March 17, 2026
We are leaving in ten minutes.
The packs are staged. The house is quiet in that strange, suspended way that only happens right before something begins. Not anticipation exactly. Not nerves. More like a narrowing of the world down to what matters and what does not.
This last week did not go according to plan.
Both big toes turned on me after a routine pedicure. Infection set in fast and ugly. Urgent Care. Antibiotics. The kind of clinical, mechanical intervention that reminds you how fragile the whole system really is. Both nails partially removed, carved out to relieve the pressure. Walking became negotiation. Training stopped for three days, not by choice but by necessity.
There is a lesson there if you want it. The body keeps the final vote.
But the timing forced something useful. Stillness. A pause long enough to look up from the spreadsheets and the mileage charts and see what this actually is.
Sharon and I have been doing the harder work. The quiet work. Preparing for separation.
She will walk the first four days with me, Campo to Mount Laguna, about forty-one and a half miles. A small opening chapter before the long silence that follows. We have been talking more carefully. Not more, just more deliberately. Less assumption. More presence. There is no manual for this part. Just two people trying to get it right before distance stretches everything thin.
And now the weather.
A heat dome has settled over Southern California. March pretending to be July. Highs pushing past ninety-five. The kind of dry, punishing heat that does not negotiate either.
So we adjust.
We move from six in the morning until noon. That is the window. That is the workday. If the miles are not done by then, they wait until after seven in the evening. There is no grinding through the middle of the day. That is how people break.
There will be casualties out there. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just people who underestimated what heat does over time. It is not the spike that gets you. It is the accumulation.
Water will matter more than pride. Shade more than schedule. Discipline more than ambition.
And over all of it, the larger world presses in.
News breaks and fractures at the same time. The United States and Israel have struck Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Fuel routes constricted. Supply lines shifting. Old alliances bending in ways that may not unbend cleanly. Russia benefits. Ukraine absorbs that consequence. Everyone recalculates.
It is the kind of geopolitical moment that reminds you how tightly coupled everything really is. Energy, conflict, trade, stability. Pull one thread and the fabric shifts everywhere.
Out here, it reduces to something simpler.
Heat.
Water.
Distance.
Time.
There is a strange clarity in that reduction. The global and the personal running in parallel. Systems under stress. Adaptation required. No guarantees.
It is hot. It is getting hotter.
So we will start early. We will stop when we must. We will take what the day gives and not pretend it is something else.
And then we will do it again the next day.
Time to go.
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