The pandemic year was one of my life’s best.

I don’t mean to sound arrogant. I know it was a painful year for so many people.

I’m not saying it was easy for me.

The struggling start-up I co-founded struggled even more. We had a few customers, our “success stories”, and they all shut down.

The business had no money and no one was going to invest or “bridge” in the face of incredible uncertainty.

My immigration got delayed. It’d been a long and painful journey and just when we got to the finish line, the finish line disappeared. Our green card interview got canceled in March 2020 because all UCSIC offices were shut down.

It was such a strange time, the spring of 2020. The world came to a standstill. Empty beaches in California and even the hiking trails were closed (ridiculous in hindsight!). I had no job. I was a failing entrepreneur. My immigration journey was getting ever more uncertain. My four kids were now all at home. Like so many other parents, we were navigating the new world of schooling over zoom.

We’re a tennis family. Then they closed all tennis courts in Irvine. So tennis stopped too. Well, no, it didn’t. The world was coming to a standstill, but my wife wouldn’t let our kids’ tennis come to a standstill. Where we used to live there was a big field right next to our house so my wife came up with fancy drills. I documented it on Facebook (thank you Facebook! for all my criticisms, these memories are priceless!)

Then I started to run…

I had always loved running. But in that spring I REALLY started to run. I remember my birthday, March 25th. It was a cloudy day and we all went for a run at a local middle school track. I have to thank Facebook again:

Then I started to run more.

Then I ran more…

I ran intervals and I ran other runs. Five miles, ten miles, sixteen miles.

I ran.

Then I lost lots of weight. Oh, Mark Zuckerberg, thanks again.

On the professional front, I had no choice but to switch to consulting. Trying to raise money for my business was a hopeless affair. Finding a job wasn’t working either. So I was able to muster a few consulting projects. Some were transitory, some — meaningful. It was all rough and tough, but we were finding ways to survive.

Then it all passed. Well, it never quite fully passed but the pandemic subsided. The world started to reopen.

I was able to get more consulting projects.

I ran even more.

I never stopped running.

In October 2021 I ran my first sub-three-hour marathon.

Earlier this year I ran a 2.49 marathon.

We finally got our green cards too, in the spring of 2021.

I guess this story is about running like so many of my stories. I remember how in the spring of 2020 even after I started to improve I struggled to break the six-minute barrier for one mile. I’d do my absolute best and I’d get something like 6.03.

Today I had my usual Tuesday intervals. Five-mile repeats:

As for Covid, I don’t know if I ever had it. Probably. I don’t know. We were all, all six of us, a bit sick at the end of last year. But we didn’t test.

It was a strange, memorable year. It was special. When I tell others about my running journey, I often start with some of variation of these words: in the pandemic year I started to run more.