive a simple pick up truck.

I started wearing Timex watches after I trained for and ran my first marathon with a normal watch. I've been in love with a Swiss Army Watch, have had some decent enough timepieces, still actually prefer a standard clock face to digital, but can't justify anything else. I beat watches to pieces. I don't take my watch off to shower, swim, run, dig in the garden, I don't like to have to think about it, to remember where I left it. So it stays on.

I'm not sure how many Timexes I have had. Always the Ironman, so I can have simple elapsed time for my runs, and multiple alarms set for getting up in the morning. And it doesn't seem to shy from brackish bay and river water.

My Timexes have run marathons, ultra marathons, trails, and hiked the White Mountains. They've played football and gone paddleboarding and hugged toilets after "spirited" nights. They have picked steamed blue crabs and cooked gumbo and jambalaya and cleaned fish and cannonballed off of speeding boats.

It's funny what you notice when you have one, or who else you notice wearing them. The Coast Guard admirals I have worked with/for, the runners, the ones in the best shape, all wear Timex Ironman watches. Not fancy watches and not Garmin. Just the simple go-to.

A Timex feels like an old pick up, with a dent or two, so that you don't mind or think about anything that happens to it, you are curious what it can take. And if it meets its match, even if it has been through it all with you, its spirit gets reincarnated into the next Timex.

My Timex is just a part of my arm, an extension of myself that I put on and don't think about until I need it. They are not for everyone. I am sure they would look out of place in a Range Rover, Jag, or Cadillac. But so would I.

Weekend

Weekends are silent. Listen. Nothing. But I'm still up at 4:30am. Restless. Weekends are silent, except for coffee beans grinding.

Except for lacrosse and Anna's eyes big, heart pounding as she clears up the sideline and passes to a friend.

Weekends are silent. No Microsoft Excel, the fu**ing scourge of all programs. I cringe when I open it. Be quiet, Excel, it's the weekend. No listening for traffic. No morning radio shows.

Weekends are silent. Except for the aluminum crunch of beer cans opening, and contemplating the blue of a Dale's Pale Ale can--does the blue change as the can empties?

Except for the bounce of the trampoline and girls screaming earlier than neighbors might care for.

The other day I wrote this in a notebook. Bouquets of blue. Or maybe I didn't, but it seems like I should have, blue being on my mind and all.

If the weekends are silent, then I have only what Merwin says, "I have only what I remember." There is no record.

From what I can recall, silence is golden. Maybe we need more of it. When I run without music, I can hear my feet hitting the pavement, feel my heart beating, like Anna's must. I speed up over the last mile, trying to leave nothing, spend it all. My breathing is becoming ragged, shorter, strides faster, arms restrained, low, shoulders working with legs, running hard until I cross the tree in our front yard that marks my finish line.

Weekends are silent. Until they fill themselves with sound.

On Air

Air is possibility. We don't even notice it until it adds voice and motion as wind. When air becomes active. When I run I can't drink in enough air, filling my lungs, clearing them, repeat. When the big shit in our lives happen, when heavy or tense or anger or sad happen, we instinctively take deep breaths, looking for air, but not naming it.

Before we got too smart, the ancient Greeks, pre-Socrates, had the Universe broken down into air, water, earth and fire. The elements. Now we've named everything so fancily, we can't even get our minds around it. But we can breathe.

I'm being bird stalked when I run these days. Mostly by male cardinals. For a couple months now, every time I run, I get swooped by one. Almost always when I've forgotten they are watching me, and a fastball of red, or maybe it's a sinker, I don't have a batter's eye anymore, swings by, standing out against green trees and air. Once one lit for a second on a fence right next to the rail trail, nodding as I went by, and I smiled at him. Birds have air figured out.

Air is part of what my heron tattoo is about. The heron inhabits both air and water. Maybe he looks at home in both, or maybe not quite in either. I wanted to make sure both elements were part of the design. Herons inhabit and invoke both.

Wind is air at its most vocal. Air that says, don't fu** with me. The big bad wolf has nothing on wind. I lie in bed and I can hear the wind talking to the trees, unsure who speaks louder in that conversation. I drive over the Bay Bridge to work and feel wind push the car, which when you're that high above the water, that slight reminder says enough. Be kind wind. Be kind.

Brenda Hillman writes the elements. She is working through books on each. Her "Pieces of Air in the Epic," moves through air. She reminds us how cut off, out of sync we are with air:

Wind will rend the suburbs
With information seeking nature

or more depressingly:

They were mostly raised
in tanklike SUVs called Caravan or   Quest; winds rarely visited them.

When we're inside, packed away in our house, or seat-belted comfortably in our cars, we forget that air can be wind. That we absolutely need it to live, to breathe, but it doesn't need us. What if we get so comfortable, so cut off, that the winds rarely visit us? That would suck. No, that would blow.

Hillman brings us back with writing. I think Air is why I run. Elemental Air, filling my lungs to bursting, on the final mile home, Jimi Hendrix's "Stone Free," in my ears, heart pounding, talking to Air. In conversation. I'm not sure who is speaking, who is listening, who is breathing.

Blue on blue

I run under the blue. If the sun is coming up, on a weekend run, the sky is azure. If I'm running in the morning dark on a week day, then the sky is what Haruki Murakami paints it:

"The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night."

Blue on blue, overlapping to make night. Deeper. Blue has always been my favorite color. Our girls know it. Dad's favorite color is blue. I don't discriminate against any blue, any coffee or any beer, they all rate highly, from azure blue, to Pabst Blue Ribbon to Blue Mountain Coffee. But if you push me to pick a favorite blue, I go darker. Levi's blue. Blue jean blue. Navy blue. But that's not it either. Darker. Midnight blue. Closest.

It's a blue you can see through, but not to the other side. It's a blue that permeates skin and soul. It's the blue Miles Davis had in mind when he titled, "Kind of Blue." It's the blue that oceans inhabit.

It's not the blue that people yell at umpires at baseball games. My blue doesn't have balls or strikes or rules or boundaries.

It's the blue of the sky at its edges, stretched beyond where you can see it. It's the blue of midnight, reflected in blue eyes, running through the blue dark, trying to see what's happening in the stars. It's blue on blue.

Of Icons and Idols

A baseball player, a skateboarder and an ultra runner walk into a bar... stop me if you've heard this one... that would actually be a conversation I'd love to sit in on. Over the course of my life, these three figures have represented the sports idols/icons that have most shaped my life.

Eddie Murray was my first sports hero. The Baltimore Orioles first baseman with his iconic hat-tamed afro. We've talked about him here before--going to your first baseball game at Memorial Stadium and being swept up in the crowd chanting, "Ed-die! Ed-die! Ed-die!" The pursuit of his Topps baseball card and even my own wanting to play first base came after. After the Colts departed Baltimore, baseball was all we had to follow.

At age 13, and a broken arm from baseball later I had moved on to lacrosse, I discovered a sport/lifestyle much more formative and transformative for me: skateboarding. This was during the time that Powell Peralta's Bones Brigade was taking shape and a tall, skinny kid was spinning 720 degree airs on half-pipes and starting to dominate professional skateboarding. I was a not-as-tall skinny kid and Tony Hawk became the guy to emulate. Never mind that we skated street, not ramps around Easton and Oxford.

Skateboarding and running have been the two physical pursuits that have shaped and defined my life probably more than any others. It's funny to think that Tony Hawk is still the singular name in skateboarding, transforming the sport and turning himself into a worldwide brand and a household name. Maybe I should have stuck with skating.

I have stepped away from both sports at different times. When I stepped back into running, at around age 30 and started reading about it, not just doing it, Dean Karnazes was making headlines and magazine covers for unthinkable pursuits. Meanwhile, another skinny kid was quietly dominating trail ultra running, winning seven consecutive Western States 100 mile races. Scott Jurek seemed to love running for running. It would take the book "Born to Run," to spread the gospel of Jurek beyond the ears of the ultra running faithful.

While I haven't skimmed the surface of the commitment or accomplishments of a Hawk or a Jurek, if you asked someone who knew me in my teenage years, the first thing they'd remember is that I was a skateboarder. If you ask someone about me over the past ten years, they'd say I was a runner. We take cues and inspiration from the icons of the sports and pursuits we love. We may try to emulate their training or tricks or style.

I have held Murray, Hawk and Jurek up, and still do, as emblems of sports I love. Our various icons shape our lives. I've been riffing on and thinking about icons a lot lately as Adam Yauch, MCA of the Beastie Boys died of cancer at age 47. And Maurice Sendak, author of "Where the Wild Things Are," which was THE iconic book from my childhood--my mom decorated my room after the book--died a few days later.

The Beastie Boys have been the band I have most consistently listened to since I was 14. I have previously listed their album "Paul's Boutique" as one of the major touchstones in my life. I guess we reach an age when our touchstones, our icons, start to disappear. We're all ephemeral.

I don't have a point here, or a neat bow to tie everything up with. I guess it's just a matter of acknowledging and appreciating the icons, the people, who I have held up; who have dedicated their lives to pursuits that are important to me. Of giving props to the people who have brought joy and inspiration to me over the years.

Running with Axl

I don't think Axl Rose is much of a runner. At least not back in his Appetite for Destruction and Lies days. But I've been hearing the song "Patience" in my head a good bit lately, particularly while running.

Patience is one of those songs that has forever stamped its tune on the word/concept of patience for me. I can't hear or think the word without seeing the video or hearing the melody. And patience is a virtue I've been lacking on runs since easing my way back into things post-ankle injury.

I used to be able to settle into whatever distance run and know I was going to be out there for a while, what my pace should be, and just drop into a groove. At this point of the comeback, my runs are three to five miles and I feel out of sorts. Not resigned to a distance and running without rhythm.

And that's generally when Axl chimes in. Ah yes, patience. Funny how no running at all for almost a half a year will set you back. Throw you off.

But I'm running without pain. Endurance is coming back. Speed is inching up. No distance or pace is taken for granted. It's a beginner's mind mentality. It's a gift. Like patience.

A Little Balance

I've never been able to pull off "balance." Not in the holistic-life-schedule sense. I tend to overload, juggle, and then try to get into some semblance of a routine. I am not there at the moment (any real routine), but I am working on it.

For me, the pieces right now are running, longboarding, yoga, and writing. Those are the practices/disciplines I am trying to keep building my free time around. That all comes with the caveat that family and work are the bedrock of any schedule.

Introspection can come from any number of outside factors. It hits me regardless, faulty wiring no doubt, but this winter, a heaping dose has come from being sick. Various crud has made its presence known more in the past six months than probably any other time in my life and certainly my adult life. Fargin' kids ;) And this on the heels of a stretch in 2008 where I didn't miss a Rise Up Runner morning run for like eight months.

Part of that has felt like a lack of real morning schedule. It's been a winter of not having an upcoming race since the Rehoboth Marathon at the end of November. It's been focusing on cross training and picking up longboarding. It's been work, it's been lack of sleep, whatever.

It's feeling good to be hitting spring and looking forward to events on the calendar. Ultra Skate is in the books. You can read Landy's take on it on the new Rise Up Longboarders team blog. I ended up with 83 miles in about 10.5 hours of actual skating time. Landy, Charlie, and Zach each broke 100 miles, having spent the morning (in accordance with the plan that I had to bail on) skating on Kent Island.

The Trail Dawgs half-marathon is only a few weeks away. Then some real distance training, with a pack, for the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge in June. The warmer weather is motivating. The balance of running and longboarding is fun and inspiring. And the return to health is coming.