in case you ever forget:

You did not think about it very often, but eleven years ago today, you had one of the top 5 runs of your life, on the 13th of May, 2015. (You used to run.)

You ran with a group a couple of times a month and this one was at a place called Briones Reservoir near Orinda, CA. Before the run,. there were people in the parking lot discussing a Trail 50K they had either just ran or were going to be doing that weekend. You had not yet done a trail marathon but this discussion planted the seed that resulted in your first one in October of that year. The ‘group run’ started and it was on single track basically the whole way. The gazelles took off, and the field naturally sorted itself, You ended up alone. for three miles out and three miles back. You had the trail cleared of snakes by runners far enough ahead to be out of sight and no one behind who was going to catch you. Just your thoughts, your breath, the sound of the footfalls, and the news that your grandpa (you called him Papa) died that day. And the random stream of consciousness wasn’t there.It was nothing but the breath, the footfalls and the grief. And you ran faster. And you cried. In the woods, on the trail, for miles. And you didn’t have to worry about explaining anything. The sweat, the flush, the tears just were of a piece. And you were sad. And you pushed it. And it didn’t matter. You were just in the woods. Running, sweating, crying, faster, harder. People ahead, people behind,, all alone, and in a completely selfish way it was the best place on the planet you could have been and the most cathartic i.immediate thing you could do with it.

You had a handful of phenomenal runs among well over probably close to 2,000.. (None of them were races. and none of them were ‘personal bests’ in terms of times or goals) I’ve no idea how to rank them except to single out the very best ones. This was one of them. and it had nothing to do with the place. It had nothing to do with running, and somehow everything to do with running. All of the others were in amazing places. This one was in a permit-only park owned by a Municipal Water Utility. And it happened eleven years ago tonight, close to sunset near Orinda, CA. It was about six miles.

If you’ve forgotten that when you read this, I just wanted to remind you.