Dear Reader,
Happy New Year! Thanks for running with me 🫶🏽 In this first mile, I wanted to share my mindset going into 2025 last year and how it’s shifted heading into 2026. For context, I was coming off my second foot injury in a year—humbled, hopeful, and hungry to get back. I wrote the following entry on Strava after my last run of 2024:
12/31/2024
God and I Down Riverside
2024 was so incredibly hard, yet so incredibly good 🫶🏽 Somehow, a year of six (non-consecutive) months off due to injury was decorated with the strongest training sessions of my life—and somehow, I believe this is far from happenstance. The past 366 days have also led me to believe that 2025 will be my year. Not because I’m counting on only receiving the good, but because I’ve learned that “good” can also be created—be it by a shift in perspective, security in faith, or gratitude for the experiences that instill and enrich them.
It will be yours too 🫶🏽
Love you ALL,
Soph
First, I swear I’m not usually sappy on Strava, but I needed every bit of perspective, faith, and gratitude vowed to the ensuing year. 2025 was littered with misfortune, which was my last expectation given the poor hand I’d been dealt the previous two years. My mom always says, “bad things happen in threes,” but good God, I think I’m on like five or six now. In January, my dad had a horrible fall, which led my mom and me to realize that even after every modification we’d made to safeguard the house, he was still unsafe under our care. After a few months recovering in the hospital, he went straight into a nursing home. As his daughter, I felt like I’d failed him. It was the first time in my five-year stint of caregiving that I couldn’t save him—a stint bookended by my own insufficiency, and I wore that burden for months following.
Soon after, since I was no longer needed at home, I bought my own! And naturally, three weeks later (en route to Penn Relays), my task force at NCI was eliminated on a day’s notice. No severance, no wrapping up of research, not even a pat on the back or a “job well done.” In 24 hours, I became a homeowner with no stable income and an elite athlete with no health insurance (and an absolute nutcase). I poured myself into every race I could think of that offered prize money, trying to gain some sort of protection against the inevitable loss of stability I’d stacked for five years as a civil servant.
I raced six times in five weeks, scrambling for a dime, and by the end of May, ya girl was toast. I couldn’t hit prescribed paces in workouts and convinced myself my iron was low, when in actuality, my iron was the highest it’s ever been—and so was my delusion. I was exhausted. It took three down weeks just to feel remotely ok in workouts, but the cycle of feeling fit and feeling shit continued to yo-yo into the fall.
In June, my dad went septic. He’s suffered most every health crisis you could imagine, but sepsis wasn’t one until that point. He beat it and, naturally, fell septic again by July. Every time I boarded a plane to race in those months, I feared I was sacrificing his last steps to time my own. We were advised to begin hospice care, and on the day I raced USAs, we were told he had two days to live. He’s lived 157 since then, naturally ;)
Remember how I said, “2025 would be my year”? I was wrong. It was not my year—and frankly, whether or not you “created the good” like me, it wasn’t your year either. Because we don’t get those. We don’t get years. We get today. We get right now. We get tiny, successive moments in time that sometimes are scary, sometimes are thrilling, and sometimes are ordinary—but that is all they are: some time. Once the time passes, it no longer belongs to you—but the perspective, the faith, the gratitude you wrung from it—that is yours for keeps.
You live and breathe and do in today, not in yesterday—and as much as I’d like to wish, not in tomorrow either. So, get today. All 365 of them. Stack the profits one by one like bricks so you can stand as tall, or wide, or sturdily as you’d like. Just make sure it’s something you can stand on. Something you can look back on at the end of the year and know that each one of those bricks was curated with attention, love, and respect for your today: the days you decided, over and over again, to stack something offering a better view tomorrow. If my view looks like a sub-2:30 marathon this fall, I’ll know I stacked my bricks appropriately.
If you’re reading this, today is yours. I’ll be rooting for you in every one.
With love,
Sophie
