Run recaps, mission updates, and everything in between.
I went to Chicago chasing sub-4:00. I came home with a 4:17 PR, a heart rate that spiked past 150, an arm that went cold at mile 14, and a $2,500 fundraising goal hit. Here's the real story — and what's next: 211 miles across Kentucky.
On September 27th, we hosted a youth heart screening at Rehabilitation and Performance Institute in Fort Thomas, KY. 65 young people were screened. Two abnormalities were found. Here's what that day meant.
We hit 2,000 miles in 2026. Here's why the shoes stay on — and why the next mile matters as much as the first.
On September 27th, we're screening 70 young hearts at the Rehabilitation and Performance Institute in Fort Thomas. We filled 65 slots in under four days — a record. Here's why screenings matter.
On August 22nd, 2026, I crossed 2,000 miles for the year. Here's what the number means, what it cost, and what comes next — the Chicago Marathon, The Heart of Kentucky, and a Fort Thomas screening event.
A sports physical is not a heart screening. Here are the three questions that can catch the warning signs sudden cardiac arrest hides behind, before the season starts.
On November 21, 2026, I'm running 205 miles across Kentucky — from the Tennessee border to the town where I grew up. This is the story of why. A scar, two dogs, and 2,000 kids a year who don't have to die.
Loading up a truck with two dogs and pointing it toward somewhere we'd never been — 58 miles across two cities, two states, and one unforgettable first encounter with the ocean.
Today is my birthday. And every year this day arrives with two things at once — gratitude so deep I can barely put it into words, and a weight that takes me right back to the hardest moments of my life.
I didn't know exactly when it would happen. I knew mile 1,000 was coming somewhere on the course. What I didn't know was that it would hit me at mile 20 — and that I would spend the final 6.2 miles of the Flying Pig Marathon fighting everything inside me just to hold it together long enough to finish.
I set out to run a backyard ultra-style 50k with my two dogs, Moose and Maverick. What happened over those 10 hours was something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
Today is my birthday.
And every year this day arrives with two things at once, gratitude so deep I can barely put it into words, and a weight that takes me right back to the hardest moments of my life.
I've learned to sit with both. But it took a long time to get here.
I was 22 years old when I went in for open heart surgery. I was young, I was athletic, and like most people my age I had no reason to believe my heart was anything other than fine.
I was wrong.
What happened in that operating room gave me something most people never experience and never will. I crossed to the other side. I saw what comes after this life. And standing there I saw my two grandparents waiting for me.
I didn't want to leave.
That's the part nobody talks about after a near death experience. Everyone assumes you fight to come back. Everyone assumes survival is the obvious, automatic choice. But when you're standing somewhere that peaceful, somewhere that feels more like home than anywhere you've ever been, with people you love who left before you, coming back is not as simple as people think.
I wanted to stay. I genuinely wanted to stay dead.
They brought me back anyway.
The months immediately following surgery were consumed by recovery. Physical therapy. Medications. Appointments. My entire focus was on healing the body that had just been cracked open and repaired. There wasn't room for anything else.
I thought I was okay.
Then about six months later everything I had been pushing down came flooding back all at once.
The near death experience. The visions. All of it hit me like a wave I never saw coming.
Because it wasn't just my grandparents I saw on the other side. There were two visions. The first was standing in their living room, familiar, warm, peaceful. Home in a way no place on earth has ever felt like home.
The second one left me with more questions than I will probably ever have answers to.
I was standing on top of a mountain in the desert. Next to Jesus. Below us stretched an endless desert landscape and moving through it was a group of people — walking in a two by two line, all wearing the same outfit, all moving in the same direction. No one breaking from the line. No one questioning the path. Just following. Following because everyone else was following.
Every detail was perfect. Every grain of sand visible. The sun was beating down but it didn't burn, it felt like warmth that was made of something more than heat. Something closer to love.
No words were spoken. Just the vision. And then I woke up looking at my parents.
That second vision has never left me. Why did I see what I saw? What was Jesus showing me? Who were those people? Was I supposed to help them? Was I supposed to pull people off that highway of sameness and show them something different?
I still don't have the answers. What I have instead is a sense of purpose that quietly confirms itself every time I do something aligned with the path God seems to have set for me. When I cross a finish line. When I fund a screening. When someone tells me my story changed something for them. In those moments the questions get a little quieter and the purpose gets a little louder.
But in those first months after surgery I was scared to share what I was feeling, I was scared to share my story, and I was scared of others judgement. I didn't have any of that clarity yet. I didn't have the confidence in who I was. I just had the questions with nowhere to put them.
The hardest part of those months wasn't the physical recovery or even the unanswerable questions. The hardest part was looking in the mirror and not knowing the person looking back.
What I didn't understand then, and only came to understand much later through therapy, is that I was grieving. Not grieving someone else. Grieving myself. Grieving the man I was before I went into that operating room, because that man didn't come back out.
The person who came out was different. New feelings I had never felt before. New emotions I didn't have names for. New values that hadn't existed in me before. New ways of seeing the world that the old version of me would never have understood. I wasn't broken. I was someone completely new trying to figure out who he was in real time, through every conversation, every experience, every hard moment.
My therapist helped me understand that what I was going through had a name. That the confusion and the emptiness and the not recognizing myself wasn't weakness or damage. It was grief. The most disorienting kind, mourning a version of yourself that no longer exists.
Once I understood that, I could start learning who this new person actually was. Day by day. Experience by experience. It was slow and it was hard and some days it still is.
What happens when you die? Is heaven real? What did I see? Why was I sent back? What am I supposed to do with this?
These became the questions I couldn't stop asking. I went down every rabbit hole I could find. I read everything. I searched for anyone who had been through what I had been through. I was desperate for answers that would make sense of the experience that had shattered my understanding of everything.
The problem is those answers don't exist here on earth.
You cannot find proof of heaven in a Google search. You cannot resolve a near death experience through research. And the harder I chased the more lost I became. The questions weren't leading me anywhere. They were just spinning me deeper into a darkness I didn't know how to climb out of.
So I stopped chasing answers and started chasing relief.
Alcohol gave me a break from my own mind. That's the most honest way I can say it.
When everything inside my head felt impossible to carry, drinking quieted it. For a few hours I wasn't the guy who had died on a table and come back as someone he didn't recognize. I wasn't the guy standing on a mountain next to Jesus with no idea what he was supposed to do with what he saw. I wasn't the guy chasing questions through every corner of the internet and coming up empty every single time.
I was just numb. And numb felt like the closest thing to peace I could find.
I'm embarrassed by this time in my life. I still am, even now. Embarrassed that I let myself fall into that cycle. Embarrassed that I let it go on as long as I did. Embarrassed that I made excuses and refused to call it what it was for so long. The hardest part of this whole journey, harder than surgery, harder than recovery, harder than the questions I'll never fully answer, has been forgiving the person I was during those years. Learning to extend the same grace to myself that I'd extend to anyone else going through what I went through.
That forgiveness is still a daily practice. Some days it comes easier than others.
You can't outdrink your trauma. It waits for you. Mine waited patiently until I had no choice but to face it.
After the assault I finally made the decision to see a psychiatric therapist.
It was the best decision I have ever made in my life.
Here's what therapy didn't do — it didn't hand me running. I was already running before I ever walked into that office. My body had already found its way to the road before my mind caught up with why.
What therapy did was help me understand what running was actually doing for me. Why I kept coming back to it. Why I was becoming more and more consumed by the miles. My therapist helped me see that running was giving me something I couldn't find anywhere else — a space to be completely alone with my own thoughts. No distractions. No numbing. No escape hatch.
On a 20 mile run there is nowhere to hide. Whatever you've been avoiding all week is going to find you somewhere around mile 14 and you're going to have to sit with it until you get home. That's not a punishment. That turned out to be the medicine. The hard thoughts, the heavy feelings, the questions without answers — running made me face all of it and work through it in real time, one mile at a time.
Therapy gave me the understanding. Running gave me the practice. Together they gave me my life back.
Miles gave me something the questions never could — a place to put all of it. Every hard mile is a conversation with myself. Every long run is an hour of processing what I've been through, where I'm going, and what I'm building. Moose and Maverick run every step with me. They don't ask questions. They don't need explanations. They just show up every single day no matter what, and somewhere in that consistency I found my own.
Today we are at 1,183 miles into a 2,000 mile mission. 2,000 miles for the 2,000 young lives lost every year to sudden cardiac arrest. Kids who didn't get the second chance I got. Athletes who didn't come back.
Every mile is a reason I came back.
I won't pretend the weight goes away. Every May 28th I still feel all of it. The gratitude and the grief arrive together and I've stopped trying to separate them. They are both part of the same story.
What's changed is that I know now why I came back.
Not because I had all the answers. Not because the questions about heaven ever got resolved. But because there was something left here worth coming back for. A mission. A community. Two dogs who need to run. And maybe somewhere out there a parent who reads this and gets their kid screened, and that kid lives, because I came back and decided to do something with it.
If you're still here too — happy birthday to us.
We made it.
💙 Heart & Hound | Run To Save