Half Marathons to Ultras & Everything In Between

Q&A with the creator of The Half Marathoner about our running, writing, and midlife goals

Welcome back! I’m writing this on a flight to Bilbao, Spain, to start a nine-day excursion hiking parts of the Camino de Santiago with my husband Morgan. Safe bet, I’ll share photos and a running story from Northern Spain next week. Meanwhile, I’m eager to bring you a conversation with the creator of one of Substack’s most popular running-related newsletters,

The Half Marathoner

. We talked via Zoom about long-distance running, writing, parenting, and our backgrounds. I figure it’s a good way to introduce you to a truly nice guy and his worthwhile newsletter, plus a way to introduce myself to all of you who are relatively new subscribers.

This past week, I spent time browsing and posting on Substack’s new Twitter-like platform, Notes. So far, I’m a fan (and I never was very active on Twitter, which grew too toxic with politics and put-downs). The Notes’ feed strikes me as more literary and friendly, at least so far. I encourage you to check it out here. My social media activity now tends to focus on Instagram, Notes, BeReal, and Strava. I use Facebook and LinkedIn hardly at all anymore. How about you?

Meet Mr. Half Marathoner

If you search “running” on Substack, one newsletter consistently rises near the top in terms of subscriber numbers: The Half Marathoner by

Terrell Johnson

. I’ve been reading it for over a year, plus following Terrell’s discussion threads on Substack’s Chat and the new Notes. Mini profiles of half (plus some full) marathons around the world form the backbone of his newsletter, encouraging readers to consider registering for these destination-oriented races.

But the heart of his content is his personal writing on matters that sometimes are only tangentially tied to logging miles. His most popular post, for example, has to do with living in the moment. It includes a  quote from Willie Nelson and a focus on Scott Jurek’s search for meaning during his 2,186-mile Appalachian Trail odyssey, as detailed in Jurek’s memoir North.

How did Terrell develop such a sought-after newsletter? The secret, I think, is how he popularizes and evangelizes the 13-mile distance, making it something anyone can run—and anyone would want to—after reading his newsletter. His friendly, supportive posts keep running fun and manageable, not too serious or complicated. Best of all, his personal musings about his life, often tied to quotes from what he’s been reading, elevate his newsletter from general running content to a midlife dad blog.

Terrell and I talked in late March, while he was at home in Atlanta and I was at home in Telluride. I started by asking him questions, and then we swapped roles and he interviewed me. I edited our conversation for length and clarity.

Terrell and me Zooming.

Sarah: Tell me your running origin story—how did you get into it, and why did it stick?

Terrell: For me it was back in the ’90s. I started running because I had a job at a school, so I’d get off 4:30ish and had all this time. And, Atlanta has a big race, the Peachtree Road Race 10K, and me and a group of friends all wanted to get into it. I had never run that far, so I thought, I’ve gotta get ready. So I picked it up as a way to run the Peachtree and do this fun thing with my friends, and enjoyed it. When you’re young and single, you’ve got a lot of time to fill.

S: So 6.2 miles felt like a stretch back then?

T: It did. I really hadn’t run much at all. I was about 22 years old, so getting ready to run 6 miles was a big thing for me. Later that year, I met someone who was running a marathon, doing one of these programs where you raise money and they pay for your trip there. She convinced me to do it, and going from 6 to 26 is a really big jump. I joined with a group that trained, and we would add a single mile each week to our long run. It was a way psychologically to expand our comfort zone, just a little bit, every week. It was really surprising to me get this point where you think there’s no way in a million years you could ever do this, and then it’s like, “Oh yeah, I could go run 18 miles.”

S:  What was your first marathon?

T: The Bermuda Marathon in January of ’97. Bermuda is small, so you feel like you’re running most of the island when you do this thing. We did a 13 mile course twice, which was so much fun because there were only about 700 runners doing the race, and it was a small enough group that they could put our race numbers and names in the newspaper that morning. But we didn’t know that, and we’d be running and people would shout our names. We were like, how do they know our names?

Then I started taking up half’s, because it feels more doable. When I trained for the first marathon, it took a big chunk of time. It was a serious commitment.

S: That’s a good segue to your newsletter. You write about more than just running. How would you describe your newsletter, The Half Marathoner?

T: That’s a great question and actually something I still wrestle with. I created a website in the mid-2000s devoted to half marathons, as a guide to them, because I’d seen a marathon guide out there but nothing devoted to half’s. Several years later, I started a newsletter on Mailchimp. It really was just supposed to be an adjunct to the website, to pick out the best or most interesting races for curated lists. [The lists] are still an important part of the newsletter but have become less important over time. I started writing essays at the beginning of the newsletter—just a couple of paragraphs—and they grew and snowballed as more people responded to it.

S: What do you think resonated with the readers?

T: For me, I am not a person who’s interested in the technical parts of running, so I don’t write about that because it’s not my area of expertise. I’ve tried to learn. But I go through this feeling of imposter syndrome because I don’t have an exercise physiology degree and don’t have a science background, so I focus on what’s going on mentally and emotionally, and the journey I’ve had and what it’s done for me. I think that is kind of universal; everyone responds to that. That’s what I gravitated toward, but no plan, it just sort of happened.

S: When did you launch your Substack, and how do your stats look now?

T: The middle of 2018. I have a little over 42,000 subscribers, just shy of 630 paid. It was higher before the pandemic, because at that point the newsletter was really focused on races. Conditions are different now—covid for two-plus years really hit races hard. Now, they’re increasingly filling up again. But the reason for being for the newsletter [to spotlight races] ceased to exist. So I focused on the essays even more.

S: What are some of the themes or topics you like to weave into your writing about running?

T: A lot about parenting, because I have an 18-year-old [daughter] and 9-year-old [son], so that’s top of mind for me. I don’t really plan out weeks in advance what I’m going to write; I sit down in a mild panic and think on the page. I’ll consult a lot of books, so for example, I’ll make a connection between a book that’s on running and a book more for a general audience. I wrote a post about the shooting in Uvalde, Texas—I felt I had to write about it, because it was so jarring for me. Way off the topic of the newsletter, but readers really responded to that.

S: Tell me more what’s so special about the 13.1 mile distance, and why do you evangelize half marathons?

T: At times I toy with changing the name of newsletter, because I do include other distances in there, and it’s not really just for people who run that distance. I was lucky with the timing of when I built that website; it just happened to coincide with that rise in popularity in the half.

If you can’t make that commitment to a training program for 26 miles, 13 is so much more of a Goldilocks distance, not too far and not too short, enough of a challenge to where you feel like “I’m really doing something here,” and it can bring more people into the fold.

S: What do you do when you’re not running; do you have other sports or hobbies?

T: I have a regular day job [as a UX writer for a company called Synovis], so I don’t do this full time, and the kids take up a lot of time. I used to play golf more often but haven’t in a while. So really just family, and I try to get in a few runs a week.

S: Do you have any advice about how you fit running into your life between work and parenting?

T: A treadmill. Atlanta is great for running in the spring and fall, but summer gets hot. Where my in-laws live, in Danville, California, there are all these wonderful trails near their house. We don’t really have that here. We’re more of a driving city. Having a treadmill is great, I can just hop on there.

S: I can go out and spend a half day on trails, but an hour on the treadmill is like pulling teeth. What’s your secret to effective treadmill runs?

T: I watch a lot of YouTube Live concerts, because the music hits this crescendo at certain points, and my body responds to that. I love running to live music. And the occasional podcast.

S: Are you training for anything now that you care about, or do you feel your relationship with running is purely recreational and for health?

T: Right now, it’s purely recreational and for health.

S: Any goals you’d like to share?

T: No. [laughs] That’s not entirely true. I would like to run more 10Ks with my wife, and I’d like to get my son interested in running, so I’d like us to do 10Ks together as a family. Her job is really busy too. I’ve got a friend who runs ultras, and I think his wife stays at home, so he can get away and do these really long training sessions that are harder for me to do because my wife has to work a lot on the weekends. So logistically, anything longer than what I’m doing now is a stretch.

How old are your kids?

S: My kids are 21 and 25—drinking age!

Terrell Gets Me to Open Up about My Running “Why”

[At this point, Terrell starts asking me questions.]

Terrell: So tell me your story about how you got into running.

Sarah: Like you, I started in the 1990s, and I was a late bloomer athletically, I wasn’t sporty in high school or college. I went to grad school from ’93 to ’95, and it was very stressful. I was at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley with intense deadlines, and I got chosen to work at the San Francisco bureau of the New York Times as a stringer, and it was high pressure. I was pretty unhappy—I felt I was trying to become a reporter because it was important, but I didn’t actually like it that much.

Just by chance, in March of ’94, I had a couple of friends running the Napa Valley Marathon, and I went to watch them. I knew nothing about marathoning. That very next day—the first Monday in March of 1994—I laced up my aerobics shoes and ran the longest I ever had, which was three miles, and I was hooked. I made a goal to go back to Napa the following year and run the whole marathon, without walking breaks, trying to break four hours.

I took a deep dive into learning what I could about running, and I did it—I accomplished my first-marathon goal in March of ’95. I think it was a way for me to find satisfaction and stress relief outside the profession I was developing. Running is very quantifiable and makes you feel good, and was something I could control.

Then I got married to my high school boyfriend, and we started a family, and I had kids pretty young at 29 and 32. Even though I had been working as a newspaper reporter, my heart really wasn’t in it, so I was kind of happy to mommy-track my career and switch to freelancing and be the primary caregiver of our kids. After my second child was born, I got better and faster as a runner in my early 30s, like I met my goal of Boston qualifying under the men’s standards for my age, which meant getting my marathon time down to the low 3’s. I think in part I did it for the ego gratification to make up for putting my career on hold.

I was just reflecting on this, because my daughter just turned 25, and I was flashing back to what it was like 20 years ago when she was 5 and her little brother was 2 and I was in my early 30s. I was really kicking ass running. That became stressful in its own way, however, because when you’re a road racer, you work so hard to shave minutes and then just seconds off your times.

Meanwhile, I was lucky to live in the North Berkeley area where there was a community of trail and ultrarunners early on in the sport. By luck, in my neighborhood one block away lived the world’s top female ultrarunner, a woman named Ann Trason who set records in the ’90s that still stand—she won Western States 100 14 times, and the Comrades ultramarathon in South Africa several times—and I’d see her running back and forth on our sidewalk, and I became curious to find out about her and learn about the Western States 100. Meeting her and other ultrarunners opened this whole world for me.

Then in 2003, I entered my first trail half marathon, on Mount Diablo [in the East Bay Area suburbs]. It went halfway up Diablo with a technical, steep climb of about 2000 feet. And I just kind of found myself and went for it. And I won it! I just fell in love with trail running and graduated to ultras—I started running 50Ks in 2007, then 50-milers and 100-milers.

I love the inherent variability and challenge of trail. Whereas if you are a serious marathoner and want to break 3:30, you intuitively feel what an 8-minute-per-mile pace feels like, and how to hold it for 26 miles. That doesn’t happen on trail. Your pace can vary from a 7-minute speedy downhill mile, to hiking a 20-minute mile up a gnarly hill. Also with longer distances, you have to manage your systems—all the factors of your body temperature, hydration, and fueling. I find the strategy for the longer distances appealing.

So that’s a long answer to how I got into it, and I’m still doing it a quarter-century later.

T: That’s amazing. It sounds like you’ve got to be planning the whole time about what you’re eating, drinking, the terrain—it’s a lot more mental.

S: Yes, you definitely need to be a planner. I did a 50-miler last Saturday, and that took me half a day, and I had to be a lot more strategic because the weather was insane, so I was borderline hypothermic, and it was tough from a logistical standpoint with flash flooding in the desert. Using aid stations and taking care of your body along the way is key.

T: A race like that throws every challenge at you. Where are some of the most amazing places you’ve ever run?

S: I’ve run some pretty incredible mountains here where I live in southwest Colorado, in the San Juan Mountains of the Rockies, and a lot of that is above tree line so very thin air around 13,000 feet. I’ve been lucky to run abroad—I did a special 100K race in New Zealand [the Tarawera Ultra].

I think probably the most incredible race I’ve done, which I’ve done three times, is a special format called a self-supported stage race, and it takes a whole week and combines camping. Self-supported means you have to carry all your food and gear for the week on your back. This was a 170-mile race called the Grand to Grand Ultra, because it goes from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to the Grand Staircase overlooking Bryce National Park. We ran through the desert and through forest land between northern Arizona and southern Utah, and it was wild—totally off the grid. You have to ration your calories for the week; all they provide is water and communal tents. It was a very immersive wilderness experience, but I feel like I found myself. I first did it in 2012, their inaugural year, and then again in 2014. I placed second and third in those. The last time I did it in 2019, as a 50th birthday present to myself, I wanted to see a female in the top 10 because not many women run it. I finished in the top 10 and first female, because I pushed really hard. It strips you bare but was an amazing experience in that landscape.

T: Let’s talk about the newsletter—how did you start Colorado Mountain Running & Living?

S: I was a blogger for over a decade, first with a travel blog. My husband and I had a pretty unusual year of living nomadically around the world in 2009 to ’10 and roadschooling our kids when they were in 3rd and 6th grades. When I got back, I started another blog called TheRunnersTrip to combine running with traveling and journeying. But by 2021, I wasn’t updating it regularly, and I wanted a fresh platform with content more oriented toward my life in southwest Colorado—about the mountains, and also about midlife transition and being an athlete later in life when you’re slowing down.

T: Do you still coach?

S: I put my coaching business on hiatus last year after nearly nine years. I put so much of myself into it, and wrote a book that distills my coaching advice, but I was feeling kind of burned out and isolated, because all my clients were remote and I worked from home. I wanted to have more of a community-oriented job. Our local school district has a chronic, dire need for substitute teachers, and since I’m an empty-nester, I miss my kids and being involved with the schools, so a year ago I started substitute teaching. I love the time in the classroom—it’s been really satisfying.

T: Have you ever gotten hurt when you run?

S: Oh yeah. I’ve taken Wilderness First Aid to be able to triage myself if and when something happens. I’ve never had a head injury or broken bone, but I’ve had some pretty dicey falls and puncture wounds. I’m big on safety precautions and have a whole chapter about it in my book.

One of my trip-and-falls during a 50K trail race in 2017—I flew in the air and landed on my forearms.

T: What are your goals for running and your newsletter?

S: For running, there’s this special race I’ve been trying for nearly a decade to get into, and it has a lottery system, and the odds are stacked against newcomers trying to get into it. The race is the Hardrock 100, through the San Juan Mountains and the towns of Telluride, Silverton, and Ouray, and it’s got about 30,000 feet of elevation gain. It’s extremely hard, but it’s my main goal. I’ve been involved with it for a decade as a volunteer and pacer, so my heart is really in it, and I keep trying every year to get drawn. To even get in the lottery, you have to run qualifying races, and there’s a limited number of 100-mile races that are tough and mountainous enough to be a Hardrock qualifier. So each year I do a qualifier. This year I’ll be working up to a qualifying race called Run Rabbit Run 100 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

In terms of my newsletter, I’m proud of what I’ve done in a year and a half, including building a community by offering paid subscribers monthly meetups on Zoom. We have good Zoom discussions, and I offer my paid subscribers the opportunity to have a half-hour one-on-one chat with me if they want to talk about anything related to running.

T: Anything you want to add?

S: If you share this with your readers who are half-marathoners, and they hear about ultramarathons on trails, it can sound very intimidating. I want to stress that if I can do it, anyone can. And in a lot of ways, trail racing is more forgiving than road racing. I find it harder to run at an accelerated pace for 26 or even 13 miles, really pushing it, than to spend several hours in a trail race, because trail races are inherently slower and have variability. For ultras, you have to find a sustainable tortoise pace. So people who find a half or full marathon stressful might actually enjoy longer trail runs more.

A random selfie from a training run last June in the mountains above Telluride. I can’t wait for the high country trails to melt out so I can get back up there!

I really enjoyed getting to know Terrell. Subscribe to his newsletter if you haven’t already! I’m curious to know, could you relate to anything in our Q&A? What parts struck a chord with you?

Related post: One Year in the Substackverse