course flags

When I ran a 51km race in January, I wore no watch. No timer on me. No clue. I ran 32 miles without a route on my phone, without a Garmin (I don’t own one). You’d spot me hurtling down a rock-flecked mountain shoulder, then hiking up the next, and I was lost to the world. No headphones, no music.

I had the course flags though. However long the stretch between them, I trusted those flags with my life — planted inch-deep in dry earth. Or tied to the fingertip of a California shrub. The flags marked the turns, the route. And they threaded me 32 miles through unknown switchbacks and a-left-not-a-right, and this-trail-here, not-that-one. Through to the finish.

I ran unplugged not because I’m hardcore. I’m just minimalist — by inheritance from my Dutch minimalist dad — and also: I had a lot on my mind and little room for screens.

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Tonight, I looked through quotes I’ve saved.

4 years of quotes.

When I die at some ripe age after a surprising life — more surprises ahead — and when the people I love search through my notes and journals (and get surprised) they will find quotes. Too many. All wonderful. They will also find inscrutable poetry, vulnerabilities, self-address, and sharp handwriting.

This 4-year collection of quotes feels like course flags, because these 4 four years alive have felt like a hell of an ultramarathon without a Garmin.

I save quotes that give me a vision of which way to go, to move, to live.

In the spirit of planting a course flag — of tying it to the sprightly sprout of a California shrub at a sharp turn, I offer my selection of quotes to mark the trail for anybody, everybody, who travels this route.

For you.

Come let us hurtle down this mountain and up the next.

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