There's more I'd like you to know.
Some parts of his story are visible from a distance. Others ask you to come a little closer.
Discover the storySpartan Moon Studio · the longer introductionThe
The
Lonely
Mile
I ran 100 races trying to find myself. I spent the next seven years trying to forgive myself.
Discover the story · an introductionRead at your own pace. The details are yours to notice.Back to home ↗
The words in quotation are from the memoir. The narrator is an editorial guide, not an eyewitness.
There is no sound or background music in this experience.
There is no sound or background music in this experience.
01 / THE LIFE THAT WAS
There’s someone I’d like you to meet
You probably know somebody like him. Someone who can keep a conversation going about almost anything, who gets an idea into his head and has a difficult time leaving it alone. Someone who can be wonderfully curious and, every so often, stubborn enough to drive you up the wall.
But that isn’t where I want to begin. Because the man I want you to meet wasn’t always living the life you might imagine from the book cover.
For a long time, his days looked ordinary. The commute. The work. Home in the evening. A life that made sense from the outside. It was comfortable in places, genuinely good in others. And somewhere inside it, he had begun to disappear from his own view.
He had become practiced at calling it a normal life. It took longer to admit how much of himself he'd stopped expecting from it. The change didn't begin with a finish line. It began when he finally noticed the difference.
02 / THE FIRST DECISION
The beginning wasn’t glamorous
It would be convenient to say that everything changed in one magnificent moment. That he woke up, saw what his life had become, and somehow knew what to do.
It didn’t happen quite like that. There was a gym, and there were mornings he could have stayed in bed. There was a body that had to learn what it could do. There were ordinary decisions, made again and again, until they began to add up to something he could recognize.
And while that was happening, other parts of his life were changing too. Some of those changes were necessary. That doesn’t mean they were painless. There were people he loved, and a marriage that could be remembered with tenderness even as it came to an end.
I think that matters. Transformation sounds rather tidy when you say it quickly. Living through it is another thing entirely.
✦ A note in the margin +
The number before the hundred
The original 2019 ambition was fifty races for his fiftieth birthday. The hundred was not the starting plan; it took shape later. There’s a reason that distinction matters.
03 / THE PROMISE
A promise to himself
He wasn’t trying to become someone who never struggled. He was trying to become someone who would keep showing up, especially when doing so was inconvenient and nobody was there to applaud.
At one point he went back up a mountain for miles he could easily have left unfinished. The others were ready to go. Nobody would have blamed him for stopping. He went anyway.
Here’s how he described what that meant to him.
Not what I weigh. Not what I used to be. What I do — consistently, stubbornly, without an audience, when it would be perfectly reasonable to stop.
From The Lonely Mile
04 / THE VISIBLE JOURNEY
And then there was the year everyone could see
Yes, he really did run a hundred races in 2019. Ninety-five Spartan races, five others. Thirty-one trifectas. Thirteen countries across three continents. It was an extraordinary undertaking. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.
100total races
95Spartan races
31trifectas
13countries
2019 racing year · three continents · figures drawn from the manuscript and author’s 2019 recap
But those numbers are a funny sort of evidence. They tell you how much happened. They don’t tell you what it cost, or who helped, or what was happening when the finish-line photographs were over.
It would be easy to make this whole introduction about the record. The book resists that temptation. So should we.
✦ A note in the margin +
One ordinary object
There was a printed travel itinerary in a transparent folder, given to him by LJ. In a year that could look almost unreal on paper, someone’s small, practical kindness helped hold the logistics together.
05 / WHAT NO ONE SAW
What happened between the photographs
Consider a morning before sunrise. He’s sitting in a truck, not at a starting line. Before another journey he says the same prayer, asking for protection for himself and for the people he loves. Then he turns the key.
There were friendships, moments of unexpected kindness, and people who showed up when it mattered. There were days when he felt a part of something larger than himself, and days when he was terribly alone—even with people nearby.
It’s tempting to call these the little moments. I’m not sure they were little at all.
One evening, after someone had kindly invited him to dinner, he wrote something I’ve kept thinking about.
I left fed and still disconnected, which had become a familiar combination.
From The Lonely Mile
06 / WHEN THE ROAD CHANGED
And then the standard became difficult to live with
You see, the promise he made to himself wasn’t just about finishing what he started. It was about the kind of person he wanted to be while he was doing it. How to act when nobody was watching. What to do when exhaustion, anger, or disappointment made the easier choice feel reasonable.
He believed in that standard. He worked hard to earn it. That made it harder—not easier—when he had to confront moments in which his own choices took him somewhere he hadn’t meant to go.
I don’t want to turn those moments into a dramatic reveal. They aren’t puzzles, and they certainly aren’t entertainment. They belong to a person who had to live with them.
He could not know, when he first decided to live by that standard, how severely it would be tested. He looked back on that promise with a different understanding:
I didn’t know yet how much I would need that standard. Or how hard it would be to keep.
From The Lonely Mile
07 / WHAT REMAINS
Some things stay with you
I wish I could tell you the hardest part was over when the year ended. For some stories, the finish line really does bring everything into focus.
Not this one.
He could look back at things he was proud of. He could also look back at choices he couldn’t simply file away as mistakes made under pressure. Other people might have understood. Some might have told him to let it go. He still had to decide what those choices meant for the person he had worked so hard to become.
And I think there’s something very human in that tension. Most of us have had moments when the person we meant to be and the person we were did not quite meet.
There are achievements nobody can take away from you. There are also decisions only you know the full weight of. An official result can record the first; it cannot resolve the second. In the book, he gives that private, unresolved mark a name: an asterisk.
The asterisk stays — not on the leaderboard, where no one can see it, but in me, where it has always lived.
From The Lonely Mile
08 / TIME AND MEMORY
Seven years is a long time to carry a question
This is where I have to resist telling you too much. Not because I’m trying to be mysterious, but because the way he arrived at this part matters. It can’t be reduced to a confession, or a lesson, or one neat sentence about forgiveness.
What I can tell you is that the years afterward were not a straight line. The person who could demand so much of himself in one season still had to live through the seasons that followed. There were returns, setbacks, ordinary days, and the slow work of trying to be honest with himself.
Eventually he began to write. Not to make the uncomfortable parts disappear, and not to pretend every decision had been the right one. He wrote to put the whole thing where he could finally look at it.
That takes a different sort of courage. And it doesn’t look much like a finish-line photograph.
✦ A note in the margin +
A detail that changes meaning
The same gym program appears years apart in the memoir. Early on, it helps him discover what he can do. Much later, it asks a quieter question: what can he do today?
10 / THE INVITATION
The rest remains to be uncovered
There’s more I could tell you. There are people you haven’t met, quiet moments that may stay with you, and choices whose weight only becomes clear when you’ve walked far enough beside him.
I’d rather you discover those things in their own time.
If you want to know him better, the book is here. Read it at your own pace. You don’t need to be a runner to find something of yourself in it.
11 / STAY IN TOUCH
Behind the Pages
And if something stays with you after you finish, you’re welcome to keep in touch. Behind the Pages is a place for thoughtful notes about the writing, the memories, and whatever comes next. Nothing noisy. Just an open door.
The finish line was real. So was everything that came after it.