Day 3,724—a story from 20 Years ago and running for 40 hours starting tomorrow —

After thinking about my original plan of running 40 hours in 5 days, I’ve decided, for mainly practical reasons, that I will need to run for 40 hours in 3 days. I don’t have a lot of the details worked out except, I am going to try to run for 40 hours, which will mean hopefully 200 miles in 3 days. That’s 13 hours and 20 minutes of running each day, which would roughly be a round 67 miles. 

It is kind of a lot, and I haven’t done much to prepare, but if not now, when? And if I don’t end up being able to do as much as I want, then that will still be more if I don’t try. I am not ready to give up before I start. I want a unique challenge, something I have never done before, and I think this is it. And with any challenge worth doing, I usually don’t know if I can or not.  

Maybe I’ll write the story tomorrow. It is weird how I am still feeling like I don’t want to write about any of these things that happened so long ago. I think they're good stories. I just don’t love thinking about them, and somehow many of these moments still feel private, not that I am afraid of other people knowing. I just don't feel like other people deserve to know some of these things, but when I think about what I like to read, it is exactly the kind of stuff that I hesitate to continue to write about. 

There is a category of stories I have thought about writing before, and this one belongs in that category. They are all true stories that I will admit are probably more common than I know, but to me, they feel incomplete, and I will still sometimes think about them what they mean, and why they happened. The category would be something like “People I knew that Randomly Died.” None of these individuals in my examples are people that I was extremely close with, but I knew them all well either at work or school. They all died in preventable ways: car accidents, fighting in war, criminal violence, illness, etcetera. There were at least two people like that I knew in high school. Then a few more from growing up to college. And two teachers I worked with, one being my classroom neighbor and then at least four of my students.

Nobody likes to talk about death or even acknowledge its existence, but I don’t know, these are stories I think everyone can relate to. When someone seems to die randomly, and you’re not okay with it, but you don’t know what the right way to respond is.