Eight things about ten years.

1.
It was January 28, 2003, and I went out into the garage and started up the treadmill we'd recently bought.

I'm not sure, but I imagine myself wearing grey gym shorts and a pair of New Balances that I'd picked up at the local Shoe Department for forty bucks or so.

2.
I hadn't run in years--certainly, not as an adult.

When I was younger, in sixth or seventh grade, I had run a local three-mile race a couple of times, drawn in at least partly by the thrill of running in a race at night--this was back when the Billy Bowlegs Midnight Run was actually run at midnight. Today, everybody runs 5Ks, but when I was a kid, we still measured things in miles.

But since then, since those early years when I'd had my parents measure a route around the neighborhood in the car so I could come home from school at Rocky Bayou and see if I could make it the whole way, I hadn't really given running much thought. I tore my Achilles in ninth grade, ending a mostly mediocre start to a tennis season. I played some intramural flag football and floor hockey in college during my time at the University of New Orleans, separating a shoulder along the way. I had played a little on the company softball team during my time in the car business.

But running? I hadn't given it a thought.

3.
And so, ten years ago, I went out into the garage, got on the treadmill, and ran for twenty minutes. I was (to put it kindly) painfully slow, covering just a mile and a quarter in my twenty-minute run.

Yes, if you're doing the math, that's a pace of sixteen minutes per mile.

4.
Since that night, I've run--sometimes more, sometimes less; sometimes with great consistency, sometimes with big gaps in training. But I've run.

And since then, I've covered just over 8,000 miles on foot, a great deal of that (a little more than 4,500 miles) in the last two years, when I've been a bit more serious about training.

5.
Looking back, it's remarkable to think of the number of great people I've gotten to know because of running.

In those early days, one of the most important people in my running life was a young man named Matt Seitz, a student in my AP English Language class, and Matt talked about training and philosophy and diet and brought me books by Jack Daniels and even ran with me during a race, pacing me for the four and a half miles across the Mid-Bay Bridge while we wondered if his classmate James Uthmeier would beat that guy who had come down to Destin to race him. (The guy, it turned out, drafted off of James for more than four windy miles and then stole the race in the last quarter, and afterwards when I congratulated him on his second place, James told me that thing that's stuck with me about how much he wished he'd trained just a little bit harder.)

If I taught Matt half as much about the English language that year as he taught me about running, I'd call it remarkable.

6.
Today, it's hard to think about a life without running. I'm often the one to remind the runners on my team that we're all, every one of us, just one bad step away from disaster. But I hope that's not something that I have to face.

7.
At times, it seems obsessive, I know.

By way of illustration, here's a question: how many of you ran on Christmas Eve?

Now, to see something of what I'm talking about: how many of you ran twice on Christmas Eve?

8.
This afternoon, I went for a run with the team--an easy aerobic workout that followed an out-and-back from the track out through the Trails of Montverde. Warm and humid for late January, even in Florida, but the running felt good and easy, and we covered the nearly five and a half miles in right at forty-three minutes, a pace of just under eight minutes per mile.

And as I was running, it was hard not to make the comparison of today's run with that run ten years ago, to try to remember what it felt like, to remember that sixteen-minute mile and all the other miles piled up one after another, different paces and people and hills and beaches and trails and trees and roads and roads and roads, and to try for just a minute to see those eight thousand miles as just one very long road that started on a treadmill in a garage.

And then for just a moment I tried to turn my gaze in the other direction, years and miles ahead to see where this road might go. But the thing about it is, it doesn't work like that--if you want to see that end of the road, you have to run there.