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.
—
