Greetings! “I’m a runner.” This sentence gets used often when I’m asked to describe myself or talk about my personal interests. Long before The Streak, running proved an interesting and recurring theme in my life. My mother used to lecture me about spending too much time out “running the roads” with my childhood friends. My buddies and I would wander as many as five miles from our neighborhood. For the record, I’m describing school nights. In the summer, we’d find ourselves as far away from Atlanta as Sandy Springs, Riverdale, Forest Park and other remote suburbs. Then there was school, starting in the second grade, around age seven, I began walking a mile to school. Walking two miles a day to and from school, playing pick-up sports in vacant lots and “running the roads” all over the neighborhood, it’s a mystery to everyone that I managed to spend much of my youth overweight.
As a teen, I spent a little time “running” from the law. For too many years I was running from somebody or somebody was running from me. Life was a mess in my every direction. I didn’t want to die, but I was unquestionably scared of living. A pivotal moment in my life came from being introduced to Bruce Springsteen’s song, Born to Run. I certainly was tramp on the run, more importantly, I resonated deeply with these lines:
Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run
I knew I had to get out of my little death trap, not walk, but run. It was songs like this and most from John Mellencamp that gave me the three minutes of rebellion I needed to keep forging on the road. Time to time, I listen to some of those old songs, and I struggle to believe that all that anger and fear only exist in the past. The reality that they do, is a great truth in my life. I can’t pinpoint the moment when such radical change happened for me, but I’m delighted not to re-run those tired old roads to nowhere.
As you many of you know, The Streak began with a goal of running every day for a month. I missed that mark four months in a row. Since March 10, 1997, though, I’ve been so very fortunate to run miles and miles of road all over the globe. As I reach this milestone of exercising every single day for twenty years, I am delighted to know I am not running from trouble anymore. These days I’m running for health and fun. Mostly, I’m incredibly grateful that I am still running on this side of the sun.
Enjoy the Road. Run.
Tom
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