Published

13 June 2026

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running

For the last 20-odd years, I’ve enjoyed that simplest of sports: mid- and long-distance running. I passionately hate running indoors and regularly try to make time for outdoor running along urban trails; my favorite distance is 7-8 miles, which I can comfortably run in about an hour. Beyond the more prominent benefits of exercise, I, like many others, find that running provides a certain mental clarity that is otherwise quite hard to come by; the excerpt below, from an essay published in The Atlantic, gives a sense of why, as does Haruki Murakami’s excellent book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

“You have to learn to enjoy the pain. You have to convince yourself over and over that the goal is worth the struggle. You have to run when you don’t want to, and you have to do the extra loop around the lake when everything is telling you to go back home. You have to believe in the process. You have to believe that brick by brick, run by run, your body and mind are getting stronger. You have to believe this on days when you run slower than you did the week before. And if you want to run faster than you did before, you have to strain your body more than you did before. You have to build resilience so you can push yourself even more the next time you run. You have to search for that mystical sensation—the crux of this sport—where pleasure and pain blur into one. When you get there, pain means progress and progress means pleasure.” Excerpted from Nicholas Thompson’s Why I Run.

Since moving to the east coast 2021, I’ve made an effort to run half-marathons a few times per year, slowly increasing the number of races per year. Here are some races I’ve run:

Table 1: Half-marathons run since mid-2022
race city year time status
BAA Boston Half Boston, MA 2022 1H 44M 51S finished
NYCRuns Central Park New York, NY 2023 1H 48M 13S finished
BAA Boston Half Boston, MA 2023 1H 44M 24S finished
NYCRuns Central Park New York, NY 2024 1H 49M 48S finished
BAA Boston Half Boston, MA 2024 1H 48M 36S finished
NYCRuns Central Park New York, NY 2025 1H 57M 7S finished
BAA Boston Half Boston, MA 2025 1H 45M 10S finished
Cambridge Half Cambridge, MA 2025 1H 44M 47S finished
NYCRuns Central Park New York, NY 2026 NA canceled
NYCRuns Brooklyn Brooklyn, NY 2026 1H 45M 0S finished
BAA Boston Half Boston, MA 2026 NA upcoming
Cambridge Half Cambridge, MA 2026 NA upcoming
NYCRuns Central Park New York, NY 2027 NA upcoming
NYCRuns Brooklyn Brooklyn, NY 2027 NA upcoming

After reading Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run in 2015 or therabouts, I became interested in minimalist and barefoot running, and switched over to running in sandals, which I use for both weekly runs and races, in all weather conditions. Anecdotally, I haven’t had a case of shin splints since making this change. If you’re curious, Luna Sandals produces some excellent options.

music

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” –Friedrich Nietzsche (supposedly)

I enjoy live music—at parks, concert venues, and festivals alike. A few of my favorite bands are LCD Soundsystem, Death Cab for Cutie, Vampire Weekend, the National, and Chvrches. My taste spans genres ranging from indie-, electronic, and art rock to art- and synth-pop to electronica, dance-punk, and indie sleaze. Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom has entertaining stories about the early years of some of these bands and the explosive growth of the NYC music scene in the early aughts.

photography

In 2020, I took up photography to spend more time outside, escape the tyranny of screens, and focus more on the world around us. In the years since, I’ve been shooting with a Fujifilm X-S10; I enjoy urban and landscape photography alike, though I mostly shoot in the former context.