Well, today is the 500th edition of this Friday Inspiration newsletter. Aside from a couple of short breaks (one for some time off in 2021 and the other for the first few weeks of Jay’s life back in 2022), I’ve been doing this every week since November 20, 2015. Which is a long time. If you open this email every week or every once in a while, thanks for reading. If you are supporting this whole operation via Patreon or a paid subscription, thank you again for your support—if it weren’t for you, I’d quit, because, well, bills.

If you’ve always wondered what it’s like to feel the satisfaction of helping keep independent art alive and also would like to hear what’s going on behind the scenes, here’s a link to my Patreon, where you can support for a couple bucks a month. I might be so bold as to say that the writing publication of 500 of these things is a pretty good sign I’ll show up next week, and the week after that, and so on.

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I was listening to this live set from Fred again.. and this really catchy bit caught my ear, maybe even sounded familiar, so I looked it up and it turns out it was Fred remixing a tune by one of my favorite artists, Valerie June. Here’s a link to the song, and here’s the full set (video):

There are multiple things that just dropped my jaw when I listened to this really brief Atlas Obscura podcast about The Earth Room. For example: a) an artist put 280,000 pounds of dirt in a 3600-square-foot apartment, b) the apartment is in Soho, meaning its real estate value is in the millions, c) it’s been there since 1977, and d) that I had never heard of it before. (If you’re not able to listen to the podcast, the transcript is a good quick read.) Oh, and you can visit The Earth Room—here’s the info.

Austin Kleon shared this link to a clip of photographer Noah Kalina calling his dad—who is a psychologist—and asking him (as a psychologist) about ups and downs in creative energy/creative blocks/creative burnout, and I have to admit, it hits home for me. On one hand, I’ve always been a big fan of the Lorne Michaels quote about Saturday Night Live, that “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” On the other hand, I have definitely forced it before, and have had a lot of weeks in the past few months that felt like a lot of work to get something decent out there. (Here’s a link to the full 11-minute video.)

These shots are incredible, but I think made even better when you know a bit of the story of how long these photographers waited/planned/did math so they could get the shot. It would be really interesting to hear what they said about how they felt when they finally got these shots, and how they dealt with finally getting something they obsessed over for years.

Based on the title (“Always read carefully”) you might kind of know what’s coming by the time you’re about 10 seconds into this clip, but this podcaster’s co-hosts’ laugher really brings it home in that sort of “we are very comfortable busting your chops and sometimes we don’t even need to say anything when you self-own this effectively.” (From the Contagious Laughter subreddit)

We interviewed runner and writer Sarah Lavender Smith on The Trailhead podcast a couple weeks ago, and it was such a blast for me to hear from a real person in their mid-50s who recently struggled to get through the Hardrock Endurance Run when things didn’t go her way at all. It was also a blast to read some of Sarah’s writing about the race back to her on the podcast—including the passage about vomiting fire. If you’d like to give it a listen, here are the links:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Only somewhat related: Sarah also recently posted on Substack a link to a New York Times piece about “men leaving fiction reading behind,” and asked if any men who followed her were still reading fiction. I didn’t read the article, but I of course was in the middle of reading a fiction book at that point and said so. Then I looked back and realized I’ve read quite a bit of fiction this year, so I thought I’d share the titles here.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Parade by Rachel Cusk
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

The Dispossessed: An Ambigiuous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

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I have enjoyed many of Arthur Brooks’ columns for The Atlantic over the years, so I wasn’t surprised that this video, “You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why.” hit home for me as well. Sometimes I wonder if we’re all keeping ourselves so “busy” with everything that we don’t have time to feel anything anymore—boredom included, but also other things. (video)

I don’t know who the market is for this app, or if the market actually exists, but I love that this person created it: A Chrome extension that adds dust to your browser tabs the longer you’ve had them open, starting at about 3 hours.

Hilary shared this Substack piece with me and although I don’t see myself in everything the author says about running culture and numbers contests, I definitely agree we could all use a reminder about perspective—like I know a lot of people who run very long distances in the mountains, but I am also very aware that everyone at the starting line of an ultramarathon is probably the “weird runner person” in their family/office/neighborhood. I loved this bit: “That’s why I say: think of 2K like 20K. A small run after a workday is already a victory. Getting yourself moving, even briefly, is a powerful act in a daily life that already exhausts us.”

True story: One time when I was living in my van, I met up with my friend Mauricio one morning to scramble up the Third Flatiron in Boulder, carrying a harness and a small tagline to rappel off the top when we were done. We hiked in, climbed the easy route to the summit, and only when I opened my pack to pull out the harness and rope did I realize that I’d carried my MacBook Pro in the backpack’s laptop sleeve the entire time. This incident was the first thing I thought of when newsletter sponsor Janji sent me their new Revy Pack, an 18-liter backpack designed for running, and also run commuting (you can slide either a 15″ laptop or a 2-liter hydration reservoir in its separated compartment). I have not put a huge amount of weight in it so far, but I have run with a laptop, rain jacket, and water bottles in it, and I have to say, I’ve been liking it.

My friend Jason Tyler Burton is releasing a new album, and his Kickstarter went live for it last week. You might be into it if you like Jason Isbell and/or John Prine—here’s his Bandcamp page for a sample of his work, and here’s one of my favorite (older) songs of his, which I think he put out a year or two before I first met him and his wife Jenn, in Springdale, Utah, more than a decade ago: A Garden Grows. (Funny story: Hilary and I asked Jason if he’d play guitar at our wedding + wedding reception, very chill, just whatever he felt like, but we asked him to cover one song, which he had to learn, Nick Jaina’s Sebastapol, and play it as Hilary and I walked down the “aisle” after the ceremony. For whatever reason, I basically have zero memory of him playing that song, and I don’t think any video recording of it exists, but I’m sure it sounded amazing. )

Mike Sowden, in this piece, delivers a clinic on how to follow your curiosity to create something really interesting. He goes from this sentence: “Unfortunately I have no idea how birds work.” To: “In fact, as my research in a local library uncovered that afternoon, birds are supremely useful to long-distance walkers. Here are four ways how.” And then, guess what, four really cool things about birds!  I remain a huge fan.

We interviewed Denverite and ultrarunner Junko Kazukawa on The Trailhead a couple weeks ago, and the episode went live this week. I have to say, while doing the interview, I was really struck by how casually she talks about her running career—she ran her first 100-mile race, the Leadville 100, at age 48, just after her second bout with breast cancer, and she’s still cranking out ultramarathon finishes  at age 62 (including this year’s Bighorn 100 in Wyoming). It was a really inspiring chat, and I think might make you wonder if you’re actually younger than you feel, no matter how “old” you are on paper.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify

I had a blast co-teaching the Freeflow Institute Grand Canyon writing workshop this past April, and I am both happy to share that there will be a second Grand Canyon workshop in April 2026, and sad that I’m not going to be teaching next year (I love the Grand Canyon and I love Freeflow workshops, but it was too much time away from my little guy). But Craig Childs and Sherwin Bitsui will be, and I bet it’s going to be amazing. If you’re interested, more info is here, and applications are due by September 17, 2025.

Do you need to look at a huge map of the entire Star Wars galaxy? Sure you do. Why am I not surprised (but still awed) that they created this? I love humans. (via Kottke)

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When the world is going crazy,

which is how it feels anytime 

I spend too much of my time

looking at the news slash social media

slash glowing screens slash information,

which I’ve been doing for the past week or so,

I go to the hardware store. 

Because at the hardware store,

I can feel, for a few minutes, that

maybe the world is not falling apart,

as much as these people screaming at each other

about “your side” and “our side” on TV news clips 

have very nearly led me to believe.

I walk in the sliding doors,

someone asks me if they can help, 

I admit that yes, I do need help, 

finding a metric tape measure,

or some 3-in-1 multi-purpose oil,

or some metal thing that I can hardly describe

but it attaches to another metal thing

which attaches to another metal thing,

and if I attach all those metal things together,

one small problem in my life will be solved,

and that’s not gonna save the world, 

what with all the people killing people,

and people trying to kill those people,

and people saying more people should be killed,

and maybe I can’t do much about that today,

but I can spend a little time of my day

and fix that thing in my house that needs fixing, 

with help from the folks at the hardware store,

and that will save a little part of my little world,

and tip my mental scale a tiny bit back 

towards something that feels like sanity.

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I watch way too many of these NBA highlight collection videos, and I know not everyone likes basketball, but I love this one for a couple reasons: a) The conceit of the video, “Dunks but the dunker gets increasingly more unlikely,” is actually backed up with each person’s statistic of “dunks per season,” and b) many of these clips show the reactions from the team’s bench, from the teammates who are often baffled and elated that their teammate threw one down (video)

Ultrarunner (and fellow Montanan) Jeff Garmire has been attempting the self-supported fastest known time for the Appalachian Trail for the past 40-some days, and if I am reading things correctly, he is still on pace for the record as of Thursday afternoon. He’s doing this to rains money for The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGBTQ+) young people, and the fundraising goal is $10 for each mile he’s hiking/running, or $21,970. Here’s a link if you’d like to read more about the fundraiser and/or donate, and here’s a link if you’d like to track his progress (if I’m doing the math correctly, he should be finishing sometime before Monday morning).

As a very recent convert to the church of putting winter tires on my vehicle, I appreciated this very simple explanation and graphic about winter tires from the folks at OpenSnow.

I don’t read every single email I get from the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, but I try, and occasionally I read one that’s just perfect for that day, like this one Ada Limón wrote about a small moment she witnessed on a subway platform: While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

I was just running with a friend a couple weeks ago and talking about—and I wish I could sound smarter than this, but I can’t—how cool the moon is. Like if the moon had a fan club, I’d join. And I think the guy who made these plaster models of the moon’s surface back in 1874 (!!!!!) probably would have joined it too.

The PhotoshopRequests subreddit is often people asking to have photos of someone edited for a funeral or memorial, or people asking to have an ex-partner removed from a photo, but occasionally it’s something like this guy whose young cousin left her bike at his house and would like people to take the photos of him riding her too-small bike and turn them into him “doing something cool,” an opportunity for hilarity to ensue, and I hope he shares a bunch of these photos with his cousin.

I’m sure there have been dozens of articles written about Robert Redford’s best movies since he passed away this week, but I liked this one, because it reminded me of a couple (to me) less-obvious films he acted in: Spy Game, and Old Man and the Gun. (I’d have to add Sneakers as one of my sleeper Robert Redford favorites, though.)

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I spent a good chunk of the beginning of my book Ultra-Something talking about the movie Rocky, so of course when this CinemaStix video about it popped up in my YouTube feed, I of course watched it, and of course was not disappointed (although I did already know the bit of trivia about the skating rink scene). (video)

I am a big believer that you don’t have to have gone to film school to make films, and that you don’t have to go to art school to make art, and that you don’t have to have an MFA (or even a college degree) to be a writer, but it sure feels nice when someone smart says it, so here’s Linda Carroll’s piece “The magic of self-taught writers”

I did not know I needed to read this profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (although I am interested in his new movie, The Smashing Machine), but as Jason Kottke put it, “Sam Anderson” can write. I laughed out loud at this sentence, which is a master stroke in how to use punctuation to make a joke: I do not need to introduce you to Dwayne “Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson” Johnson. 

I got to meet with newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration CEO Andy Blow and COO Jonny Tye last month, a few days before Jonny was to crew Dan Jones, who was running the UTMB. Afterward, I thought, “I should have asked Jonny if he’s ever kept track of all the food he eats while crewing,” because that (to me) would be really interesting. Fast-forward a few weeks to me reading the “Crewing 101: How to crew an endurance athlete” article on the PFH website, scrolling to the end, and found this chart comparing the nutrition intake of Chris Myers, who took 5th in the Western States Endurance Run, and Brad Williams, who helped crew Chris (it looks like Brad was a little under-nourished, in my opinion):

I clicked on this link, When Bruce Lee Trained With Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and was delighted to see it had been written by Jeff Chang, who wrote one of my favorite hip hop history books ever, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. The article tells the story of the friendship between the two men, which started when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a junior at UCLA, who had just won the college basketball championship. I didn’t realize until the end that the piece is actually an excerpt from Chang’s new book, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, which is also exciting (but is also going to cost me $35).

I have a vague memory of this thing happening when I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros on the original Nintendo, but had not idea it was a “glitch” that inspired many other secret glitchy features in video games for years afterward. (thanks, Ed)

I think Keith Haring’s art is still relevant, and if you don’t believe me, how about this bit that Jillian Hess dug up from Keith Haring’s Journals? “Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The worlds of art and money are constantly intermingling. To survive this mixture the magic in art has to be applied in new ways. Magic must always triumph.^”

I am writing this post a few hours before I go to the theater to see One Battle After Another, so all I can say about this long read about the film is that it made me even more excited to see it. I didn’t know that Paul Thomas Anderson walked out of film school at NYU because a professor snobbily dismissed Terminator 2: Judgment Day as an unserious movie, but that makes me like him. Also, this line: “It turns out that the answer to the thought experiment of whether a director already widely canonized for the consistent quality of his craft can handle the sort of massive budget more often handed over to hacks is—resoundingly—“yes.”

Marty Brodsky and I met maybe eight or nine years ago, I think at an event I did at the Boulder Bookstore, and I’ve been following his writing ever since (I have included several of his recent Substack essays in this newsletter). He reached out and asked for any advice I might have about self-publishing, since he’s starting to go down that road and self-publish a book, and I said, “Would you be up for a Substack Live conversation?” So we did that yesterday. Here’s a link to the recording.

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A selection of podcasts from 2025

Singletrack

Jeff Garmire

Peak Route

The Buzz

https://podcasts.apple.com/mx/podcast/john-kelly-on-barkley-balance-and-the-appalachian-trail-fkt/id1804209940?i=1000709101074&l=en-GB

Hiker Trash Radio

https://hikertrashradio.com/episodes/random-forest-runner-john-kelly-part-i

https://hikertrashradio.com/episodes/random-forest-runner-john-kelly-part-ii

Running Won’t Save You

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/comparing-cruelty-can-you-compare-a-barkley-to/id1783631999?i=1000702259878

From the Backcountry

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/105-john-kelly-appalachian-trail-fkt-attempt-tor-des/id1616882162?i=1000724712098

Runners Diary

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/138-john-kelly/id1667173628?i=1000703463383

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Life comes at you fast: On Monday, I was not at all interested in birdwatching. On Tuesday, I was obsessed with it for two straight hours. I am probably not the first person to tell you that you should, as soon as you can spare one hour and 59 minutes, watch the film Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching. 

Someone sent me a link to it on August 29th, 10 days after it went live on YouTube (thanks, Jason), followed by four or five other people. By the time I got around to watching the first 20 minutes of it, I was so taken with it that I thought “surely someone’s written about this.” And yes, Slate had written an article about it, as had the folks at GearJunkie. In the first month after it was released, it had 1.1 million views on YouTube. So what makes it so good?

The story: Two brothers from St. Louis—who are very novice birdwatchers—take one 2010 Kia Sedona minivan and one year to attempt a “Big Year,” the birding term for a person trying to identify as many birds as possible, by sight or sound, in a geographic area in the span of one calendar year. 

Two minutes into the film, Quentin Reiser, sitting in front of the camera, explains the genesis of the adventure: “One day I got high and found the family’s bird guide book. And I thought about how crazy it would be if you knew all the birds in that book. Just how insane that is.”

As he’s saying those three sentences, his younger brother, cinematographer Owen Reiser, pans the camera down a bong to show it sitting on top of a copy of Birds of North America: A Guide to Field Identification. 

Quentin and Owen come off as two regular guys with almost zero knowledge of birding (which they are) but they also obviously worked really, really hard on this film—which is, by the way, free to watch on YouTube (because Owen has not turned on ads for it). Owen is a legit professional cinematographer who has shot documentary footage for National Geographic and others, and brings that production quality to the video footage of birds in the film. But he also had a vision for the aesthetic of the film (I believe), and almost everything else in the film is vérité, with hand-built animations and graphics—which makes the film feel more authentic to the experience of eating-rice-and-beans while living out of a 2010 Kia Sedona with your brother, camping in Cracker Barrel parking lots. 

Quentin is very comfortable in front of his younger brother’s camera and dropping profane wisdom during the sit-down interviews (“Dude, holy fuck mosquitoes love to be inside your van”), or living the adventure in real time in the field, like when he’s enthusiastically snapping photos of a Montezuma Quail in Arizona in March, and he quietly announces, “I’d run through a brick wall for that bird.” 

The brothers find their way into the birdwatching community (and interview many of its more accomplished birders), explain everything they learned about birdwatching to the rest of us non-experts, do it in their own style, don’t gloss over the uncomfortable parts (the mosquitoes, the heat, the negative side of competing to identify more birds than anyone else, the discomfort of living in a very small old minivan), but capture the joy of discovery and adventure, and will make you laugh out loud (I promise). 

Maybe what works best about the whole thing is that it’s fun. These two are clearly fun to be around, enjoy being fun, and even though they’re dedicated to this obsessive quest that definitely changed their lives, it almost always feels light. If you take a second to examine the graphics and animations, you can imagine Owen having fun creating them, dedicating an hour (or hours) to something that he knows will be on the screen for only a handful of seconds. These two are real artists who have made a Very Fun Thing, and many of us probably need that kind of fun right now. 

The film is free, but you can support it or say thanks through Owen’s Venmo or by buying the book Quentin and Owen made about the trip on Bookshop or Amazon or Barnes & Noble. 

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Apologies if you are a longtime fan of ARIatHOME and will wonder if I live under a rock, but I somehow just discovered him this week, and I kept going “no way” every time a new person got on the mic and rapped or sang—especially the two “Brooklyn OGs” who appear around the 10-minute mark. As a commenter on a different video said: “According to these videos, every single person in NYC can spit hot fire at a moment’s notice” (video)

I loved this collection of photos of the writing spaces of authors who have made the 2025 Booker Prize longlist because (in my opinion) not a single one of them would be featured on anyone’s Pinterest page or Dwell Magazine or whatever. One of them is a couch, one of them is a bench, no one has more than one monitor, one has a view of the next-door neighbor’s shingled roof—I mean, they’re all so humble. (via Kottke)

I don’t think I’m as much of a slow lane enthusiast as the author of this New York Times Letter of Recommendation, but I love this piece because of the evolution of the author’s approach to driving because I had the same revelation about speeding a few years ago—if you’re trying to make up time, it’s really hard to make the math work in most cases, no matter how fast you drive. [GIFT LINK]

I saw a video of an Instagram influencer giving his bus driver a Rolex yesterday, which is a nice thing to do, but I couldn’t help thinking how much cooler it would have been if the guy had just given the bus driver the watch in private instead of making it into a piece of content. Maybe that’s what I like so much about this story about Ludacris ordering spring rolls at a restaurant—it genuinely happened, and makes you think Ludacris probably just acts like this all the time.

My friend Ben Polley wrote this piece on who lives and who dies after getting lost in the backcountry, and there’s a bunch of fascinating stuff in it, including this bit from the chief of county search and rescue here in Missoula: “there are two main categories of outdoor emergencies: those that involve meeting a schedule and those that involve pleasing another person.”

I read my friend Ed Roberson’s Good News from the American West newsletter every Wednesday, and I have never done this before, but I’m just going to copy and paste what he wrote about this story about a first ascent of a big rock climb along the Salmon River:  “Here’s a cool story about  a “wild and crazy” first ascent in Idaho—one that required hiking 22 miles, swimming 3.5 miles of whitewater, ascending an unclimbed wall, then floating back to civilization in a boat full of friends.”

I am not usually interested in videos with titles like “Shocking police brutality in Ireland,” but this was posted on the ContagiousLaughter subreddt, so I figured I could chance watching all 30 seconds of it, and I’ll tell you, it delivers, and does not need a trigger warning. (I mean, I guess it is technically a “dirty joke,” as far as that goes.)

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TODAY is a big day—we are re-opening registration for How To Tell One Story, my online writing course. We sold out the last round of 25 spots back in July, and I just this week finished up reading the stories the folks who completed the course sent me (pretty much the highlight of my week). If you’re interested in writing, or really, putting together a story in any format, you can register for the course from today (October 10) through next Friday (October 17). We’re going to do the $50 discount again this time, and we’ll shut down the page once we hit 25 registrations. You’re probably about to spend some money on holiday gifts for people in the next couple months—maybe get yourself a little gift now? (If you miss this round, we’ll open registrations again in February). Here’s the link: How To Tell One Story

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I loved this little film, using the words from the poem “An Ongoing List of Things Found in the Library Book Drop, Usually Being Used as Bookmarks” by Sam Treviño, and showing the whole thing from the librarian’s perspective. (video) (Also: here’s the original poem the film was based on)

This was of course written in response to current news, but I honestly think you could do endless variations of topics written in the voice of Animal from the Muppets and I’d read it and laugh. But this was pretty great: “AAAGGGHHH!!!” A Memo from Animal, Your New Editor-in-Chief

I’m not interested in using AI for the stuff I create, but I’m also not that interested in spending my time shit-talking it or people who use it. That said, when artists I respect comment on the whole moment we’re in with all of it, I am interested in what they have to say. So I read this piece/cartoon by Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) when it landed in my inbox, and I definitely agree with a lot of what he says here—not so much the insults directed at people who evangelize about it, more the “talent vs. skill” stuff.

I’ve been following Hallie Bateman since back in 2017 when I bought one of her “Creative Licenses,” which were literal licenses, wallet-sized plastic cards saying you were licensed to do creative stuff (with a hand-drawn portrait of you), so I loved this illustrated story of how trying a new pen made her an artist. I mean, who among us hasn’t bought something we hoped would change our lives? Often more expensive than a nib pen and ink.

I am a fan of José González because he makes wonderfully music that I find grounding and calming, but also because he once told a story during a live performance I was watching on YouTube, and the point of the story was that someone fell asleep during one of his shows, and he kind of laughed it off and said something like “they were having a different kind of spiritual experience.” Anyway, I found this rework of his song “Broken Arrows” by Portico Quartet and I looped it for about an hour yesterday—maybe you’ll like it too, even if you don’t listen to it 12 times in a row.

I have linked to Anne Kadet’s Substack here before, because I love how she takes her experience as a journalist and follows her curiosity to things in New York, bringing the reader along as she breezily navigates whatever topic she’s decided to research, interviewing people in what feels like very casual conversations. So when I saw she went to the world’s longest footrace, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100-Mile Race in Queens, I had to read the piece she wrote about it. It’s great. And if you aren’t familiar with the race (I mention it in my book Ultra-Something), it takes place around one city block, around a high school.

This guy was out on a trail run and a barred owl swooped down and stole his hat right off his head! Isn’t that crazy!?!? OK, you know what’s even crazier? It happened a second time the next week, on a different trail! Not sure if it’s the same owl, who just loves messing with this guy? Below the carousel of photos in this Reddit post is a link to the video where you can watch it happen.

If you missed getting one of the “What Does Your Urine Say About You?” water bottles we made this summer, we have a few extras we ended up making to fulfill the minimum order quantity. Grab one now for the person on your holiday gift list who would appreciate a good joke about pee? I don’t know.

September 26th was the 10-year anniversary of the first time I ever tried to run an ultramarathon—the 2015 Bear Chase Race in Lakewood, Colorado, at Bear Creek Lake Park. A brief, bullet-point version of how that happened might be: 

It was kind of a lark, but I got hooked. Jayson and I ran a couple 50-mile races together, then signed up for a 100-mile race, the 2017 Run Rabbit Run, and ran it together. I made a film about the experience (and about Jayson’s life) called How To Run 100 Miles and it screened at several dozen film festivals the next year and racked up almost 6 million views on YouTube. Jayson’s mom liked it, which was really my main goal. 

Over the next 10 years, I ran almost 20,000 miles and ran 15 other races—a couple more 100-milers, some 100Ks, and some 50-mile and 50K races. Outside of races, I put together some big routes in the mountains on my own, and began to enjoy long days out in trail running shoes and a running vest more than anything else. 

Jayson attempted a couple 100-mile races in 2019, and during those attempts started to discover some chronic medical issues. His running went up and down for several years, through the pandemic, job changes, a few moves, buying a house, and in March 2025, becoming a dad. 

All of a sudden—but not really all of a sudden, is it—it was almost fall 2025, ten years after we’d done that first ultra, shuffling around the trails at Bear Creek Lake Park. I texted Jayson:

We signed up for the race, I booked a fast trip to Denver, arrived, and several times in the lead-up and even the morning of, Jayson said: We really don’t have to run together if you don’t want to, like if you want to try to run fast or whatever. With everything he’d had going on, long story short, he hadn’t finished an ultra race since the Run Rabbit Run in 2017. I said: We’re running together. 

I saw it as my job to make sure he got across the finish line, although honestly, I wasn’t worried about him being able to finish. Maybe I just wanted to be there for it.

Time travel, at this point, is not yet possible. And despite all the messaging about making things the way they used to be—America, your skin/testosterone levels/how you felt when you were 22, the band you loved in your 20s getting back together—it’s really not possible, is it? 

You can try to revisit something, but no matter what you do, you can only get partway there, because you’ve changed. Hopefully for the better in a few ways. 

As they say, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. A kind-of-happy, kind-of-sad feeling that can make you smile over the top of a lump in your throat. 

If you run long enough—as with pretty much any athletic activity—you’ll eventually start slowing down. I saw this chart showing typical VO2 max for humans, going from about age 27 to about age 77, and even without the numbers, you probably know how the line trended:

So if you want to continue to do the things you did when you were “young,” maybe you have to get better at self-care:

Which is maybe where Jayson and I are both trying to be, 10 years later. 

We started near the back of the pack, shuffled through the first 6-mile lap, shuffled through the second 12.5-mile lap, taking it easy when we needed to, refueling at aid stations when we needed to, not so much “racing” as enjoying a day out on the trails with volunteers handing us snacks and water. Anyone nearby, even if they didn’t register our casual pace, might have thought we weren’t taking the race very seriously. And I guess we weren’t, in that competition-is-everything-Nike-commercial sense. 

When I think back to all the theater screenings of How To Run 100 Miles, I remember several Q&A sessions when someone in the audience would ask something like, “What was the best part of running that 100-mile race together?” And I’d always say the same thing: The training. I loved getting to run every weekend with my friend Jayson. Even then, in our later 30s, I knew that wasn’t something that many people our age got to do. 

And running the 2025 Bear Chase 50K, we dropped right back into our long-running dialogue, talking about books, kids, jobs, food, same shit, different year, happily. The temperature was fairly pleasant, we had some fortuitous cloud cover all morning, and the wind picked up on our final lap as we chugged the final miles toward the finish. Jayson was definitely going to complete the race, and if everything went well with the baby nap schedule, Jayson’s partner Kate would bring Baby June to the finish. Wind gusts had wreaked havoc at the finish line, and we could see several blown-over tents as we jogged the last 100 yards of trail, scanning for Kate and June near the finish arch. 

Over the course of the eight-plus years since How To Run 100 Miles came out, I’ve had a number of people ask me, “Is Jayson still running?” or “How’s Jayson doing?” Depending on how familiar they are with him and how much time we have, I’ll tell them a few details to catch them up on his life since the Run Rabbit Run. Sometimes I’m not quite sure what to say in those situations. 

But at the Bear Chase Race, according to the smile on his face as he crossed his first race finish line as a dad, and his first ultra finish line since 2017: 

He’s doing great. 

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Today is the LAST DAY to sign up for my How To Tell One Story online writing course for 2025. If you haven’t heard people (me) talking about it before, it is:

• a six-week, 12-email course designed to help you get one good written narrative nonfiction story on the page
• comprised of brief emails and assignments (a 3- to 6-minute read plus a 10- to 30-minute writing exercise)
• proven to be very satisfying according to the 27 people who have taken the post-course survey (and the 180+ other people who have taken the course and complained about it)
• usually $249 but $199 this time around
• only offered every three months

If you’re interested in more information and/or signing up for the course, the deadline is 11:59 p.m. MST tonight (February 17th)—here’s the link to the course page.

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Please meet Naoki, a Japanese fly fisherman who has dedicated his life to old reggae records (and fishing for tarpon), who says this partway through this short film: “This is part of my adventure of my life. I’m still working on it.” (video)

I am not good at cooking eggs (I am trying to get better at it), so when I see a video titled “Egg master flow-state” and the thumbnail is 12 freshly-cracked eggs on a restaurant kitchen’s flat-top, I’m going to watch it. Some people enjoy watching professional golfers who are the best in the world at what they do; I enjoy watching professional egg-cookers.

I was an on-and-off listener to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast over the years, and I was kind of shocked to hear that a) he was ending it and b) it had been going on for 16 years. Here’s a quick tribute The Atlantic published [GIFT LINK], which contained this quote: “[T]he platform Maron helped create—the low-key chat show—has exploded into an industry worth billions. Comedians of all stripes now host back-and-forth chats, though few display the compassion Maron is known for.”

Last week, I finished reading Ruth Whippman’s book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, because Hilary picked it up a few weeks earlier and sold me on how thought-provoking it was. She also hosted a four-week online “book club” with a bunch of moms (and our friend Jonathan). In reading the book, I had the dual perspective of being a dad of a toddler and as a man who grew up in some pretty traditionally “masculine” spaces. So Hilary and I both have our dog-eared copies of the book and a date night coming up so we can chat about it uninterrupted by (MOM!) our (MOM!) little (MOM!) guy. You are not invited to our date night, but you can get a sense of some of her dogeared pages/underlined sections in the last Substack she wrote about it: Why Don’t I Call My Son “Sweetheart?”

On Wednesday, I had my first run of the fall season in which I thought to myself, “Wow, maybe should have worn pants for this one,” and while I vastly prefer running in shorts, I live in western Montana, where we definitely have a “pants weather” season. So I will be wearing the Trail Tights from newsletter sponsor Janji because they’re nice and also because they have SEVEN POCKETS. The Women’s 7/8 Trail Tights have five pockets. (both of them come in reflective prints, which I am quite excited about for the dark mornings and evenings that are coming soon)

We interviewed writer Jared Beasley on The Trailhead podcast a couple weeks ago, which required me to read his book The Endurance Artist, which was fantastic, as was our conversation with Jared, who is a real writer who knows what the hell he’s doing, and who was willing to put in the work to get to know Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, the quirky (to put it lightly) guy who dreamed up the hardest footrace in the world, the Barkley Marathons.
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I remain a huge fan of Brandon Stanton and his Humans of New York work, and could not be more excited that the project has grown to the point that he can take over Grand Central Station, remove every single ad, and choose from more than 10,000 of his portraits to put on an exhibition starring everyday/extraordinary folks he’s interviewed. (via Kottke)

This Blackbird Spyplane piece Hilary sent me yesterday echoes something I have quoted my friend Forest as saying to me once, a piece of advice that lives rent-free in my head—You don’t look cool looking at your phone. My favorite part: “This is the real cure for “phone addiction” that no one has considered. Forget lightphones, forget apps that lock you out of other apps. Humans are a deeply image-conscious species. Just think about how dumb you look when you’re on your phone, and how you would never willingly look that dumb by any other means.”

Also: If you missed my post yesterday about celebrating 10 years of running ultramarathons, here’s that, and if you’d rather just watch a video about it, here you go:

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“Who’s gonna watch a senior citizen grandmother do jigsaw puzzles on a platform where people are competing playing Warzone?” Apparently a lot of people. (video)

This math about budgeting at the bookstore of course makes no sense but is exactly what most of us do when we want something, and that is why it is an example of a well-written joke.

I finally subscribed to Blackbird Spyplane yesterday after Hilary sent me this piece about creativity and AI and making birthday cards for people, as there were so many good lines in it, but especially this one: “‘You can get rich if all you want to do is get rich,’ my mom, a law-school dropout, told me, but I’d only be happy if I did something that really mattered to me.”

The folks at Injinji are sponsoring this edition of this newsletter, and it’s kind of great timing, because it’s starting to get cold here in Missoula and I’m just going to keep running through the winter again like I did last year and the year before. And: Injinji just introduced a Snow Crew sock for winter running, same five-toe design but with Thermolite EcoMade fibers for insulation. I wore them on my run yesterday, which was 28 degrees (Fahrenheit) at the beginning, which felt way too cold right now but that I bet will feel balmy when I’m wearing these socks in January.

I saw this puffy jacket Aldi made to look like a giant baked potato on Kottke .org and immediately thought Hell Yes That’s Great, and then I clicked through to the website and saw the silver rain poncho it comes with. I hope some people who really, really love baked potatoes end up with these jackets.

In 2025, four of his novels and two of his short stories were adapted into shows or movies, so Stephen King wrote about that for LitHub, and of course he said a whole bunch of really thoughtful stuff and never once said anything about the money he’s made, which, when 100-plus movies and shows have been created based on your work, is probably quite significant.

I assume, maybe not incorrectly, that if you subscribe to this newsletter, you appreciate the diversity of links I dig up every week—short videos, microblogs, long essays, and the occasional piece of internet media that only takes 1.5 seconds to appreciate, such as this post in the oddlysatisfying Subreddit titled “My Neighbor’s Tree Fits Perfectly In My Window.”

Austin Kleon recommended in this piece George Saunders wrote about the dilemma we all (probably) have with art made by people who are or have become problematic, and I found it thought-provoking but also comforting, in some way. It’s worth a read. This was one of my favorite bits: “I find that my life is simplified if, when I’m tempted to have an opinion, I ask myself why I need one, and what I aim to do with it. If there’s nothing to do with it, I try not to get too worked up.”

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I don’t often re-publish stories I’ve written, but I remembered this one this past week when I was tagging along on a rock climbing trip in the desert with my mom and her friends. I think this essay, back when I wrote it in 2013, was a sort of expression of gratitude through a story about my grandma (my mom’s mom), who was in the last 14 months of her life at the time I published it. I hope it still resonates.

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I flew to Iowa to visit my grandmother in the hospital a couple weeks ago. She’s been in and out of hospitals for the past few months, kind of one thing after another, the latest being a dental infection. I got off the plane in Des Moines, rented a car and drove straight to the hospital, where she was in bed, the right side of her face swollen up around the infection, IV drip in her arm.

I sat with her for three days, leaving when she went to sleep at night and took naps in the afternoon, but mostly we just sat and chatted like we always do. I ran across the street a couple times to get her milkshakes and real coffee from the coffee shop a block away. She only drank a few sips of it, but it didn’t matter. If it was between hospital coffee and espresso, I thought she should have espresso.

We went for short walks up and down the hallway, Grandma apologizing for how slow she was going, shuffling with her walker in front of her, and me telling her that she was the fastest 85-year-old lady I’d hung out with, plus I didn’t have anything else to do that day anyway. I have about a dozen deadlines and a million e-mails, but only one grandparent. Sitting there in the chair next to the hospital bed, helping her in and out of the chair, cutting up her food, I wondered how many more times I’d get to spend the whole day with my grandma, just me and her.

My grandma knows I live in a van and that I’m a writer, and I don’t think she cares what I do as long as I’m happy. She doesn’t read my blog, or care too much about rock climbing and mountains, and she knows I travel a lot, but I don’t think she cares where — I think she sees me in one of two locations: in person, and at the other end of the phone line wherever I call her from.

While I was visiting her in the hospital, I was supposed to talk her into moving into an assisted living home five minutes from my parents’ house, where she’d have her own apartment and her seven kids would be able to visit more frequently. I tried a little bit. Her other option was a nursing home in her hometown, and she liked that idea better, despite the wishes of all of her kids. She’s lived in the same town, Emmetsburg, Iowa, pop. 4,000, her entire life, and in the same house since 1956. She’s not going to be able to go back to her house, but she doesn’t want to leave Emmetsburg, where she raised seven children, and outlived almost every single one of her friends.

When we talked about the assisted living home, she said across the hospital table, “Brendan, I don’t want to go somewhere I don’t know anyone.”

I said Grandma, I go everywhere, and I don’t know anybody.

Which is a stupid thing to say to your grandmother when you’re a young guy who loves to travel, and she’s talking about leaving the same house she raised a family in for 30-plus years, and then lived in alone for 26 years. She said, I mean, Can you imagine me leaving the only place I’ve ever lived? and I understood how scared she is.

I’ve had something like 23 different addresses in my life, and every time I moved out of another apartment, I had a little twinge of nostalgia, a little sadness as I closed the door on all the emptied-out rooms I’d made memories in. My grandma had to multiply that feeling times 66 years. Driving away from the hospital, I realized Grandma and I were both talking about freedom, even though it looks wildly different to each of us. She doesn’t want to live anyplace where people tell her what to do, and I suppose I’m kind of doing the same right now.

I guess we like to point out the traits we get from the people who raised us, how we’re like our people — I was raised on spicy food; my family’s always been Cardinals fans; we never back down, et cetera. I’ve spent most of my life rebelling against everything I grew up with, but I get it. When you’re 85, like my grandma, people say you’re stubborn. I think I’m just like her, but I call it driven. I fancy myself to be pretty tough, able to get myself out of any jam in the mountains with sheer perseverance. My grandma doesn’t care if anybody thinks she’s tough, but she fell and broke her hip five years ago, and walked around her house for three days thinking it was just bruised before she went to get an x-ray. My family, both sides, has never been shy about busting people’s balls, no matter the situation. It’s a true art, and I have a hard time relating to people who don’t know how to do it. My Uncle Dan, on Grandma’s second day in the hospital, told her, “Mom, we’re so optimistic, we’re gonna buy you some green bananas.”

We walked down the hallway one evening, just me and Grandma, past a few open doors of hospital rooms, and she apologized again for being slow, and I just walked next to her with my hands in my pockets and assured her I wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere. She said Brendan, I bet you can walk anywhere you want, and I said Yeah Grandma, I guess I can. I thought about all the places I had walked, like the top of the Grand Teton and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and I don’t know why my grandma had to say something like that hunched over her walker and shuffling along in a hospital gown and why it made me so sad.

Last Christmas, after I hugged her goodbye, she grabbed my hand with both hands, taking one more second. That was the first time she’d ever done that, and I walked out the door of my parents’ house wondering if she did because she wasn’t sure if it was the last time she’d see me. It wasn’t, of course, but I guess you never know when you get to be 85.

Someday she’ll be gone, and then I’ll be a wreck for a while, but I suppose after that, I’ll find a few good places to think of her when I’m out there being stubborn and walking anywhere I want.

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My grandma died in June 2014. Here’s the essay/obituary I wrote about her back then.

May your inner physics nerd (and chemistry nerd, too) keep you sucked into watching this entire video from 1987, which just keeps going and going, even though at times it looks like the chain reaction is millimeters away from being upset, and maybe that’s why it’s so compelling. (video) (thanks, Eric)

A hundred years from now, when historians are looking back at the communication styles we developed in the first couple decades of social media, I really hope they are able to access the many, many jokes that have been written in 280 characters or fewer, including this one, which I am sure will pop up in your head every time you put on a shirt for the rest of your life.

Speaking of social media: I forget where I found a link to this essay titled “How to end your extremely online era,” before I read the whole thing, not so much for the tips on how to spend less time scrolling, but for the observations and banger lines like these two:

• “I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.”
• “Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad.”

I had to count, but it’s been six months since we wrapped up our Freeflow Institute course in the Grand Canyon, and I continue to be glad that Eliot Treichel joined us for his second Freeflow course, even though he’s a published author and professor of English, because he put together this wonderful write-up about his experience on the trip for NRS’s Duct Tape Diaries.

We interviewed Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, for The Trailhead a few weeks back, and just published the episode this week to coincide with the publication of his book, The Running Ground. I didn’t say this in the interview, but I am not usually drawn to books about people getting faster at running road marathons, but the book held my interest in that exact thing, as well as the stories Thompson pulls into the narrative, about his father’s tumultuous life, his battle with cancer, and his efforts to balance his ambitions of being a good partner and a good dad, having a successful career, and running his fastest marathon in his mid-40s.
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If you are at all moved by a very specific nostalgia for the computers/technology/aesthetics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, you may (as I sometimes do) scratch that itch with the r/cassettefuturism subreddit, which is full of photos of that sort of stuff, like this 1965 photo of the reception desk at the General Motors Technical Center, or this set of photos of the Brutalist design of the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco from 1973.

Maybe you’re paying attention to the World Series this year, or maybe not. Maybe you did or didn’t know that Game 3 went to 18 innings. Either way, here is a wonderful essay about staying up too late to watch the conclusion of that game, and I don’t think it’s spoiling it to say that the essay includes a mention of (and the trailer for) Invasion U.S.A., a Chuck Norris movie with a 22 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I have a number of new designs for coffee mugs and t-shirts that I’m trying to get out before the holiday shopping season starts ramping up (I can’t believe I’m saying that already, I apologize), and I whipped this one up a while back when I was flogging myself trying to write something about something and of course struggling mightily with it. Which reminded me that no matter what people on LinkedIn say, the creative process is never straightforward, and I don’t think it should be. Anyway, maybe someone in your life would like this mug that says “Please Do Not Question My Creative Process” (and by “someone,” maybe I mean “you”):