“Is that a f—— horse?” 

Though I didn’t break stride, or say that phrase out loud, mentally I veered away from the wood fence abutting the sidewalk on which I was running. I was so jarred by the sudden appearance of this objectively beautiful creature, standing no more than 25 feet from a road I drove every day of the week. A road I had driven on the first day I received my driver’s license on my 16th birthday, and still drive today as someone who, for better or worse, lives in the town in which he grew up. But despite that built-in familiarity, the horse lived out its days, there in my hometown, invisible to me as I drove past day after day after day after day, foggy, distracted, or engaged in conversation with my child passengers, who coincidentally had also not noticed the horse up to that point either.

It didn’t help, too, that the property to which the horse belonged was flanked by the kind of suburban subdivisions where the houses dominated sightlines along a road that used to be dotted by a dozen properties but now sat under the tremendous weight of hundreds and hundreds of 3,000-square-foot American Dreams, which apparently only came in three or four flavors. It’s like when you don’t look up at the sky as much on a rainy day as you do when it’s an impossible blue dotted by never-before-seen cloud formations. It’s easy to get lost in the malaise. 

That all sounds a bit depressing, but it’s not meant to be. It’s progress, as defined in 2026. And so it was that I was jogging a road that I used nearly every day of my life by car, but rarely ran on because of its relative distance from my home, and I noticed a horse I had not noticed the thousands of other times passing that little plot of land. And that is one of the magical things about running. Where even with an elevated heart rate, a potentially high level of exhaustion, and even perhaps a deeper level of focus than normally achieved in a day, things slow down enough to be perceived. And in some cases not just perceived but…internalized. I don’t know why that horse had such an impact on me. I didn’t even stop to look at it. I just said to myself “Is that a f——- horse?” and kept on running. 

I never considered myself a runner. Even as I trained for and ran a marathon in 2015 (with somewhat disastrous results), and even as I incorporated running in my weekly exercise routine, I never called myself a runner. Maybe that is because there are so many people who take it more seriously, or do it more often and with greater success than I do. Maybe it’s because I only picked up running as an adult, running longer than a mile in one sitting for the first time in my mid-twenties. Maybe it is because for quite a while, I enjoyed the results of running more than the act itself. 

I still don’t consider myself a runner. But, here at age 41, I am now open to the possibility that I may like the sport of running. I might even love it. 

But why? And why now? 

I’m still not sure, but I have some guesses. First, it’s cheap. You can spend more on a nice pickleball paddle than you have to on a nice pair of running shoes, and that is theoretically the only piece of equipment required to start. Put on some shorts, a ratty old t-shirt, and a decent pair of running shoes, and you are literally off to the races. 

Second, it’s an incredible workout. There was a time where I struggled (and still do) with tendonitis in first one, and now both, achilles tendons. I replaced running with biking for a period of almost two years. And even though I have an incredible bias toward biking and would consider biking a part of my identity, it did not deliver the same results as jogging did. Not many activities engage your full body – legs, core, heart/lungs – the way running does. In combination with other types of exercise it is an extremely effective way to maintain overall great health. 

Third, it’s a sport that pits you against yourself. You can join run clubs, or compare yourself to peers or – don’t do this – professionals, but that’s not really the spirit of the thing. The goal of running is to be better than you were the day before. That’s it. Runners value personal records, and they compare themselves to themselves primarily. Running with people can make it more enjoyable, but it is not required. And it in some cases, one of the joys of running is being alone, working hard toward a goal, and feeling your heart pump blood and oxygen to every muscle in your body. 

Those are all pretty surface-level reasons to love running, though. They do help explain why an estimated 50 million Americans participate in the sport of running, which far surpasses adults that participate in other sports like basketball (28-30 million) or the aforementioned and rapidly rising pickleball (24.3 million). But if you are one of those millions of Americans who have run multiple miles in one session, or built a running routine into your life, it doesn’t tell the full story, does it? 

If you’re like a lot of people today, life is extremely busy. It doesn’t matter if you have kids, a job, multiple jobs…life feels intense. In moving so quickly, we tend to miss little things, like a sunset, or a nice flower, or a beautiful horse on a road you’ve driven thousands of times. We are all so acclimated to this way of living that we hardly notice we’re missing these things. But when I run, everything slows down a little bit. Sometimes I’m very much in my head, or maybe focused on the music or podcast I brought along with me, but inevitably, as the miles slip away, I start to look around, and I notice things – a tree I’ve never looked at that is catching the sun just right, birds and animals going about their business, a cute house I’ve never noticed before. I’ll even stop my run if the mood is right, to look at something. I would never have seen that snapping turtle in the creek near my house if I hadn’t stopped that one time…

Running also contextualizes distances differently. I live in a suburb, which means sprawl. Everything is spread out, and people drive everywhere they need to go. I’m no different in that regard, but then when you start running past these places that you’ve only driven to, suddenly the two-mile drive to the grocery store near your house feels very close. Or the four-mile drive to Costco, which you make regularly and takes 12 to 13 minutes in your car, feels not-so-far away if you jog past it on a longer run. If you’ve ever trained for a marathon, during your training you start running distances that would take 30 to 40 minutes in a car and previously felt impossible to reach by foot. It not only makes the world more accessible and a little smaller, but there is a little bit of self-satisfaction in reaching distances that previously were only reachable by vehicle. 

I sometimes cry when I run. True story. It started when I trained for my first marathon in 2015. I was running 18 miles, and the run was going extremely well. I had been training all summer, slowly building up the mileage based on the training program I was following, and I’d had the typical ups and downs that go along with running distances one has never run before. But that 18-mile run on that early Saturday morning in late August was one of the best runs of my life, and the combination of pride in a job well done, plus a little bit of adrenaline, resulted in a brief release of emotion. It was gone in an instant, but it felt so damn good. 

I may have been experiencing my first “runner’s high” in that moment. It hadn’t really happened up to that point, and it doesn’t happen to me every time I run now, either. It happens mainly on significantly longer runs, which are only possible after I’ve trained up to those distances over the course of weeks and months. That experience tracks with the updated science on runner’s high, where the experience is not as common as once believed, but creates heightened positive feelings and even euphoria (and, chemically, is produced by cannabinoids produced by your body – yes, cannabinoids, like those present in marijuana). 

For me, in those moments of heightened emotion on those long runs, my mind goes to the people in my life that I love – my wife and children, my parents and siblings, my friends. I feel grateful to have those people, but that gratitude is turned up to 1000 in that moment. I also feel some pride in doing what I’m doing, running distances that were only theoretically accessible on foot until I started running them. And in feeling all of that, at a maximum level, I sometimes let go. And out come the tears. It’s usually very brief, but woof – it’s a pretty incredible feeling. 

So that’s why I run. That’s why I now call myself a runner, after nearly two decades of doing it. This sport gives me the ability to distill everything in my life down to the most important elements, in the clearest way possible. And it allows me to slow down, even as I speed up, and notice that beautiful horse once in a while.