The end of December means a few things.

It may be time to stop with all the holiday nog.

You’re going to have to do something about that dead tree in the living room.

And the kids are already sick of their Christmas presents and the holiday break was as many days too long as it is past Dec. 25.

‘Tis the season, right?

It also means taking a look at your year-end running stats to see if you did what you wanted to do as well as you wanted to do it. For me, I had a slow start to the year, a giant bump in April with Zumbro and then a paranoia about a broken foot for about a month (it was fine). This summer and fall were all about forgiving myself for whatever days off I took and focusing on building a base and being consistent.

It worked.

I ran almost always for time, telling myself I would go for 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and 20 minutes, whatever the day called for, and then logging it all for a while as a straight 10-minute mile – this is what I always do when I’m trying to just focus on going and not worry about how fast or slow I am. Sometimes it means I probably overtestimate my mileage, sometimes I underestimate it. But it’s how I’ve done it for years, so I figure at least my running logs are consistent in their inconsistency.

After a few weeks, when I got that feeling that every run was easy, I started using Strava again, just running in the background in my pocket, checking it when I got done. It’s easy to get discouraged until you do a check like that and realize, OK, I’m putting in the same effort, but getting in more mileage. It’s a good reminder that this is what happens when you just persevere.

This year, I barely got over a thousand miles – I’m at 1,061 as I type this, my lowest mileage year in a decade, I bet. It’s OK. You have to start and restart somewhere, and this is where I am. I confess to hoping I can somehow make it to 1,100 by the end of the month, but considering I’m eating cookies and not running right now, it’s probably unlikely.

In 2017, I ran a stack of races – all of them trail, from 50 miles in Zumbro to 25K in Afton to two different stints at Newton Hills, a race at Good Earth. I did two bike races – first time for that. I went on a few walks, did a little yoga, taught some spin classes, rode my bike to the library and pool and neighborhood pizza joint.

It all turned out OK.

Next year, I hope to stay consistent, keep trail running, do more bike races. I have this tiny idea that if I spend the first half of the year just running a lot, I can use the second half to fine-tune and see if I can qualify for Boston again. I used to think I would never go back there, but I’ve started to want to again, and I’m not sure why. We’ll see what the year holds.

Right now, my calendar has cross-country skiing in the Black Hills in January (wish me luck), the Zumbro 50-miler again, another 50 in the Black Hills in June and probably some distance in Afton in July. Beyond that, I’m not sure.

Keep running. Keep showing up and meeting new people. Keep stepping onto my treadmill on the days I have to, when I can’t get outside. Embrace my new work schedule that basically ruins any chance of running at noon – one thing I miss terribly every day.

See you out there.

Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.

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​Someone asked me a question about my kids the other day.
 
“Do you think they understand exercise makes them healthy?”
 
I thought about it. I don’t think that. It’s not that they don’t understand taking care of themselves, they do, as much as any 7 and 9 year old do, in a house that serves milk with dinner and then dumps a pile of Hershey’s syrup into it, chases every evening meal with ice cream.
 
We’re a normal people.
 
But they don’t think of exercise as healthy. They don’t think of any of it as exercise. They see a mom who runs, a family that rides bikes to the library, to the pool, to the park, to get slushies. A son who now has winter goggles to go over his bike helmet so he can keep riding around the block as it gets colder. Santa is seriously considering kid snowshoes.
 
We spent several weekends this year at bike races and road races, trail races.
 
So I didn’t know how to answer it. Do they know it makes them healthy? They could probably answer it like they would parrot back anything from school. Sure. But what I love is they don’t think of it as exercise. They think of it as life, and this is how we live it.
 
I’m teaching them a lot, I know that, and forgetting to teach them even more. And they’re learning things from me I didn’t intend for them to learn, those lessons you remember when you’re 15 or 25 and remind yourself to never do that, just don’t. At 40 they all make sense again.
 
This past weekend I was at the library – on my bike because it was the kind of weekend where you have to be outside, no matter what – and I saw a girlfriend of mine. She had walked there and had three of her kids with her – on a bike, a scooter and a Big Wheel. I’m not sure how far she lives from there, but I guarantee it took her longer to get to the library this way than it would have to drive.
 
But you can’t pass it up, not when the day presents itself.
 
Earlier in the week, I watched the forecast and saw how beautiful it would be. I kept adding to my list of things I wanted to do, and it was all wants and no needs. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store or clean the bathrooms in preparation for a house full of people descending for the holiday. I just wanted to play, and I was lucky enough to be able to rearrange to do that.
 
Friday night, we headed out and did the bulk of our Christmas shopping, stopped for dinner and drinks. That opened up my Saturday, and I chose to sleep in (there are some benefits to shared custody, after all) and go to the 605 Running Co. morning run, where I spent 7 miles having a very detailed conversation on domestic life with someone I’ve never met before. This is the glory of the group run: Meeting someone new and then spending the next hour finding out more about him than you probably know about most of your coworkers.
 
Toward the end, we saw another woman standing on the path and she stopped us as we came by.
 
“Look,” she said, and pointed to a ledge across the Big Sioux River. I looked, and there was a huge bald eagle just sitting there. “I waited for you. I wanted you to see it.”
 
She flagged down another person on the bike path, and we all stood there in awe, watched it swoop down over the river and fly up to the top of a hotel, sitting up there, bigger than I realized, and incongruous against the building.
 
After the run, I went over to WoodGrain to take Jeri’s yoga class. She teaches every Wednesday at 605, but I haven’t been able to get there for months. I set my mat next to the bar and hoped I wasn’t too close to ram my arms into it when I was supposed to be gently twisting or swandiving down. The class filled with 20 women I’ve never seen before – it always amazes me how big and small this town is at the same time.
 
I don’t know what happened, but part way through the class, I just felt completely overwhelmed, and by the end, the tears coursed down my face as I laid my palms against my hips while Jeri talked us through the end of class. When I finally sat up, I held my headband from Zumbro over my eyes and tried to be as quiet as possible while everything just exploded and imploded at the same time.
 
The next day, we drove to Newton Hills and I met my friend Nancy out there. We ran for two hours, watched the hoarfrost slowly fade on the trees as the sun rose higher. Her dog, Sydney, ran ahead of us the entire time, chasing whatever looked good out in the woods. My friend Kelly was out there, too, running her own route. Patrick was on his bike, tooling around the trails.
 
We saw two bowhunters, heard someone else fire off a shotgun.
 
That was it. The park was ours. And it was the kind of day where I felt like I could spend all day doing this – it was beautiful and it was the rare time I wore the exact right clothes, with nothing too hot and nothing too cold. I hiked up the hills, ran down them.
 
“I can’t stop smiling,” Nancy said. “I just love this so much.”
 
Me, too, I thought.
 
So when I was asked if my kids know that exercise is good for them, I thought: They know this. They know it makes you laugh, and it makes you cry, and it makes you feel better, and sometimes it makes you feel worse. It’s every reaction and equal and opposite reaction. And it’s the constant we have in our lives, this movement, the friends we’ve made and lost, the trails and trees and trips to the library. The bikes leaned against a bench outside a gas station you just realized has a soft-serve ice cream machine.
 
Is it exercise? I don’t know. Kind of.
 
It’s also just life, and I hope I’m showing them how to live it.
 
Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.
 

​Scott Walschlager is always himself – he looks like a long-legged, slightly greying praying mantis, with a wry smile and the smallest bit of vocal fry when he talks. There’s something about him that’s sort of always laughing, and he’s both heartbreakingly sincere and a little oblivious all the time.
 
It can be a charming combination.
 
For the past 18 years, he’s been the leader of the Sioux Falls Area Running Club, a local nonprofit that puts on the Newton Hills Trail Race, the Kids Cross-Country Series, the Run for Food and the Thursday night trail runs at Good Earth State Park.
 
Scott’s been at the core of all that. He’s moving back to Indiana this week, and we sat down to talk about what it’s meant to him to live here, to run with friends all over this city, to lead the club and to leave a legacy of trail running and friendship. This weekend, nearly 50 people came to an open house to say good-bye, a sort of who’s who of long-time distance running in Sioux Falls.
 
“It was a little overwhelming,” Scott, 52, says.
 
It wasn’t for us – we know what he’s meant to this community.
 
It started when he moved here in 1999. He grew up in Indiana and went to school in North Carolina, and then he took a job in Sioux Falls.
 
He was looking for a group to run with, so he went to Peak Performance and asked around. Brian Brinkman was working and told him about a group that left from Lincoln High School on weekend mornings. Scott went, and the group ran a 14-mile loop to Harrisburg and back.
 
Scott kept coming back, and that group at Lincoln, running every Saturday and Sunday, and some again on Wednesday evenings, became his core of friends, his training partners, liner notes in his logs for the next 18 years.
 
They ran loops to Harrisburg, loops around the battleship and then the bike path back to the high school, loops to Falls Park. The group still meets, some of the same faces, some new ones. When Scott started with them, they just guessed how far each loop was based on time.
 
“We left at Lincoln and would run the Westward Ho loop,” Scott says. “We always counted it as 10, but it was closer to 9. We just rounded the wrong way. Nobody had watches to know what distance it was. We were really giving ourselves a lot of extra miles.”
 
This is where Scott did all his training, with these guys, this ragtag group he says was the first bit of the running club in town.
 
“We would fly,” he says. “We would come down the back side by Westward Ho, running a 6-minute pace, and it would be a race to get back to Lincoln. We just fed off each other. We had the mile markers and I would look at my watch and be like, ‘wow,’ we were 5:50-something, and we would keep it going the best we could.”
 
This is why you run with a group sometimes – the friendship, the accountability, the reason to wake up and stand in a parking lot in the dark. And then, the feeling, like flying, like every breath in lockstep, as you push your way back.
 
“It wasn’t a race, but everyone goes a little faster and sees who can keep up,” Scott says. “It was fun.”
 
We talked on the phone for over an hour the other night, and it was just like running with Scott – he told story after story of people in Sioux Falls and places he’s run and things that happened.
 
Here are some of my favorites:
 
On starting the Newton Hills races: I was discouraged there were no trail races on this side of the state. Jamie and I went down to Newton Hills to measure out a course, and it was raining the whole time. We kept getting lost, and we had a map and finally found our way around. We measured out 8 miles, and we ran that course for the first five years. But we were getting fewer and fewer people because it was too hard. I was like, too hard? Trail racing is supposed to be fun and it’s supposed to be difficult. Owen convinced me to make it 6 miles and get more people, so I did. We got more people.
 
On the growth of ultramarathons and trail running: The club is geared more toward trail running now. We’re posting photos from Big Sioux and Good Earth. Ultramarathoning now is what marathoning used to be in the 1990s. So many people now have run marathons. Patients would find out I’m a runner, and I would tell them I’ve done an ultramarathon (Big Horns 50-miler), and that just blew people away. I would say, ‘well, that’s nothing, people do 100s.’”
 
On his college friends and the Hood to Coast relay: We did Hood to Coast for two years, 2002 and 2003 and got third one year and fourth the next. We were always competing but just couldn’t get over the hump and get the win. This was back when it was still the big relay race in the country. Ever since then, there have been a lot added on over the years.
 
On group runs at Lincoln: We all got along, and it was just a fun group of people that made running fun. You know, running isn’t always fun. When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, living in North Carolina, we were training and racing to win money. It was basically a second job, and it wasn’t always fun.
 
On Owen: We would always be looking for money (while running), and we would fight over whatever we found on the ground. One time we were coming down Cliff, and I ran right over a bill and Owen was behind me and picked it up and just started laughing making fun of me because I missed it. I was so mad, because I was always the one to find stuff.
 
On finding stuff: One time Phil and I were doing the battleship loop by ourselves, and were on West 12th Street, and I looked down and there was the biggest screwdriver I had ever seen laying there. It was industrial-sized, and probably a foot-long screwdriver. I picked it up and carried it for the next 8 miles. People looked at me like I was a mass murderer running down the street with this giant screwdriver.
 
On litter: I used to pick up cigarette packs, and I would send in the UPC symbols when you could buy stuff with them, the Marlboro miles and stuff. I have sleeping bags and camping gear and winter coats and jackets – some of the nicest stuff I have came from picking up empty cigarette packs. I thought of myself as the street cleaner of people’s garage. Then the Coke caps came, where you would get points. I was always picking up bottles that still had caps on them – I would fund my entire Christmas gifts with gift cards from Coke.
 
On his first run: It was April 25, 1979. I ran 2.6 miles, two laps around my neighborhood. I still remember the shoes I wore – Nike Internationalist training shoes, blue with a yellow swoosh. I knew I wasn’t going to play basketball, and the high school coaches had talked me into going out for cross-country. So that was the day I decided to start running.
 
On running logs: I’ll hit 80,000 lifetime miles in January. I’m like Chris Anderson – we buy the same running logs, and next year will be 39 years. I love writing down the weather and how I felt. I keep all my race numbers and stuff I want to hang on to, all in the log. I could write a book – nobody would read it –but it would be all the stuff I’ve written down over the years. It’s fun to get them out and see the stuff you used to do and think, ‘man, I can’t believe I used to be able to run that fast.’
 
On the club: I made it a priority to meet and get to know everybody who was in the club. I kept track of the members and tried to introduce myself. I wanted to try to make people feel welcome and important. I have so many friends from the club. That’s what I’m going to miss the most. It’s grown so much – when I moved here it was a ragtag group of guys who ran all year.
 
On his license plate: I have “Marthnr.” Non-runners don’t get it. The want to know what a Martha-ner is. It’s up for grabs when I move. I would love to know who gets it.
 
Scott knows there’s still a lot of work to be done with the club – on Sunday, members voted Nathan Schwab in as president, set a board and a trail committee and made a promise to each other and to members to be more organized and strategic moving forward, to take advantage of the boom in recreational running and continue some of what Scott started.
 
He knows the club didn’t always do everything it could to be welcoming: “We took off and left them for dust and they never came back,” he says of weekend runs at Lincoln. 
 
That changed – the Thursday trail runs at Good Earth are known for being welcoming, and Scott stops at every intersection, waits for people to regroup and then tells them the mileage for whichever way they choose to go next. He credits 605 Running Co. and the Sioux Falls Women Run groups for helping bring in more people and more excitement around running in general.
 
“They’re posting photos, and that helps people get motivated,” he says. “They see this picture of ordinary people running and think, ‘if they can do it, I can, too.’”
 
The Lincoln group still meets, and it’s morphed over the years. “You know, that run has been going on for decades,” Scott says. “It’s a different group – it’s not the old guard. It’s a lot of newer runners.”
 
We end our conversation talking about the bike path, the state parks, the races in town and how they’ve changed, the people we know and why we love them. We talk about the open house, about how nice it was to catch up with them.
 
“We could have sat around and told stories all night long,” Scott says.
 
We did, a little, but not as much as we should have. There’s never enough time, when you get down to it, to know people like you want to know them, or it’s too late when you get around to it. I wish I had kept going to Lincoln, even when I couldn’t keep up, wish I had been carried along the weeks I could. I ran my share of miles out there with different versions of that group, always in the back, always glad to be there.
 
I saw a friend this weekend and she talked about how encouraging Scott always was to her. “He told me once I could be one of the best runners in town,” she said. “He was wrong, but it was nice of him.”
 
He’s a nice guy. If you want to run with him one more time, join us Thursday at Good Earth at 6 p.m. Bring a headlamp. Be ready for stories. Be ready to say thank you.

Happy running, Scott. 

​Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.
 

​Some stories have to tell themselves.
 
I’ve watched that play out over the past week as I’ve listened to Dan Brendtro and Peter Vitiello explain how they met and what that means to media outlets throughout Sioux Falls. They tell their story better than I ever could, with more detail and meaning, with remembered dialogue and a set of events that had to happen in the exact order they did.
 
Dan’s trying to find a cure for his daughter’s rare and fatal disease. Peter’s trying to help him.
 
They’re doing it all in Sioux Falls.
 
I first heard about Dan when a friend told me about him for this blog – he was trying to raise thousands of dollars and was running the Twin Cities Marathon to do it. He raised the money, ran the race and spent his time on the course wondering if what he was doing was the best way to help his 16-year-old daughter, who has Friedreich’s Ataxia.
 
He decided he could do more, and through a series of chance encounters, he connected with Pete, and now Dan’s raising money to fund a year of research to see if any progress can be made to cure FA.
 
It’s not a sure thing. Nothing is. No promises have been made, but to figure out if something works, you have to figure out if something doesn’t first. It’s that simple, when it comes to what Dan and Peter are doing.
 
They’ve explained it all here:

• On The Patrick Lalley Show on KSOO.
• In an Argus Leader article by Jon Ellis.
• On In the Moment with Lori Walsh on SDPB.
• With Sophie Heinemann on KELO.
• And in a story with KDLT.

 
It’s a story worth telling, and they tell it well.
 
For us runners, it’s a reminder of who is out there with us on the course. When reporters have asked Dan what it’s like, he repeats the story of the day they found out. It was an hourslong doctor’s appointment, followed by standing outside the office waiting for the valet to bring their car around. Raenas mom asked her daughter if she wanted to sit down and wait, and she said, no. She would stand, while she still could.
 
Every time I hear him tell that, I think about him and his family, all of them, standing while they still can. Taking every step they can, while they can take them. I don’t know what that looks like at home for them, but out here in the world it looks like trying to catapult research and awareness and this belief that each answer is worth pursuing.
 
‘No’ is still an answer. It changes what the next question is, and, eventually, the next answer.
 
We’ve all run races with charity runners – from big groups like Team in Training to breast cancer races to something as small as a runner with a family member’s name and a message of hope scrawled across their shirt on the course.
 
I don’t know their back stories. I don’t know if it’s something a friend asked them to do, dedicating every mile to a memory of someone or a hope in their future or a search for a cure. I know not everyone is running like Dan did, with the weight of his daughter heavy in his heart, with this lightness he has that is hard for me to describe lifting him up, step by step.
 
I used to think that people who stood at the starting line untrained in the name of charity were foolish and didn’t respect the distance. It’s a stupid thing to even write, and I stand here before you, aware of what you must think of me.
 
That race wasn’t the hardest thing they ever did, no matter how hard it was. The hardest thing is waking up every day and fighting against the rising tide of time marching and hearts breaking and memories gathering for what is closer and closer to someone’s last day. It’s doing what Dan’s daughter said, and standing while you still can, whatever that means for you.
 
It’s hope, the thing with feathers, the thing we all have to search for sometimes.
 
I don’t know where Dan finds it, where Peter finds it, where any of us do.
 
Running is a small world. We see each other over and over, variations on a theme in races across the country. The next time you’re in a race and find yourself next to someone with a message on their shirt, maybe it’s worth it to run alongside for a while, ask the question: Tell me about your daughter. Tell me about your cause. Tell me why you’re out here.
 
Tell me.
 
Let’s bear witness to each other’s stories.
 
If you’d like to learn more about Dan’s daughter and FA, and how to help, click here.