Welcome to Turned Tables

I write a lot, and this is an attempt to share more of that, especially the more fun and personal stuff.

As a kid, it was my dream to write for a living. As an adult (technically), it’s my dream to write without the pressure of a paycheck. I want this writing to be shaped by the crucible of your curiosity, but not necessarily pay the mortgage. This is my attempt to treat my grey matter like the sandbox it is, and not the content creation factory it sometimes has to be. I’m frustrated that there’s not always space to embrace the physical and cerebral parts of myself (there’s a soft limit on how many times I can quote poetry in Trail Runner articles), and sometimes those parts feel a bit at odds with each other as an ambitious athlete and writer

It’s inconsistent in theme and likely in cadence because it is not an exercise in personal branding or pleasing The Algorithm. Quite the opposite. It’s my best Barbaric Yawp, exploring ideas and stories that are interested in expanding my sense of self, as opposed to distilling it down to its most marketable/relatable properties. It’s not so much a book or a blog as  a long-ass message in a bottle tossed to the internet sea in the hopes it washes ashore in someone else’s curiosity. I hope to build something that is both a wunderkammer that houses the compelling things I’m reading/listening to/thinking about and a training log for my writing as I stretch and challenge myself. 

It’s for runners and writers and all who are interested in collapsing the space between athletics and poetics. It’s for people whose bedside table looks like a Free Little Library, and whose car trunk resembles a Boulder garage sale. It’s for anyone equally obsessed with the Black Mountain Poets and hill workouts. It’s for anyone who’s heart is as excited by a tempo workout as a Rimbaud poem.   It’s for enduro-Beatniks who keep a meticulous training log and a messy writer’s notebook.  It’s for people who like strong coffee and doing pushups on their knees. It’s for anyone surprised to find they like the process of keeping their sourdough starter alive more than making the bread it feeds. This is to say, that this might be so curious, and strange and specific that it’s mostly for me, but anyone is welcome to join the party.

I’ve named it for a favorite poem by William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned that circles the central tension I like to sit with in a lot of my work.

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,

His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless—

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

 I feel constantly pulled in the equal and seemingly opposite directions of a life spent inside with my nose in a book, or outside with my feet in the mud. The Tables Turned is a clear argument for the non-intellectual experience outside. Put down your books! Take a walk outside! 

And I love that twitchy, physical part of myself. I love running and skiing and hiking and doing anything that’s the opposite of sitting still and thinking. I crave the escape from my brain’s perpetual motion machine that only moving outside, on my own two legs can provide. I love submitting fully to what Wordsworth calls, “one impulse from a vernal wood.”  I love getting sweaty, and dirty and pushing myself physically to the point where thinking becomes more of a hindrance than a help. 

And yet, I often find some of my most fulfilling experiences outside are the ones that bring me from my doing self back to my thinking self in surprising and unexpected ways. Like drifting thoughts on a long run that calcify into my next writing project, or summit inspiration for my next poem or project, it’s just trying to be a little more Zoë than I always get to be in the confines of writing for my upcoming book or Trail Runner. 

As much as I love winding through the forest on a singletrack trail, I love navigating the particulars of a well-formed argument or solving the tricky boulder problem of a poem. I try to finely tune my sentences so that they can carve and execute a turn sharper than any ski. I like thinking about running, and running about thinking, and writing about it all. 

In college, I worked as a backpacking guide in Northern New Mexico. Most of my equipment was light and space-efficient, I cut the handle off my toothbrush to save a couple of grams and a few square centimeters of space in my pack. But, I developed the habit of lugging increasingly large books with me into the backcountry as I spent long stretches of time alone with not much else to do besides read or watch the clouds collect over the Sangre De Cristos. At one point, intent on shoving my paperback edition of 1Q84 into my pack, I decided it was more reasonable to abandon my camp pillow than my reading material. For weeks, I used the volume as my pillow, falling asleep at night on a solid, two-pound hunk of Murakami. 

Even when it’s heavy, awkward, and ill-fitting, I hope that this writing can provide some level of comfort or community for a mindful life on the move. Much like Wordsworth’s poem, it will point at the environment as a source of inspiration and connection, and perhaps the resolution to the tension we all feel in a culture that seeks to divide brain from the body, physical from intellectual being, the internal from the external, the self from the everything else. 

While these ideas are far from new, I hope to explore them in novel ways, primarily through the lens of my experience as a runner and outdoor athlete. We’re turning the tables and embracing everything that books and trees and poetry and running have to teach us. Welcome to Turned Tables! I’m stoked you’re along for the ride. 

Zoë