Running spiritually how 13.1 miles changed me

Sometimes I Am Humorous. Occasionally I Am Poetic.

In some cases, I'm simply the best I can be. And on a cool morning at the start line of the Dexter-Ann Arbor Half Marathon, standing among strangers who would soon become fellow pilgrims on a 13.1-mile journey, I was all three at once — and something more. Something that didn't have a name yet, but that I would discover somewhere around mile five, when the music in my ears faded and my own thoughts began to fill the silence.

When I accepted the challenge to run a half marathon, I made myself a quiet promise: that just one race, the right race, would be enough to make me keep running. That race was always going to be this one. For 40 years, the Dexter-Ann Arbor Half Marathon has been more than a footrace. It has been a tradition, a ritual, a living piece of my hometown's identity — and it had sat for years on a very personal rack labeled: 'Possibly, but… yeah, right… I dislike running even one mile.'

Growing Up: 25 Minutes Between Two Worlds

Growing up, I was driven from Dexter to Ann Arbor for everything. We lived in the podunk-ish, cornfield corners of Dexter — the kind of place where you know your neighbours not by their names but by the sound of their trucks. My father grew up farming the fields around our family home, and the land shaped him the way land always shapes the people who tend it: quietly, permanently, and without apology.

Every grocery trip was the same 25-minute drive to Ann Arbor. Every errand, every appointment, every occasion — the same route, winding along roads that followed the curves of the Huron River like a river itself. I'd press my face to the car window and wish we would stop. Just stop, right there, and let me step out and breathe it in. The Huron River corridor is, without exaggeration, absolutely breathtaking: limestone bluffs, hardwood canopies, still water catching morning light, and the kind of quiet that only exists when you are somewhere genuinely far from the noise of ordinary life.

I never stopped then. But I was about to run the entire thing.

Choosing a Race That Means Something

I can't just pick a random race. That's not my style, and it never has been. When I look back at every race I've entered, each one carries its own weight — chosen for a reason, meaningful in a way I could articulate even if only to myself. I have selected races for fun. For a brand-new obstacle. Because I have something of the Irish spirit in me, the compulsion towards a challenge that makes little practical sense but enormous emotional sense. I have chosen races because I wanted to roll around in the mud or sprint through a rainbow of coloured powder like a ridiculous, joyful child.

But this race was different. This race was a homecoming. Running from Dexter to Ann Arbor — from the fields where my father farmed to the city I grew up driving toward — felt less like a sporting event and more like a long conversation with my own past. A conversation I had been putting off for years, postponing under the comfortable excuse that I disliked running even one mile.

A Journey of Self-Discovery: What the Road Teaches

I could write all day about how this race was a journey of self-discovery. And perhaps I will. But let me start with this: I discovered that my own ideas can keep me company. On the long stretches of Huron River Road, where the trees form a cathedral overhead and the water flashes below through the brush, I found that my internal monologue, usually a noisy, undisciplined crowd of anxieties and half-formed plans, became something quieter and more organised.

Around mile five, something shifted. The music disappeared — not because my headphones died, but because I stopped noticing it. The thoughts that had been clamoring for attention earlier in the run fell away too, and what remained was something very close to silence. A productive silence. The kind of quiet in which you can finally hear yourself think clearly.

I found inner determination on those hills. Real hills, the kind that appear in the middle miles of the course and that no training run in a flat park fully prepares you for. I was not quick. I will not claim otherwise. But I climbed every one of them. I kept adding those hillsides to the total, one after another, with a stubbornness that surprised me and a patience I didn't know I possessed.

And here is what I want to say to anyone reading this who has a race, or a challenge, or a road that has been sitting on a mental shelf marked 'Maybe, but probably not': the meaning you bring to a thing determines the experience you have of it. I did not run this race to set a time. I ran it because the road between Dexter and Ann Arbor is the road of my entire childhood, and I wanted, just once, to travel it under my own power.

Forty Years Running. One Day Mine.

The Dexter-Ann Arbor Half Marathon turned 40 the year I ran it. Forty years of runners who got up before dawn, pinned on their bibs, and chose, for whatever reason, to run a road that winds along the Huron River from a small farming town to a university city. I was one of them now. Whatever comes next in my running life — more races, no races, a slow return to the couch — I will always have been one of them.

The sun rises with the trees on Huron River Road. I know that now not because someone told me, and not because I read it somewhere, but because I ran through that sunrise myself, one footfall at a time, forty years after the first person ever did the same.

Written with Irish spirit, muddy shoes, and a grateful heart.

Dexter, Michigan  •  June 2026  •  #DexterAA  •  #RunWithPurpose