Running: two years ago I was starting the most amazing journey of my life

I don’t remember exactly how it happened. I have glimpses, flashbacks, some posts on Facebook.

We were at the beginning of the pandemic. Life had come to standstill.

Kind of a standstill! We’re never “standing” still in our family. My kids play sports and my wife’s intensity, the ability to keep everyone busy, is of an extraordinary kind. Even if you’re a guest at our house, you can never be a potato couch. She’ll make you hike. She’ll make you run. She’ll make you visit places. She’ll make you party too.

When even the tennis courts got closed, look what she came up with — all these crazy drills in our backyard.

The kids wouldn’t get their free time, till all of the above was done.

I’d enjoyed running for many years before COVID. I’d run four marathons before 2020. The last one and the fastest was in New York in 2010. I was thirty years old then. I got three hours fifty-something minutes. The other three were around four hours or slower. So I’d not run a marathon for over a decade and wasn’t planning to. But I had always run at 10–20 miles a week. Wherever I lived — and we, as a family, traveled a lot — I tried to run two or three times a week. It could’ve been a five-mile run, it could’ve been longer.