The Will to Win

The turning point from mediocrity to breakthroughs often lies in the decision to keep going. We're excited to welcome back Oliver Hinson as a guest writer for The Hammer, where he shares a powerful story of an athlete with an incredible will to push forward. It’s a lengthy one - but a worthy read for anyone trying to unlock the next level of what’s possible!

The Will To Win

Loevner’s Story of Grit and Glory

Mile 20 is a brutal place for a runner to find himself. It signifies, unofficially, the “real start” of a marathon, where comfort ends and decisions are made. 

That is one decision, really, between two worlds: one of physical pain or one of lasting regret. Most successful runners have an array of tricks to help convince themselves to choose the former. Will Loevner, the 2024 Philadelphia Marathon champion, is no exception, but he has an ace up his sleeve that few can match.

At least, he can say, I’m not lying in a ditch in the middle of a cornfield in Middle-of-Nowhere, Kansas, with a broken hand and 150 miles left to go in the darkness.

That anecdote comes from Loevner’s extensive biking career, a phase of his life that, among many things, taught him that marathons aren’t really that long. 

In many of his biking races, he had to make the decision to keep going for hundreds of miles. “In the marathon, you’re making the decision to push for another 30 minutes,” Loevner says as he jogs along North Park Lake, about half an hour north of Pittsburgh, on a foggy morning. He enjoys the edge that biking has given him. He enjoys the uniqueness, too. In one way or another, biking is responsible for a lot of the things that make Loevner who he is as a runner.

For lack of better words, he is an enigma. His training is extremely polarized, even called psychotic by some. Retellings of his trials and tribulations have made him a legend in the Pittsburgh running scene. He finds more enjoyment in suffering than most others can or should.

All of this is to say that there is no one like Will Loevner, and that that is the key to his success. He’s not a contrarian; he simply holds the principle that he’s going to do whatever the hell excites him, and that often leads him down odd paths. It led him to a collegiate running career; to a 303-mile solo bike ride through the Allegheny mountains; to a near-death experience remedied only by a gas station employee and pure grit; and finally, to the finish line of the Philadelphia Marathon.

Individuality has made Will Loevner a champion. The story of him learning that is the story of his career.

A Slow Grind

His story starts in the mid-2010s on this same path, a near-perfect 5-mile paved loop around the lake. Due to the convenience of planning workouts here — and likely the tradition of it, too — North Park is one of the few spots in the Pittsburgh area where the elites flock, and it is where Loevner first found excitement in running. 

As a high school student in Pittsburgh, Loevner trained under coaching legend John Wilkie. Wilkie coached cross country and track at North Hills High School for 38 years, and after his retirement, he continued training Pittsburgh-area athletes. Loevner says Wilkie instilled in him a brighter outlook on the mundanity of training.

“He showed us that coming out here and pushing ourselves is a way to improve,” Loevner says. “If it was a 10 degree day at North Park and we had a 15 mile long run, it was about not having the mindset of complaining and saying, ‘Oh, we gotta be out here,’ but having the mindset of enjoying it.”

One of Loevner’s early training partners, Colin Martin, corroborates that impression. “You had to be able to withstand quite a bit of brutality,” Martin says of Wilkie’s training.

In particular, the training encompassed high mileage and a lot of tempo-like sessions, including one that sticks out in Martin’s memory: The Grinder. The workout was simply a 10.2-mile loop featuring three of North Park’s steepest hills (aside from the lake loop itself, North Park is by no means a flat venue), and it operated like an elevation-dependent fartlek: hard on the uphills, steady on the flats, and easy on the downhills. On a great day, Martin says, they could average about 6:30 pace for the loop.

Not everyone responded to this kind of training, but Loevner seemed to be a perfect match both physically and mentally. He knew it, and Wilkie knew it, too. This is Wilkie’s impression of Loevner as an athlete:

“Never have I encountered a runner who enjoyed the pain and suffering that inevitably accompanies hard training and racing more than Will.”

With Wilkie at the helm, Loevner developed steadily throughout his high school career, and by 2016, he was one of the top distance recruits in Pennsylvania with PBs of 4:26 in the 1600 and 9:16 in the 3200. Wilkie believes those times could have been faster if he hadn’t been slightly overtrained heading into big races — “probably my fault,” he says.

In choosing a college, Loevner wanted a program that would develop him into the best runner he could be. Penn State seemed like a great fit, if not for their Power 5 status then for their reputation as a showcase of the best talent in the state. It’s in their branding – look at a post from their social media accounts announcing an athlete’s commitment and you’re likely to see this phrase: “The best in PA stay in PA.” Loevner was a top Pennsylvanian, and he did what he was told.

He had high expectations for his collegiate career, but it didn’t take long for him to realize that he wasn’t going in the right direction. The Nittany Lions’ training featured little individualization, and like the rest of his teammates, Loevner was introduced to a high dosage of fast intervals. It wasn’t bad training in itself, he says — it worked for a lot of his teammates — but it didn’t suit him.

Due to repeated injury, Loevner’s TFRRS page is nearly bare, and the results he does have aren’t much to write home about. He set PBs of 8:39 in the 3000 and 15:07 in the 5000, but he was nowhere near as successful as he wanted to be. With his fitness and health already out the window, his confidence fell soon after. By the end of his sophomore year, Loevner had a feeling that, at that time, was foreign to him: he wasn’t excited to work out.

That summer, Loevner and a few of his friends went to Seattle and got jobs at a summer camp teaching bike skills to children. Between working and sleeping on a couch, he did some mountain biking on his own, and he fell in love with it. “It was just such a new thing, a completely different sport,” Loevner says.

At that point, it also represented an antithesis to his running career.

“You’re battling to bring down your PR by a few seconds,” Loevner says of running. “Getting into biking, I saw something where there was so much room for improvement.”

New Kid On The Trail

When he returned to State College at the end of the summer, he decided he wasn’t going to rejoin the team. He didn’t have much of a plan until he went to his brother’s wedding, where his uncle told him about a mountain bike race that he put on every year. Loevner signed up without much thought.

“I knew nothing about racing,” Loevner says. “I showed up in a pair of running shoes and some baggy shorts. I had a mountain bike, but it wasn’t a race bike or anything.”

By his own account, he got his “doors blown off” in that race, but it reminded him of how much he loved racing. He missed the butterflies and the feeling of pushing himself to the limit.

That fall, he signed up for the Month of Mud, a mountain bike race series in the Pittsburgh area. He put himself in the “sport” division, between beginner and expert, and he won. At this point, he had more momentum than he ever did at Penn State, and he wasn’t shy about expanding his dreams.

“I pretty quickly went from [the Month of Mud series] to wanting to do ultra races, which were 100 kilometers,” Loevner says. “Then, I was like, I want to do 100 mile races.”

Loevner entirely skipped the 100 mile distance, though, instead diving into more outlandish projects. The first was a “single track Everest,” which is what the name suggests it is: he rode loops on the same narrow mountain bike trail in Rothrock State Forest until he reached 29,032 feet of elevation gain, the equivalent of the height of Mount Everest.

Then came the Wilderness 303 in the spring of 2021, a project devised by Loevner himself. He could have done the Wilderness 101, an existing 101-mile race in Rothrock State Forest near Penn State’s campus, but that prospect didn’t excite him. He wanted to push his body to its limits, and completing the course three times in a row was enough of a feat to do that.

The entire ride, which featured over 30,000 feet of elevation gain, took him just over 32 hours to complete. He sustained a fairly minor crash on the first lap, and about 24 hours in, he almost crashed again after falling asleep on one of the descents. 

“I remember my eyes kept shutting,” Loevner says. “Even though I was blasting down this hill, going probably 20 miles an hour, they just kept shutting.”

Loevner reached the bottom of that descent safely, but it shook his confidence. For the last 220 miles, he had only needed to make one decision over and over again — ride — but that simplicity was gone in an instant. Crazy was a long-retired word for him, but dangerous was not.

In what was probably his best decision of the day, he called his friend, who was serving as part of his crew. His friend drove to him and picked him up, but they didn’t leave. Loevner told him that he needed to take a nap, but only for 10 minutes. If it was any longer, he would never have gotten back up.

After “the best 10-minute power nap of all time,” Loevner got back up, and the sun decided to join him. Daybreak turned out to be the catalyst for his second wind.

“When you’re on a 300 mile ride,” Loevner says casually, “once you’re at mile 240 and you’ve got 60 miles left, that’s the home stretch.”

Loevner wanted nothing more than to finish before a second nightfall. After nearly a day and a half, he pedaled to the finish line, beating nobody but the moon.

Completing the 303 redefined what he believed his body was capable of. Before the ride, he had already found his next venture: UNBOUND, a 200-mile self-supported gravel race in Kansas. In the aftermath, though, he decided 200 wasn’t grand enough, especially given the existence of UNBOUND XL, the race’s 350-mile cousin.

Becoming Will Loevner

From the description on the race website, UNBOUND XL sounds like it was practically designed for Loevner:

The UNBOUND Gravel XL stands in a class of its own. This self supported journey through the Flint Hills presents an unparalleled challenge of body, mind and spirit. If your penchant for pain is matched only by your sense of adventure you’re in the right company.

That being said, Loevner didn’t appear to be in the right company on the starting line. Long bike races tend to attract older riders with decades of experience. Meanwhile, Loevner describes himself at the time as “a 22-year old kid that didn’t know too much.”

Once again, Loevner knew this race was a chance to prove himself. He didn’t realize until about 200 miles in just how hard that would be.

What follows is the story that a lot of people use to exemplify who Loevner is. As it goes, he was riding at the front with Taylor Lideen, who would go on to win the race. At around 2:00 a.m., they were flying down a rocky farm road that had received its fair share of rain in the past week. Loevner hit a rut that he believes was about six inches deep, and he went flying. 

“I had crashed a ton on my bike,” Loevner says, “but this time was different. I knew something was wrong instantly.”

At first, he thought he had broken his left arm, but it turned out to be his hand. Lideen stopped to make sure he hadn’t hurt his head, and then he vanished into the night. So, there Loevner was – lying in a ditch in the middle of a cornfield in Middle-of-Nowhere, Kansas, with a broken hand and 150 miles left to go in the darkness.

It took him a while to process what had happened. He tried to get in contact with literally anyone, but he had no cell service. He then started walking his bike to a gas station that he knew was about 15 miles away, but after climbing one hill, he realized it would take him about four hours to get there. He had no choice but to suck it up and keep riding.

He figured out a way to prop up his arm on his handlebars and use his good hand to steer. Every time he approached a bump, he had to take his arm off the bars and ride one-handed because the pain of his arm hitting the bars was so severe. After a few hours of slow riding, he arrived at a Short Stop gas station in Council Grove, Kansas. There, he got the lone attendant to tape up his arm as he refueled with pizza, ice cream and a bottle of Fanta. After a bit of rest, he got back on his bike.

The second day wasn’t much kinder to him. With one hand steering and the other out of commission, he wasn’t able to reach for his water unless he was stopped. He started to suffer from severe dehydration as well as rhabdomyolysis, a condition that occurs when electrolytes and proteins are released into one’s bloodstream as a result of skeletal muscle damage. By mile 250, Loevner was hallucinating and completely exhausted.

This was news to Loevner’s parents. According to his father, Steve, they had been following the race on a live tracking app, and as their son rode with Lideen in the early stages, they believed he could win. And then he stopped. Lideen’s dot moved farther away, and they couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe he hit the wall, they thought, but even that seemed unlikely.

Finally, in the middle of day two, Loevner called them, crying. He wasn’t able to communicate with much coherence, but he got the major news across.

“We had no idea what the right thing for him to do was,” Steve Loevner says.

I asked Loevner if this was the lowest point he’s ever had in a race. He doesn’t hesitate. “It definitely was,” he says.

He wasn’t crying because he believed he couldn’t finish, though. The call to his parents ended with both parties coming to the same conclusion: he was absolutely going to finish. His parents didn’t quite believe it, and Loevner was still trying to process that notion himself. Some inner demon was signing him up for 100 more miles of pain and suffering, and he had no choice but to obey.

“I’d never taken something in such small increments,” Loevner says. “My GPS would say turn in 1.2 miles, and I’d tell myself, just make it to that next turn.”

After powering through 100 miles of ignorance, Loevner did make it to the finish line — behind Lideen, and Lideen only. Somehow, through every trial, not a single contestant in one of the biggest gravel races in the country had passed him.

Deja Vu

UNBOUND XL is, without a doubt, what shaped Loevner as an athlete. By this point in his career, racing was little more than a binary science. 

“You are going to hit rock-bottom,” he says. “It is probably going to be 3:00 in the morning. You’re going to be exhausted.”

In every race, he knew there was going to be a point in which he would have to make a decision.The decision. Now, he knew that he would always make the right one.

“In future races, I’m not gonna break my hand,” Loevner jokes. “The choice will be easier.”

UNBOUND XL is also what made Loevner a household name in long-distance biking. He appeared on multiple podcasts after the race, and on one of them, “The Adventure Stache,” host Payson McElveen proclaimed that “this kid is coming for ultra racing unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

Loevner kept finding bigger stages and pulling off impressive feats. Not even two months after breaking his hand, he won the 24 hour mountain bike Championship of America, which qualified him for the World Championships in Italy the next year. 

In between those races, he recorded the fastest known time on a 250-mile route in Virginia named Rockstar Gravel, circumnavigated Lake Erie in four days, and rode from Pittsburgh to State College and back so he could test out a new bike. He didn’t even tell me about these ventures; I had to dig them up from his Instagram account. For anyone else, those stories would be lifelong accomplishments. For Loevner, they don’t warrant a mention.

Even the World Championships were hardly monumental. Loevner took third overall, but he doesn’t stop to talk about it for long.

There’s a reason for that; by this point, Loevner was starting to lose the spark that pushed him into biking, but not for the reason he quit running. He was having all the success in the world, but he had already had that success. UNBOUND XL was his proving ground, and he proved just about everything he could. He was getting bored.

He was also getting tired. After a 3,000-mile ride from Canada to Mexico in which he contracted giardia from drinking bad water, his body was wrecked. After a subsequent race in Nebraska, he started thinking about his next adventure — a race called the Marji Gesick 100 — and he just wasn’t excited about it.

Back On Two Feet

Quitting biking was one of the toughest decisions he’s made, he says. It helped that he didn’t make it all at once. At first, he and his coach agreed that he simply needed a month off to let his body recover and let his mind find excitement again.

That didn’t happen, though. He knew he was in the midst of a promising career, one that most people would cling to, but the glory didn’t appeal to him. Not if it was achieved by doing the same thing he had always done, the same thing he was already comfortable with. 

He wasn’t finding any excitement in pushing his body until one of his friends told him about a 50k race — on foot.

The idea of starting something new was too powerful to ignore. After just two weeks of running, he tackled the Tussey Mountainback 50k, and he showed no signs of rust. He won the race in just under three and a half hours, averaging 6:39 per mile over a course with 3,600 feet of elevation gain.

Just as he did in the beginning of his biking days, he felt the spark. At first, he thought he was going to go straight into ultra-running, but his high school coach convinced him to take a different route.

“He told me, ‘I think you can run a pretty fast marathon,’” Loevner says. “‘You’re young. You still have the speed. Use it while you can. You can do ultra stuff later.’”

Loevner took that advice. After several months of regaining his running fitness, he debuted in May, winning the Cleveland Marathon in 2:19:56.

Training Like Will Loevner

One of the reasons for Loevner’s immediate success was fairly obvious: cycling and running are both aerobic activities, and success in one can correlate to success in the other if training is done in the right way. Just ask a triathlete.

The other, more important reason that he did not repeat the woes of his Penn State days is that he did not repeat the mistakes he made in those days. He ran on his own terms, molding his training simply to what benefited and excited him.

That mold created a unique training regimen. A quintessential Loevner week consists of several easy runs, one medium-long steady run or tempo session, and the Loevner special: a blistering long run of around 20 to 24 miles (during peak training). Every so often, he might throw two workouts into the week, or he might get a small dose of speed, but the core components almost always look the same.

“There’s a shorter and shorter list of pros that train like him,” Martin says. “But I don’t think he’s pulling this training out of thin air. This is something that some people can do, the high mileage, high-intensity long runs, and he responds really well to it.”

The long runs are especially a point of pride. His Strava page is filled with gems like 22 miles at 5:52 pace, 24 at 5:33, even a full 26.2 at a 5:54 average. This is a weekly ritual for Loevner, and in addition to its physical benefits, it also serves as an exercise in monotony: he does them almost always by himself, and he rarely strays from North Park, even if that means performing a “quintuple lake,” as he calls it.

Martin is a talented runner in his own right; he finished 67th at the 2024 Olympic Trials Marathon. He doesn’t find too much value in comparing his training to anyone else’s, but he says there’s still a “shock value” in seeing some of the runs Loevner has pulled off.

“You can look at workouts like that and objectively say, ‘That’s insane,’” Martin says, “but he’s found a formula that works.”

Wilkie carries the same impression. “He still trains like a madman,” he says, recalling his similarly intense high school training.

Just like his biking experiences, he believes the long runs give him an edge. It’s a lot easier to make the decision to press on at the end of a marathon, he says, when “you’re used to running 22 miles really fucking hard.”

When he’s not doing a long run or workout, his training looks more similar to most runners, consisting of several easy runs per week, but he still makes sure to do those in his own way. A lot of elite runners are better than amateurs at taking their “easy days” truly easy, but Loevner takes it to a different level. On this cold morning, I — some guy who keeps trying to crack 17 minutes in a 5k and simply can’t — am able to amble along with a marathon champion and ask him questions about his life for over an hour, and I’m only able to do that because we’re practically jogging, running around 7:45 pace. On some days, he doesn’t crack the 8-minute barrier at all.

He does this for a few reasons: first, he has nothing to prove. He hasn’t cared about what others’ runs look like in a long time. Second, he’s taking a page out of his own book from his cycling days. Back then, he says, he was “either pedaling around for an hour with no effort or doing an 8-hour, 150-mile ride.” 

The third reason is that he simply can’t afford to be tired from those easy runs. Loevner works on his family’s goat farm during the day (that’s why, in addition to “Marathoner” and “Bike Cowboy,” you’ll see “Goat Wrangler” in his Instagram bio), and that adds stimulus to his body. 

Loevner carried his training model through the latter half of 2023 and 2024, and it yielded a string of good results. In November of 2023, he ran 2:16 at the Philadelphia Marathon, finishing 4th overall and qualifying for the US Olympic Trials the following February. There, he ran 2:22, which wasn’t his best performance, but he rebounded quickly, taking second in the Pittsburgh Marathon and repeating as champion of the Cleveland Marathon (and proposing to his girlfriend at the finish line) in the span of two weeks. 

Going into the summer of 2024, Loevner had a few options for what would come next. He considered the California International Marathon, a net-downhill course that likely would have allowed him to crush his personal best. He wasn’t that interested in a fast time, though, especially in a race he would have virtually no chance of winning. He wanted to put himself in a position to win a major race.

So, he decided to return to Philadelphia. He adjusted his training, even making a change to his trusted long run. In previous marathon builds, he had incorporated several miles of marathon pace into each run, but it was all consistent. Those runs, as covered earlier, were beneficial, but they weren’t great at replicating how a race plays out. 

“You don’t just tuck in and run 5:08’s,” Loevner says. “You’re running a 4:50, and then the next mile you’re running a 5:20.”

Loevner decided to replicate this change of pace with a 24-mile long run workout, consisting of a warmup, 20 miles alternating 6:00 pace and 5:00 pace, and a cooldown. By the time Philly came around, he knew workouts like this had prepared him well. 

He had little idea, though, just how much he had been preparing for the next two hours over the last several years.

It’s Will!

No one wanted to take the lead at the start, and Loevner sat with the pack as they ran 5:20s for the first few miles. He knew he would blow up if he went out fast, especially considering the hilliness of the Philadelphia course. At mile four, they finally picked up the pace, working closer to 5:10. During the hilliest portion of the course, from miles 8 to 13, they cruised at around 5:00 pace, which broke a lot of the pack. By the halfway point, it was down to four runners, including Loevner. 

As they started the flat portion of the course, all three of his competitors wanted him to take the lead, but he declined. He had spent years doing his own training, pushing his own limits; why should he run someone else’s race? 

He let everyone else trade the lead for a while, and at around mile 18, Mulgeta Birhanu Feyissa decided he was done waiting.

“He took off like a rocket,” Loevner says. “He must have put 30 seconds on me pretty quick.”

Loevner tried to follow him, as most runners would. Letting someone make a move that late in a race is a risky move; if you want to win, you have to bet on their ill-timed demise as well as your own catch-up skills.

After about 20 seconds, though, Loevner realized that following Feyissa would be “a death wish,” and he made the same decision he had made earlier in the race, as well as hundreds of times throughout his career: he decided to bet on himself.

“I knew the way I was going to run the fastest and do the best was just running my own splits,” Loevner says.

Within a minute, Feyissa had put a substantial gap on him, and he was soon out of sight entirely. Rahal Bouchfar tried to go with Feyissa, and he survived for a while, but he eventually dropped off Feyissa’s pace as well. He remained about 10 seconds in front of Loevner, who spent the next six miles chipping away at his lead. By mile 24, Loevner was on his heels.

“I immediately went for the pass,” Loevner says. “I didn’t want to hesitate at all and tuck in behind him and give him a chance.”

Bouchfar tried to cover the move, but he dropped off after a quarter of a mile. Loevner was surprised at how swiftly he had dropped him, but he couldn’t dwell on that for long. Soon after he made that pass, he heard more yelling from the crowd, and he realized it was because Feyissa was in sight. 

“I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, he’s right there,’” Loevner says. “I was just hoping I had enough road to catch him.”

Feyissa was visibly struggling, and by mile 25, Loevner was four seconds back. He saw Feyissa was at the edge of the street, so he decided to make his pass on the opposite side. Feyissa, who wasn’t looking back, was caught off guard. He had no answer. 

Loevner’s family was standing near the finish line, waiting for an indication of what position he was in. They knew from the race tracking app that he and Feyissa were neck-and-neck, but they didn’t know who had the advantage. As Loevner came into sight, a voice rose from the crowd. “It’s Will!”

Loevner got to see his bet pay off in real time, breaking the tape in two hours, 16 minutes and 12 seconds.

The Legend of Will Loevner

Compared to a 350-mile bike race, a marathon seems fleeting, Loevner says. “You’re training for a 20 week build, and it all counts for the last five minutes.” Moreover, the last five minutes are unlike anything a cyclist would ever see. During a gravel race, he would have been lucky if a few friends showed up to watch him. As Loevner stormed down Kelly Drive in downtown Philadelphia, thousands cheered for him as he became the first American to win the race in a decade. 

For Martin, watching Loevner — a training partner, a good friend, a Pittsburgher — win a major marathon inspired him to think about his own running journey.

“I’d love to go back to the Olympic Trials and compete at a high level for a long time to come,” Martin says. “But it’s not satisfying now to watch Will compete at such a high level and then say, ‘Yeah, I’m okay with top five or top three.’ No, I’m gonna go to marathons and try to win them.”

For his father, it was everything. “He is a disciplined, hard-working, competitive guy,” Steve Loevner says. “To see him achieve that goal that he worked so hard for… it was an amazing moment for everybody.”

These moments are enough to keep Loevner going for now. Admittedly, for someone who typically is enchanted by doing things that seem completely insane, a marathon career seems somewhat out of place. He’s starting at 7:00 a.m. and he’s done a little after 9. He’s sitting on the couch with his wife by noon. Considering the legend of Will Loevner, an exploit so normal ought to bore him quickly. 

Asking him about how marathoning keeps him excited, I expect to be met with a piece of wisdom that forces me to reconsider the essence of running itself.

That is not what happens. He has a list, he says. There are things he wants to accomplish in his running career. He wants to win the Pittsburgh Marathon, which he will have the opportunity to do this May. He wants to get pulled along to a fast time in a major marathon that he has no chance to win. The list is long, but it will eventually be finite.

Loevner is completely satisfied with the notion that he won’t be marathoning forever. He wouldn’t be surprised, he says, if he’s still doing it in five years, but he also wouldn’t be surprised if he’s doing something completely different.

“What I do know,”’ he says, “is that I’m gonna be really going after something. That gives me peace.”

That is the legend of Will Loevner. He doesn’t possess the voice that says, Hey, I’m really good at this and I could probably make something out of it, so I should stick with it as long as I can. He could have been one of the best gravel cyclists in the country for decades, and in a few years, it’s possible that he could find himself in the elite fields in the world’s biggest marathons. Most people, if they ever get those kinds of chances, would hold on to them for dear life.

Not Loevner. He shows no loyalty to success or glory, only excitement. He does not care what form it takes.

Today, he finds what he needs from life on a wintry morning at North Park. He lives for the fog that rises from the lake, for the dead trees lining it, for the sunrise that will soon illuminate it. For everything that will grow over the next several months, providing no constant except for constant change. This excites him.

As we finish our loop, I have figured that out, but I want to know for sure. I ask him point blank, “Are you excited by a day like this?” He looks back at me. 

“Yeah,” he says quickly. He smiles, but he does not elaborate or justify. He stops his watch.

About the Author

Oliver Hinson is a second-year student at American University studying journalism and graphic design. He has been writing about track and field for a little over two years, and he enjoys telling stories that emphasize humanity. You can find his work in publications like DyeStat, Runner's World, Milesplit, CITIUS Mag and others. When he's not typing away, he is usually clicking off miles of his own, sinking his teeth into a sandwich, or trying to figure out where the N6 bus is.

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