100 Words Per Mile: The First 10

On Kobe Bryant's birthday, I decided to try something new.

What follows are the first two entries of 100 Words Per Mile in which I run the first 10 of what would become 546 miles.

I’m still unsure about sharing this—I don’t know that I ever intended to—but here we go.

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August 23, 2020
4.04 Miles
30:08

Today would have been Kobe Bryant’s forty-second birthday. This is important, if only because what I most admire about Kobe is not his talent, or his relentless competitive spirit. I admire him as a father of daughters and a man remade in an image of his choosing.

When Kobe died, it was difficult not to think about the rape allegations, but I didn’t think about them because I felt compelled to deflate the praise piling up outside Staples Center in Los Angeles. No, I thought about them in the context of Kobe’s self-improvement, his second career as one of the biggest advocates for women athletes, and the image now of he and Gianna smiling together courtside that’s engraved in the zeitgeist forever.

I started running because I needed to be better. Better is vague, yes, but that’s where we need to start. I needed to be a better, more present husband. I needed to be a healthier version of myself, physically and mentally. I needed to redirect the comfort I found in alcohol. I needed to find a way to come to terms with my own grief, which encompassed not only my wife and I’s recent miscarriage, but the weekly nightmares I still had of an tyrannical stepdad and the emotional toll of having played second father to my siblings for most of my life. I needed to practice mindfulness, a term I learned in my very brief (but positive!) relationship with a therapist. She told me I was stressed, which I only now realize is true, but was never present enough in my own life to notice myself.

I’m an escape artist. When you’re the oldest of five and you grew up in a household littered with verbal abuse, you become very good at tuning everything else out. You learn how to read Harry Potter through the sounds of