The Reason I Never Run Past the Good Stuff
Trail running is the activity. The van is just the tool that gets me to the trailhead. What actually grounds me is what’s around me while I’m out there — and I don’t run past it.
I’m not chasing a distance or a time. I never have been. When something catches my eye, I stop. Every time. No hesitation, no guilt about the split I just gave up. I’ve been doing this for years, and I have a folder full of proof: photos of things most people run right past without ever seeing.
There’s a lesson in that bigger than trail running, and I think it’s worth saying plainly: we get caught up in the hustle and grind of every ordinary day, and the outdoors have always been my escape from that. But the same rule applies everywhere, not just on a trail in the woods. When life gets the most hectic is exactly when you need to stop, breathe, and soak it up — because these moments are the memories, and this is the life you’re actually living. Every single day deserves that same attention. The outdoors just happens to be an extraordinary place to go find that peace. It’s not the only place. It’s just where I found it.
Here’s some of what stopping has gotten me, over the years.
The Small Things Doing Their Own Thing
This one stopped me cold — a newt the color of a traffic cone, picking its way across a bed of rocks like it knew exactly how loud that color was. You could run past a hundred of these without ever seeing one. You just have to be looking down.
A hermit crab hauling its whole house across the Texas coast. A starfish that washed up and held still just long enough for a photo. Neither of them is rare. Both of them are easy to miss if you’re moving at running pace and looking straight ahead.
“It’s hard to imagine how something so beautiful came from that cocoon.” That’s what I wrote about this one years ago, and I still think about it every time I see a swallowtail. The whole thing it used to be had to fall apart first.
Patterns Nobody Designed
“Bewildered by such lines.” That’s still the only caption this one has ever needed. Weathered wood grain doesn’t get designed by anybody — it’s just decades of growth and weather arguing it out, and the result looks like something a person would spend a career trying to paint.
Naturally occurring iron ore, intertwined with moss and spider web, doing more with color than most palettes I’ve ever seen sold in a store. Nobody arranged this. It’s just what the ground looked like that day, to somebody willing to get down and look at it.
Pebbles sitting under clear creek water in West Virginia. A different creek somewhere else, moving over moss-slicked rock, in no hurry to be anywhere. Water does this kind of thing constantly and mostly without an audience.
A whole forest floor gone over to ferns in the Blue Ridge. Somewhere else nearby, more ferns crowding in next to a shock of orange fungus that had no business being that bright. Same mountains, different day, different thing worth stopping for.
One leaf, floating on a creek pool so calm up in the mountains that it barely counts as moving water. Sometimes the whole photograph is just: the water went still for a second, and I happened to be there for it.
The Views That Make You Stop Running Entirely
Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. The rock formations get all the postcards, but the sky that day was doing something the rocks couldn’t compete with.
The view straight down a rock face mid-climb in West Virginia — the kind of look you only get by stopping exactly where most people keep their eyes on their hands. And, not far off, a single lily holding still on a pond near the New River Gorge, doing the opposite of everything climbing demands.
Desert wildflowers refusing to be intimidated by the red rock around Sedona. A cactus outside Prescott old enough and big enough to make you feel like the newcomer in its landscape, which you are.
An old tree holding on to the very edge of the Grand Canyon rim, roots doing something with bare rock that shouldn’t really work. It’s been up there a lot longer than any of the people taking its picture.
Bar Harbor, Maine, framed by a gap in the coastal rock like the landscape built its own picture frame. And bare footprints in Outer Banks sand — the kind of photo that only exists because I took my shoes off instead of running straight through.
And then there’s Niagara — a place so big and so loud that stopping isn’t even a choice you make. It makes the choice for you.
Not Everything Worth Stopping For Is Quiet
Everything above this is quiet — a newt, a leaf, a sky. This one isn’t. That’s us at Dominion Riverrock in Richmond, Virginia — a whole festival built around outdoor sports and music on the James River — hanging off the event banner like a couple of kids because the moment called for exactly that and nothing else.
Slowing down doesn’t mean going quiet all the time. Sometimes the thing worth stopping for is just how much fun you’re having, and the right move is the same either way: stop, take it in, don’t run past it.
Everyday Deserves the Same Attention
None of these photos are rare. That’s the whole point. A newt, some pebbles, a leaf, a piece of driftwood — none of it required a permit, a plane ticket, or a personal record. It required stopping.
I run because I love to run. But I’ve never once believed the point was the mileage. The point was always what was standing right next to the trail, waiting to be noticed by whoever was willing to actually look. Life outside the trail works exactly the same way — the hustle keeps moving whether you stop or not, and the good stuff doesn’t wait around for you to have free time. It’s just there, right now, if you’re willing to look down, look up, or take your shoes off.
Find your version of the trail. Then don’t run past the good stuff on it.
More on slowing down and paying attention: The Bear. The Eagle. The Owl. Do You Feel It Too? and The Harder-to-Find Places Are the Point.
