Newsletter 77: The Mid-Life Crisis That Is the Half-Marathon

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This newsletter is from October 2017. It was right before that year’s AthHalf, the half-marathon I run every year. I re-run this column every year I run the AthHalf. Like a sucker, I’m doing it again this year.

I’m running a half-marathon tomorrow. This is my fifth half-marathon, the AthHalf here in Athens. It’s the third time I’ve run the AthHalf; I’ve also run the Chick-fil-A half-marathon, also here in Athens, and the Soldier Half-Marathon at Fort Benning. The last one is my favorite because it is a flat course — Athens is unspeakably hilly; it’s like a little dash of West Virginia right here in northeast Georgia — and because when you start to slow down, an actual drill sergeant will yell at you to speed up. (Not surprisingly, this will cause you to speed up.)

It’s flabbergasting to me that I’ve run that many half-marathons. I started running a little about a decade ago, but I wasn’t organized or all that driven about it; it was mostly just the type of thing you do as an impotent first strike…