The Thing About Slow

What running taught me about the only pace that actually works

I came back to running in my fifties, the way you return to something you always knew mattered but kept setting aside for more urgent things.

It was not my first time. I had run before, cycled, moved through seasons of taking care of myself and seasons of not. This was a return, which is different from a beginning — there is less innocence in it, and more intention. You come back to something knowing what it costs, knowing you will have to earn it again, and deciding it is worth the earning.

What I understood more fully this time around is that running is not one thing. It is a conversation between effort and recovery, between pushing and yielding. The 80/20 principle in endurance training makes this formal: run roughly eighty percent of your miles at a genuinely easy, conversational pace. Save the intensity for the small percentage of sessions where hard effort actually produces adaptation. Then — and this is the part most people skip — recover fully before you ask the body to perform again. The hard twenty percent is not the secret. Recovery from the hard twenty percent is the secret. Consistency is the plan. Everything else is detail.

Slow is fast. Not as a productivity trick. As a description of how things actually work when you pay attention long enough.

And then there are the trails.

There is a joy in trail running I find almost nowhere else. When I am moving through the woods — alone, or with my dogs threading ahead and behind me — something shifts. I can go faster or slower or simply stop and look. I am part of something much broader and older than whatever I carried into the trees. Neither more important nor less important than anything else out there. Just present, breathing, moving through beauty I did nothing to earn.

Sometimes, on the right morning at the right pace, something happens that runners describe in slightly embarrassed terms because it sounds improbable until it happens to you — a kind of transcendence, a dissolution of the boundary between effort and ease, between self and surroundings. You are not running so much as you have become the running. Those moments cannot be manufactured. They arrive, almost always, in the slow miles, the patient miles, the miles where nothing dramatic was supposed to happen.

This is not unique to running. Every deep tradition of human transformation has known this. The Camino de Santiago draws half a million walkers annually, most of them not conventionally religious, nearly all of them changed. The Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan has carried Buddhist seekers through 1,100 kilometers for a thousand years. The Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails are walked every year by people at crossroads, carrying questions they could not sit still with. Colin O’Brady built an entire movement around a single premise — walk alone for twelve hours with no phone and no destination, and see what finds you. The form varies. The logic is the same: the body in motion, sustained over time, opens something in the mind and spirit that stillness cannot reach. And what gets opened is not a return to where you were. It is something new.

I have been in ministry for almost forty years — youth work, ordination, senior pastor, the administrative weight of leading complex institutions — and for the last several years as a chaplain embedded in a pediatric hospital. I work with children and families navigating cardiovascular disease and transplant, neurological illness, trauma, and the full range of what human bodies endure when they are young and under siege. Patients range from newborns to young adults, and some I have known across years of returning care.

What I encounter most is not what people expect. It is not suffering, though suffering is present. It is resilience — and something beyond resilience. The human capacity not just to endure difficulty but to be transformed by it, to emerge from it carrying something they did not have before, is one of the most astonishing things I have ever witnessed. I keep coming back to that. I keep trying to understand what makes that possible for some people and not others, what conditions allow a person to grow through something rather than merely survive it.

That question is at the center of everything I intend to write here.

The chaplain’s work taught me the first part of the answer: presence. I talk far less than I used to. I have learned — slowly, imperfectly, still learning — to listen twice as much as I speak, to ask one careful question and then be quiet long enough to actually hear the answer, to speak only when genuinely moved to or when someone has specifically asked. There is a kind of violence in unsolicited wisdom. Sometimes the most powerful thing I can offer is the quality of my attention.

That is slow work. It cannot be optimized. It has formed me more than anything else I have ever done.

This Substack is where I intend to think out loud about the rest of the answer.

The Long Walk is about what happens when human beings move through difficulty with intention — when suffering becomes not just something to survive but something that reshapes the interior landscape in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. It is about the conditions that make that kind of growth possible: slowness, presence, meaning, connection, the willingness to let something be rewritten in you rather than simply patched.

I will write from forty years of ministry and clinical chaplaincy. I will draw on the research — trauma-informed care, post-traumatic growth, neuroscience, moral psychology — because the science is pointing somewhere genuinely important and it deserves to be translated into language that people can actually use. And I will write from the inside, about faith tested and revised so many times it barely resembles what I started with, and somehow more sturdy for it.

The through-line beneath all of it is this: there is something at the foundation of things oriented toward you, regarding you with something that can only be called love, and learning to receive that — really receive it, below argument and above sentiment — may be the most transformative act available to a human being.

I have been learning that for forty years. I expect I will be learning it for whatever years remain.

I will publish twice a month. I will not waste your time.

If something here resonated — the quiet suspicion that slow might actually be fast, or the sense that what you have been through might be making you into something rather than just costing you something — I think we are going to find good company in each other.

The walk is long. That turns out to be the point.

— Mark