One Lap at a Time. One Day at a Time.

He couldn’t finish a single lap around the track.

That’s where James S. started. Not dramatically, not at a rock bottom with a spotlight on it — just a guy, recently out of Fora Health, standing on the track across from RA, legs giving out before he made it around once. He didn’t know then that he’d run the Portland Marathon. Twice. Same track, same body, a completely different life.

We’ve known James for a while. We kept running into him at Go the Distance events, sat across from him at the FORA Freedom Awards the day before he completed a marathon, watched him keep showing up to the same rooms, the same runs, season after season. There was a conversation that got started at a fundraiser and never got finished — right when James was getting into it, we got cut off and the recording ended. Julie has been thinking about finishing that conversation ever since. This episode is it.