Barkley (we re-named him after the Star Trek character) joined our family in mid-2021. He was about 2-3 years old at the time and had lived his life before us as a badly neglected backyard breeding stud. We took care of his medical needs and showed him how a pet should be treated. He had a very good dog life as a part of our family. Unfortunately, he died suddenly and unexpectedly yesterday. He is sorely missed.

As a kid, I was not sedentary, but  I never participated in any kind of sports or organized fitness activities. Nobody in my family had an interest in participating in or watching team sports, and I was never encouraged to try out team sports. 

When I was a teen, I picked up jogging a little on my own initiative. When I got to college, I started running regularly and kept it up until I had to stop due to knee and foot issues¹ at the end of 2019. I ran a couple of organized half-marathons along the way. At the time I stopped running, I was running 8-10 miles each, three times a week, and in 2019, I ran a total of 1,200 miles. In almost 40 years of running, I estimate that I ran a total of at least 30,000 miles. Those are not big numbers for marathoners, but it was not just casual jogging either. 

After I stopped running, I swam laps, but I never enjoyed it like I had enjoyed running. The last couple of years, I’ve picked up recreational road and gravel bicycling, and I have rediscovered joy that is similar to what I felt as a runner. I spend 8-10 hours per week on my bike and would ride more if my schedule allowed it. This year, my goal is to ride 100 miles a week or 5,000 miles total. Seven months into the year, I’m on track to meet or possibly exceed that goal. Again, like running, compared to really dedicated cyclists, those are not large numbers, but they are on the higher side for recreational cyclists.

But I’ve never considered myself an athlete, even though the people around me have always seen me as one. A few months ago, as I was researching more about road cycling, it finally dawned on me why: I have always run and cycled just for the enjoyment of the sport. On and off, I pushed myself to longer running distances and I watch my mileage and average speed when I’m cycling, but I’ve always stopped short of actual training plans, e.g., today is my sprint day, tomorrow is my rest day, the day after that is my day for a zone 2 ride, etc. No eating plan; no measuring and obsessing over other statistics, such as heart rate zones, cycling power; no strength training in support of getting faster or covering longer distances. When I looked at people who did those things, I considered them athletes but not me.

But I now realize that I am indeed an athlete. Running was, and cycling is currently, my most important hobby. When planning my week, times to run or cycle have always been the first thing I consider. I enjoy the feeling of physically pushing myself. If I have to take a break from my sport, I feel slightly nervous. The people around me sometimes get weary of hearing about my running or cycling. It has taken some adjustment to change my attitude, but I am now comfortable with the idea that I am indeed an athlete.

The photos in this post are: running the 10-mile Run for the Water event in Austin in 2019, just before I stopped running, and riding in the 45-mile Pinkstrong ride just north of Austin, in October, 2025.

¹ Before the “running ruins your knees!” crowd comes in, running didn’t mess up my knee and foot; my idiocy did. I ran with pain in my right knee and foot for almost a decade. By the time I finally got checked by the orthopedist, the cartilage in my knee was shredded and I have a bunion and hammer toe on my right foot. I will eventually need a knee replacement. The surgery to fix the hammer toe and bunion is pretty brutal, so I’ll probably just live with those the rest of my life, assuming they don’t get worse. Thankfully, these injuries stabilized when I stopped running, so I’m putting off any surgeries for as long as possible.

This article reminded me of something that I haven’t thought about in decades: the presidential physical fitness test that we had to take in school when I was a kid. The author writes:

My positive relationship with movement developed not because of the test but in spite of it. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s and had run a half-dozen half-marathons, at a comfortable pace, that I even began to believe I was an athlete.

I’ve heard similar stories from recreational exercisers, exercise scientists and fitness professionals.

I’m one of those people. I did horribly with the test, and, like the author, it was the source of a lot of anxiety and shame for me as a kid. And also like the author, despite the test, I later developed a lifelong exercise routine. Despite running hundreds of miles per year and running a half marathon a couple of times, it wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I began to consider myself an athlete. Now I consider exercise a core part of my identity; I prioritize it above many other things.

When I think back on my early history with sports and movement, one other thing comes to mind. The rural middle school that I attended had traditional competitive sports: only limited openings that you had to try out for, and athletes competed with similar schools throughout a large area. In sixth grade, I tried out for basketball and tennis, but I didn’t qualify for either one.

But the next year, our school district tried something new: everyone who wanted could participate in sports,  competition was just between the three middle schools in our district, and each school fielded as many teams of a given sport as needed for all the students who wanted to play that sport. And while it was still competitive, the focus was on everyone being included, getting a chance to play, and  having a positive experience.

I was indeed terrible at both basketball and tennis, but I had so much fun in that program. Then I moved to high school which only had traditional competitive sports, so I didn’t play sports after middle school. If I had had the opportunity to play lower-stakes sports in high school as I’d had in middle school, I’m convinced that I would have had very different attitudes toward sports and movement.

We had a professional family portrait made in this same location when the kids were young. This past weekend, we updated it with our current family.

When I was an undergraduate student at UT, I worked for a blind professor, Ralph Read. I’ve blogged about him a few times over the years: here, here, and here. Another thing he did is write a cookbook for the blind. I was thinking about this the other day and realized that I never had my own copy of his cookbook. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I remedied that problem. 

This morning I was listening to the episode of the 99% Invisible podcast about addresses. The thesis of the episode is that while addresses are something we generally take for granted, they are actually a relatively new invention. I realized that I had lived in two places where conditions mentioned in the podcast existed.

First, I grew up in a house that didn’t have a street address. Our house was on a named street, and it even had a wooden street sign where it intersected the county road, but I don’t think the street names were official and in any case nobody used them. When we gave someone directions to our house, it was “when you’re coming down the county road, turn on the first street to the right past the water tower. Our house is the first one you come to, on your left.” Our mailing address was “Star Route 1 Box 205” and our mailbox was in a bank of mailboxes about a mile from the house.

Second, the podcast episode mentions how the Hapsburgs undertook an effort to number houses throughout their empire. When I was a high school exchange student in Austria in the 1980s, I lived in the village of Großklein (that name is another story of its own), and the address of my host family was just “Großklein 26” no street name necessary. That numbering most likely dates back to the Hapsburg numbering mentioned in the podcast.

A few weeks ago–a few days after the Run for the Water race, in fact–I injured my hip while running. Last week, I went to see my orthopedist about it. As her PA was examining me, noting that I’m a lifetime runner, I mentioned that also have low-level pain in my right knee, but not enough that I’d gotten it checked out. The PA said they should X-ray the knee, too, while I was in the office.

The good news: the hip injury will heal with a rest in running, some stretches, etc. The bad news: the knee pain is due to degenerative osteoarthritis. The doctor said that they can take some measures to ease the pain but that the only remedy is a knee replacement. The arthritis will only get worse whether I run or not, and I may eventually need a knee replacement. She emphasized that running it will accelerate the degeneration. She also pointed out that I would eventually have to stop running if I had a knee replacement and that knee replacements only last a certain period of time, therefore it’s vital that I delay it as long as possible. Therefore, she strongly advised me to stop running.

I think both the doctor and her PA assumed that I would find this news devastating and that I would not want to stop running. But after a few days of reflection and talking with a lot of people about this, at this point in my life I identify primarily as a healthy, fit and active person–it’s just that running is the only way I’ve ever used to maintain that state. Furthermore, I don’t relish the prospect of increasing chronic pain and eventual significant surgery. It’s much more acceptable to me to find other forms of exercise that don’t exacerbate my arthritis and allow me to remain fit than it is to continue running at all costs. I think that swimming is an activity that I enjoy that will most easily fit into my current schedule/lifestyle. I have already been to the pool once, and I think I will try to take a swim course to learn to swim more effectively. But I’m sure I’ll continue a little running, and maybe also do some biking as well.

On Sunday, November 3, I ran the 10-mile Run for the Water through west central Austin. I completed in 1 hour and 30 minutes, at a pace of 8:53 min/mile. I used to be a lot faster, but that’s not bad for an old guy.

A writer from MEL Magazine contacted me via a comment that I had made on a reddit question about whether men should run shirtless. My whole email interview got included in the article.