I live in Greenbush, Wisconsin, which is another way of saying I live inside the Kettle Moraine. For a little over a decade, that meant one thing: running. Not jogging. Racing, badly at first and then less badly, for absurd distances, mostly alone, mostly at hours polite people don’t discuss.
I ran the Glacial Trail 50K in my own backyard so many times I lost count trying to write this paragraph. I ran Kettle Moraine 100 miles five separate times, which either means I love it or means something is wrong with me, and I’ve stopped asking which. I ran Western States in 2018 and finished in just under twenty-nine and a half hours, which is a sentence that sounds more impressive than the last six hours of it felt. I ran Javelina Jundred in the Arizona desert at night. I flew to Urique, Mexico, and ran the Copper Canyon ultra that inspired Born to Run, among the Tarahumara, in shoes that were embarrassingly worse than theirs. Twice, I tried to finish the Tuscobia 160 in the dead of a Wisconsin December and twice the winter won.
Here is what nobody tells you about spending that many hours on trails: you start noticing things. Aid station tables built by somebody’s uncle out of a single slab of live-edge oak. A trekking pole handle carved from burl by a guy in a gas station outside Los Alamos who wouldn’t take money for it. A hitching post at a trailhead in Mexico that was clearly just a tree that had given up trying to be anything else. You start collecting a mental list of the best-made, strangest, most honestly-built wood objects you’ve ever seen, with no plan for what to do with that list.
I retired from racing in 2021. My knees would like it on the record that this was overdue. What I didn’t retire from was the habit of noticing extraordinary things made from wood and wanting other people to see them too, without having to run a hundred miles first.
That’s the whole company. We find the things. You don’t have to run for them.