Season 1 of Mental Miles ended the way it was always supposed to: with exhaustion, pride, and a final tally that still looks impossible when I say it out loud. Two hundred and fifty-one kilometers in September. That was the mark. That was the number etched into my legs and my lungs, the scar tissue of stubbornness layered into every run. It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t even sane. But it was real. And it was enough to close that first chapter of my running life with a sense of finality.

October, then, is the beginning of something else. Not the quiet aftermath, not the clean rest period that coaches and training plans would recommend, but the messy start of Season 2. I call it rest, but it isn’t. Not really. I’m still running nearly every day. Just slower. Shorter distances. More limping, less swagger. The right leg complains the loudest—ankle grinding, shin stabbing, sometimes a ghost pain that shoots straight up the knee into the thigh. The left leg, strangely silent, feels like it’s standing off to the side with its arms crossed, watching its brother take the punishment and wondering when I’ll learn.

Maybe I should stop. Maybe I should take real rest. But the thought of stepping away from the rhythm feels worse than the ache itself. My body has built a clock around running. Six-thirty in the morning, it whispers to me: time to go. Time to lace up. Time to push pavement. Missing that alarm feels like breaking something more important than muscle. So October becomes a compromise. A limp through recovery. A balancing act between injury and momentum.

But in truth, October isn’t about the runs I’m doing now. It’s about the runs to come. November 1st is the line in the sand. The day the 17-week marathon training plan begins. It’s written out on my whiteboard in thick black marker: intervals, long runs, core days, cross-training. The plan is the plan. It has to be. I’ve already made one adjustment to tradition—something most coaches wouldn’t dare write into a plan. A full marathon distance, 42.2 kilometers, built into the middle of training. A test run before race day. Call it unorthodox, call it reckless, but I know myself. I don’t want surprises on May 11th. I want the body to remember the distance before the clock and the crowd get involved.

Wednesdays are marked in red: core workouts. That’s another change. I’ve neglected strength before, and it’s cost me. Shin splints, imbalances, the breakdowns that come from trying to carry a marathon body on half-trained muscles. This time, no excuses. Wednesdays will hurt, but in a different way.

Winter lurks in the margins of the whiteboard, too. The short days, the biting air, the inevitable treadmill miles at the gym or in the basement at home. I hate treadmills. The monotony, the hum, the wall in front of your face. But I know I’ll need them. The snow doesn’t care about my goals, and the Fundy Footpath won’t wait for a comfortable season.

Because yes, that’s the secret. The marathon is the public goal, the respectable one, the challenge you can say out loud at family gatherings and work sites. “I’m training for a marathon.” People nod. They understand. They respect it. It makes sense.

But the real goal, the one I haven’t told anyone—not my wife, not my kids, not my closest friends—is something else entirely. It’s the thing that wakes me up at night with equal parts excitement and terror. The Fundy Footpath. Sixty-some kilometers of rugged New Brunswick trail, twisting through cliffs and coves, unforgiving elevation gains, roots and rocks and mud and rivers. The kind of trail that takes most hikers four or five days to finish. I want to do it in twenty-four hours. Straight. No sleep, no breaks beyond water and food. Just keep moving until the map is behind me.

It sounds insane. It probably is insane. I’ve done almost no trail running. I screamed like a child at a snake not long ago. I hate wet socks. I hate bugs. I don’t particularly enjoy the dark, and the thought of meeting a bear in the middle of the night is enough to make my chest tighten. But insanity is half the point. Because I’ve learned something in these past two years: crazy ideas stay crazy until you do them. Then they become stories. They become landmarks in your life. They become the proof you hold onto when the rest of the world doubts you—or when you doubt yourself.

The Fundy Footpath isn’t about distance. It’s about transformation. It’s about seeing if there’s a version of me I haven’t met yet. The man who can keep going long after his body has begged him to stop. The man who can find peace in the solitude of a night on the trail, even with the fear, the discomfort, the sheer stupidity of it. I want to meet that man. I think he’s out there.

But Season 2 isn’t just about the endgame. It’s about everything in between. The marathon in May. The 17 weeks of discipline. The core workouts, the treadmill grinds, the early mornings. And maybe, if I can work up the courage, the 4x4x48 challenge in February or March. Four miles every four hours for forty-eight hours. Two days of sleep deprivation and exhaustion, the kind of test that has nothing to do with pace or distance and everything to do with will. I’ve been circling it for years, like a shark sniffing blood in the water. I think this might be the year I finally bite.

It all sounds athletic, but the truth is it’s life. Running doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It weaves into everything else: my job, my marriage, my kids, my sanity. On site, I’m managing a building that feels like it’s always one mistake away from chaos. The forklift goes missing, trades bicker, deliveries get screwed up, and the weight of keeping it all on track sits squarely on my shoulders. At home, I’m a father trying to keep up with two kids who are growing faster than I can process. A teenage daughter pulling away into her own world, an eleven-year-old son who still wants to wrestle and laugh but is slowly shifting into independence. A husband, too, to a wife who deserves more of me than the scraps I sometimes have left at the end of the day. It’s messy. It’s beautiful. It’s exhausting. And running is where I sort it out. Running is where the noise gets quiet, even if only for a few miles.

The proof of growth is there in the numbers. In 2023, my first year of real running, I logged 28 runs, 205.6 kilometers total. A foundation, shaky but solid enough to build on. In 2024, I exploded: 171 runs, 1,209 kilometers, and my first marathon. The year I proved I could stretch beyond the safe zone. And now, 2025: no marathon, but 217 runs so far, 1,197 kilometers logged, with two months left to add more. The math doesn’t lie. I am getting stronger. I am getting better. Even when the pain makes me doubt it, the progress is carved into the numbers.

I’ve learned how to survive the low points. How to breathe through pain, how to distract my mind when the miles get heavy, how to find comfort in the discomfort. My body has become its own alarm clock, nudging me at the same hour each morning, whispering that it’s time to run. That kind of discipline is rare. It’s fragile, too. But it’s mine now. And it’s what will carry me into the insanity of this season.

Season 2 is about chasing that insanity and shaping it into something meaningful. I don’t just want to run for myself. I want to turn this into something bigger. Maybe a charity. Maybe a way to raise money, to turn my stubbornness into someone else’s lifeline. I don’t know the details yet, but I know it’s possible. And I know it would make the pain matter in a different way.

So here I stand at the start of Season 2. My leg aches. My mind races. My whiteboard is full. My heart is restless. The marathon in May looms ahead. The 4x4x48 tempts me from the sidelines. The Fundy Footpath waits like a dragon at the end of the story. And in between, there will be miles and miles of ordinary days, family dinners, worksite disasters, arguments, laughter, and all the other things that make life what it is.

Maybe I’ll fail. Maybe I’ll break down. Maybe I’ll find out I’m not capable of what I dream. But I’d rather fail forward than stand still. I’d rather limp into something impossible than coast comfortably in mediocrity. Season 1 proved I could fight. Season 2 will prove who I really am.

And when June 2026 comes, and I step onto that trail, I’ll know that every mile, every bruise, every laugh, every doubt, every number on every whiteboard led me there. To the edge of something impossible. To the chance to make crazy ideas real. To the man I want to meet.