Traffic to South Miami today had taken about forty minutes, which was unusually bad without being unusual enough to qualify as a surprise. The rain waited until I got there. I made it from the truck to FootWorks with only a little of it, and then Zeus apparently spotted me. The sky opened into an angry gully washer.
It wasn’t hard to guess that no one else was coming. This was a real thunderstorm, not just inconvenient rain. Even my most faithful running partner Marcel, 27, fast, motivated, practically living across the street from the store and usually there when I am not, wasn’t going to walk over through that much thunder and lightning.
So I was resigned to that part. I figured I would wait a little while and see if it cleared. Miami weather usually has a sense of theater: violent rain, dramatic skies, a lot of noise, and then twenty minutes later everyone carries on as if nothing happened.
This time, it didn’t.
When I got to the store, Ms. Laurie was already shutting things down—closing up, settling stock, clearly at the end of a very long day. I wasn’t going to be the reason she had to stay any later.
Fortunately, the rain let up just enough for me to get back outside with my umbrella. The thunder and lightning were still going pretty hard, though, which made holding an umbrella feel less protective and more like a challenge to the old deity.
Still, there wasn’t much choice. I went back to the truck and decided I would sit there for a while and see what happened. Suddenly, I found myself thinking back to Athens.
During that marathon build, I had used ChatGPT to work through some Stoic ideas about endurance, segment-by-segment of that race. One of the pieces that stayed with me was related to the last six miles of that race. It was titled “The Dialogue with Pain”—the idea that when things get difficult, you stop arguing with the fact that they are difficult and start asking a more useful question: What are they trying to teach me?
So I tried that: What was the actual problem with running in the rain? What were the real risks? What would make it reasonable to go, and what would make it stupid? Couldn’t I just do this Thursday?
I settled on my conditions. If the rain eased enough, if the thunder backed off, and if the lightning moved far enough into the distance, I would run. That was the bargain.
And when the weather finally gave me just enough room, I ran anyway.
I gave myself permission to start very slowly. The roads were slick, and it was supposed to be an easy run to begin with. I let my mind calm down, tried not to think too hard about it, put one foot in front of the other, and concentrated mostly on not slipping.
The first real test was a puddle that stretched all the way across a dark patch of road. There was no elegant way around it. I couldn’t tell how deep it was, and for a moment I had that familiar impulse to stop and negotiate with the inconvenience. Instead, I ran straight into it.
The water comes up over my ankles.
I ran anyway.
Then my headlamp betrayed me.
The rain would hit the front of it, collect there, and funnel straight down into both eyes. The thing I was wearing so I could see where I was going had somehow become a remarkably efficient device for making it harder to see where I was going. Definite design flaw.
I ran anyway.
By then my shoes were completely waterlogged. Every step had that rubbery scrunch and squeak of soaked shoes, and it stayed with me for the rest of the run. There was no fixing it. No drying out. No pretending I wasn’t wet anymore.
I ran anyway.
Then it got dark. The headlamp made everything feel a little Blair Witch—the rain cutting through the beam, the wet streets reflecting it back, the darker turns in the neighborhood disappearing just beyond what I could see.
By then I couldn’t really tell how deep the puddles were anymore, or even exactly where they were. Same with the mud.
So I gave up trying to control the conditions and started making a game out of the misery instead. “I ran anyway” was already stuck in my head, so I started inventing new verses as I went.
Puddle to my ankles.
I ran anyway.
Rain in both eyes.
I ran anyway.
Shoes scrinch-schronching.
I ran anyway. Three miles and countless verses still in front of me.
Somewhere around the first mile, the rain started coming down harder again. By then I was far enough into the run that turning around would have been its own kind of absurdity. More importantly, I noticed that I wasn’t debating it anymore.
I knew I was going to finish.
That was when I realized something had turned a corner. After months when not running had too often been the easier choice, I had been handed an almost comically good collection of reasons to quit—and somewhere between the truck, the puddles, and the rain getting heavier, the decision had become settled.
I was running anyway.
The assignment was 45 easy minutes, with 10:40 as the reference pace. 10:40, however, was not really a gear I had. Trying to force it felt awkward enough that it would have defeated the point of an easy run. The pendulum kept swinging widely on both sides of that number because my gait simply could not match it.
I ran anyway.
[10:40 can take its place beside 118 bpm in the small museum of FU training numbers that sounded reasonable until I actually tried to live inside them.]
By the time I finished, I understood the turning point that simple “easy” run had been. After months of struggling to make that choice consistently, losing my confidence and self respect by degrees, I had finally been handed a night full of perfectly reasonable excuses and decided they weren’t going to win.
The assignment had been 45 easy minutes. Garmin said I ran 45 minutes and one second.
Then I went next door to Subway and treated myself to a protein pocket and a large Diet Coke, satisfied I ran anyway.
Support the run for Parkinson’s: I’m running the 2026 Philadelphia Marathon as a Parkinson’s Champion. If you’d like to support the journey, you can donate through my Parkinson’s Foundation fundraising page.
