The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends

A young Hannah Merrill takes the baton from Spencer Rodriguez in a younger siblings 4x400m at a Lodi High dual meet circa 2004.

Words Jeff Merrill

Last week, I saw an article in The Atlantic titled: Americans Need to Party More. This happened about the same time that my mother-in-law sent a link to an article in People Magazine written by outgoing Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. It was titled: Surgeon General Urges Americans to ‘Rethink How We’re Living Our Lives’ in Closing Letter to Country. I found it interesting that Murthy chose People Magazine as his pulpit, but hey, when you lack a robust X following, what better way to reach the American People?

The contents of the letter were unexpected. Rather than instruct Americans on eating healthy, exercising, taking vitamins, getting vaccinations and flu shots, he laid out how we could lead healthier lives by focusing on 3 important things: relationships, service, and purpose. His parting prescription was for these to be placed at the heart of American society, and our lives.

In 2023, my wife and I had a daughter. As Chuck Klosterman said about having kids: “all of the sappy cliches are true.” Things get put into perspective. The priorities in your life shift. You do a lot of thinking about what is important to you through what you want to be important to her. You hope to be important to her.

Having a kid also shifts your place in the family tree. There’s a rung below you now. It makes it more apparent than ever that rungs will continue to disappear above you. The knowledge of your place in the hierarchy brings the weight and privilege of responsibility.

As a kid, I knew 3 of my great grandparents. I grew up around the block from 2 of them and would ride my bike over to their house to eat cookies and play in their backyard. I remember registering for a 5k with my great grandmother at the lake park where I would one day race on the high school cross country team. She walked most days until late in life. When we stepped to the registration table, the guy taking her name down asked her the year she was born. “Nineteen ot six”.

She knew her great grandfather who was born in 1817. I knew someone who knew someone who was born in 1817.

I saw her suffer through some sort of illness briefly at the end of her life at 94. She was a private lady and didn’t share what it was, especially not with a 12 year old. I remember her pushing against a twisted white sheet with her feet as the sun came through the curtains of her convalescent home bedroom, the one she moved to after she left the house around the corner from me. It was strange to me then that there could be pain and ending occurring on a sunny day. The schedule shouldn’t allow for that. Cars were driving by outside her window, heading to the grocery store and to baseball practice, and afterwards they’d get ice cream. Things continued to happen. Those people seemed to be unaffected by what was going on.

I remember the plants hanging from her balcony, and when I go back to Lodi and drive by the balcony that is sometimes empty and sometimes dotted with other things, I think about her and wonder how to honor her memory.

94 years is a long time, but I only say that because I’ve lived for 36. My grandmother had my father when she was 21. My mother had me when she was 29. I was 34 when my daughter was born. These numbers of years don’t amount to a long time. They seem incredibly short as I write this and my parents are taking care of my 92 year old grandfather. I don’t think 92 years feels like a long time to him, and in his state of mind, what seems to confuse him most is where the time went. As the tree grows higher, the aperture opens, making our branches appear closer together. One day I’ll take care of my parents.

This doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with running, but it’s what’s been occupying my mind lately when I think about relationships, service and purpose and the importance of each individual life and what all of them mean together.

A difficult thing about running, for altruistic people, is trying to place your individual effort into being somehow beneficial to others. If it cannot be, what good is the work? In team sports, an individual’s effort is in service to the team. Others want you to do your job well because they and the team as a whole benefit from it. It is not bad to do something for yourself, but you don’t want to slide so far as to get yourself into the “I’m gonna get mine, screw everyone else” camp. That may be a helpful on-field persona, but a society built on people out for themselves is a cold, dark place.

People need each other. Relationships, service and purpose all require a connection to one another. Of all the beliefs and convictions that people hold onto, a connection to each other’s well-being should be at the center.

Jane Jacobs’ opens her book The Life and Death of Great American Cities with a story about Boston’s North End. At the time of the writing, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Americans were moving to the suburbs and being told that a life reliant on automobiles was the future. The suburban life with stores, parks, attractions and employment connected by freeways was the healthy and ideal American life. Boston’s North End was the low rent district, and viewed as an undesirable place to live. Jacobs observed, however, that this was where everyone went out on the weekends. This was where all the good food was and where the best clubs were. Jacobs also observed that despite the perks being touted for suburban living, and the dangers of the North End, the North End wound up having the highest life expectancy of any neighborhood in the city. People felt connected. Old people were not stuck in their suburban homes when they got to an age where they couldn’t drive any longer. If they lived in the North End, they could walk out their front door and pull up a chair in front of the bodega on the corner and be a part of the city life. The cramped city layout likely forced them to walk more too.

In 2025, there are many conveniences that we aspire to attain with more wealth. Luxuries like being able to have your groceries delivered to the front door, being able to work from home, selecting a mate through an app. It is right to question what we lose through convenience. We lose the process of living.

My biggest fear for AI is not that it will spawn a robot army that will enslave us, it is that it will achieve what those pushing it wish it to and create a Utopia where we are all provided for and no one ever has to work again. If that is achieved, what is our purpose? What is our service?

It is ironic that our natural drive to create could one day produce a world where our drive to create is unnecessary. Our drive will still be there, however unnecessary it is. I don’t know if humans can evolve past this, and I don’t want us to.

Humans are aspirational beings by nature. It’s why we set resolutions and goals every new year. What winds up being the most valuable piece of these resolutions and goals at year’s end is not the achievement of them, but the process to get there. You know… it’s about the journey, not the destination.

Once you’ve achieved everything and gotten to the house on the hill away from everyone, getting your groceries delivered, what are you doing there? Is it fun?

The athletes who really love the sport love to race more than they love any single result.

It turns out that life is about working toward the better place, it isn’t about being in the better place.

It’s why the game is important, and playing it honestly so that others can do the same is a gift to their health and well-being. Success is just getting another crack at it. It is the game we construct together.

In time, we will calculate results and figure out what they mean throughout the year. We will all look at any given performance and try to place it into its appropriate context. We’ll discuss what it means for the individual in their quest to achieve their overall goal. What it says about the work they have done to get to their current place and the obstacles that have faced them. We’ll look at what a performance means for the competitors of the person who achieved it. People will do amazing things this year. They’ll do things they never thought they could, they’ll place themselves in competitive circles that they could only dream about, and they’ll open up new worlds of opportunities. People will fall short. They’ll miss the goals they set for themselves. They’ll face hardships and hindrances. They’ll need support from people they love. The new year will be a test, as it always is, and right now we have a clean slate, and the ability to face it with our best.

One thing I love hearing about after the fact are messages exchanged between competitors and rivals that you would not expect would speak to each other for one reason or another, either because of their fierce determination to defeat the other in competition or just simply because there is no incentive to do it. Des Linden is known for sending her competitors encouraging words through text, at the finish line after the race or even during it.

There’s a woman named Carolyn Gilchriese who is the President of the Jacuzzi Boys Athletic Club in Portland. She gives me Strava kudos for every single run I go on. I’ve heard from others that she does the same for them. It feels good to get that pat on the back for getting out there, no matter how short the distance. I often think the most impactful thing a professional athlete can do is to go on Strava a couple times a week and give kudos to random people. We underestimate the value of a complement or a kind word. Imagine seeing a notification on your phone that Emma Coburn or Cole Hocker or Gabby Thomas liked your 5.5 miler. They see you and your effort. It also might be the easiest way to gain a fan there is.

Running is a hard thing. It’s not convenient. It's reasonable to think that we’ve evolved past it, and that it is just an instinctual urge we have left over from when we had to stalk prey and travel long distances to find food. We have bikes now, and cars and rocket ships, but we’re still left with this archaic mechanism inside of us that calls us to move, linking the health of our vital organs to it. We still have to do it to placate the serotonin in our brains and to keep our cholesterol at a reasonable level. People didn’t think about these things before, because we were just dumb beasts who were lucky enough that our wiring both kept our levels in check while we hunted for sustenance, tiring ourselves out enough in the process to go to sleep at night. But it's deep inside of us, the itch to run. We set goals around it and admire those who do it well.

Even with all the advancements allowing for autonomy in society, we also haven’t evolved past our need to be around each other, and with the many luxuries incentivizing us apart, it takes initiative to do the hard thing.

Keep playing games, keep running, and be a good sport.

Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech is over-referenced, but the main point he makes will never be false: “You’re going to die someday”.

How do you want to live?

Relationships, Service, Purpose.

The work never ends, and that’s the way we want it.

Happy New Year, I wish you health and happiness and fulfillment in 2025, and lots of great times with friends and family. I look forward to seeing you around the track, roads and trails.

-Jeff