I knew I needed to get the “Long Endurance” run done before I left work this Sunday. Or at least I was afraid that if I went home first, I wouldn’t do it. I would get home, lie down on the bed for a minute, and that would be that. No chance at the tempting casual jaunt through my shaded Coral Gables neighborhood. So I changed at work and headed out toward Rickenbacker Causeway around 5 p.m. for the 7.5-mile run assigned by my virtual coach through the Parkinson’s Foundation.

I knew it was going to be hot. What I had not really accounted for was how different that bridge would be at five in the afternoon in August. I’d run it plenty of times with a hardcore subset of my FootWorks running group, but mostly in the 6 a.m. hour during the fall and winter months. You could say I had an idealized conception of that experience. The bridge is one of the highest places you can run in this city, and it’s all-out Icarus in the Miami summer. My bottle of electrolytes, which I had thought to take with me, was the saving grace for the day.

Usually the causeway is lousy with runners. Not today. Reasonable folks were under beach umbrellas, in the water or under trees. The other problem was that this time I needed to keep going a couple of miles beyond the bridge before I could turn around. The planned pace had been around 10:00. By the end Garmin would say 13:02. This was a Zone 2 run, meaning I should be able to keep a conversation going. I was pretty much able to do that, but somewhere on that stretch I saw the light when my secondary metric, my heart rate, started spiking ever upward.

Through miles four to seven, I backed off as much as I needed to in order to keep my heart rate roughly in the mid-140s. My pace drifted into the 13- to 15-minute range from a pretty average 9:30- to 10-minute range.

Somewhere in that struggle, coming toward me was this dude. THE dude. He was tall, deeply tanned, incredibly fit and probably somewhere around my age. He also had long hair like mine, except his was white. Gliding past me like Hermes. The first time he passed me he was moving fast enough that I just thought, that’s an exceptional person. Then I saw him coming back the other way. Later he had stopped at the fountain at Alice Wainwright Park. He was only jogging by then, still grace in motion.

There was a little envy. Of course there was. Mostly, though, I was in awe. Even when he slowed down, everything about his running looked easy and practiced in a way mine certainly did not at that moment. I was hot, sore, moving deliberately slower and still had miles to get back to the office. But there was also this odd glint of recognition. I could see my aspiration—my potential, even—in this perfectly formed human being.

By the time I got back to the office, the experience had taken on a faintly mythic quality in my head. It reminded me of the story of Pheidippides encountering Pan on the road. And while he did not exactly emerge from the wilderness and instruct me to build him a shrine (I would have), sometimes something appears in the middle of an ordinary effort and your mind decides it signifies more than it probably does.

A few minutes later, I finished 7.37 miles in 1:36:03. It was considerably slower than prescribed, but I knew why I had slowed down and I knew I had needed to. No particular injuries complained. My muscles were just sore and tired by the end, which seemed like a reasonable response to the circumstances.

And somewhere out there was a white-haired guy running the way I would like to run someday, except my hair is way better.

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.