Dance This Mess Around: A Mystery

What do John Cage, Coin Tosses, and a Hippy Hippy Shake have to do with the B-52's classic 1978 jam?

Probably nothing.

But maybe everything.

This all started on a run.

So Long & Thanks for All the Sports Bras

Or: The fitness app that changed my life is ending (probably), so here’s my goodbye. With snark. Obviously.

"Keep running. Always keep running."
~ Some wise person. Maybe Gandalf? Or my inner monologue during every hill sprint ever.

So, it looks like Zombies, Run! is finally coming to a close. I’m not crying, you’re crying. OK, I’m a little crying.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I’ve been with this app since the beginning. Like, beginning beginning. 2012. OG beginning. Before Runner 5 had even met Sam Yao. When base-building was some weird fever-dream and made no sense. Way before that Moonchild-induced existential dread. Back when the very idea of mixing story with fitness was revolutionary, and we were all just trying to survive the zombie apocalypse one footfall at a time and I was strapping my phone to my arm with neoprene and hope.

Base-Building was sketchy...

Maybe we should back up a little. My running journey as an adult actually started in 2007. And I was not young even then. Thirty-six is an odd age to pick up running, but there were extenuating circumstances. I didn't lace up my shoes to impress anyone or to hit a certain weight goal. I started running because I wanted to give my child (now children) something precious: an active, energetic father who could run, play, and be fully there. But there was a reason I had not run since I was a kid: I didn't enjoy running. Not one bit. So even though I started running and had motivation to run, it was not "fun."

Zombies, Run!, enter stage right.

If you know, you know...

So there I was: a 40-something runner, motivated but desperate for something to make the miles feel less like punishment. I'm into sporty things (OK, rock climbing, though no other sports) and I like games with a cerebral focus like chess and the like and I'm into stories, like I love stories, especially the horror genre. And guess what someone does. Guess! That's right. They make a fitness app that motivates you to run by immersive storytelling about zombies! That is unlocking some level-up life stuff right there. This could be awesome, I thought. And I was right.

It was a Friday in June of 2012. Five-fifteen AM. And I became Runner 5 during Jolly Alpha Five Niner. Thirteen years ago and I still remember the thrill of running for Gryphon Tower, getting a message from Dr. Myers requesting I detour to collect medical supplies from a nearby hospital, being christened Runner 5, finding the CDC file, and escaping the hospital. Suddenly, running was fun. No, it was FUN! So I ran.

Jolly Alpha Five Niner

And I kept running. Through eleven seasons, countless supply runs, radio mode rabbit holes, 5K training missions, and yes—even the introduction of Moonchild and the entirety of The-Season-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named. (Let’s not pretend it didn’t jump the shark, friends. It soared right over the tank, landed in a tangle of cryptic metaphors, and left me squinting at my headphones like, “Wait... are we in space? Are we a ghost? Did I miss a meeting?”)

The-Season-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named

I kept running because it became something more than a fitness app. A motivator, yes. A story that—most of the time—kept me invested. A companion. But it also gave me a community. And that might be the biggest surprise of all.

The Unofficial Zombies, Run! Facebook group became my weird, wonderful digital clubhouse. We weren’t just chatting about missions or comparing split times—we were building things. Another Runner 5 and I hosted monthly scavenger hunts, where he came up with items to spot on your run and I created the icon graphics to go with them. It was fun, sure, but it also made the community stronger. More engaged. More Abel Township, really. We were Abel. And it was awesome.

Those scavenger hunts were so much fun.

Some of us even had… well, let’s just say a “very exclusive sub-forum of enthusiastic early adopters with impeccable taste and possibly secret handshakes.” And tequila. (You know who you are. And no, I’m still not sharing the password.)

Season 1 remains my favorite. There was something magical about that first year—the sense of discovery, the mystery, the way the story and the act of running fused into something more than either one alone. You weren’t just Runner 5. You were Runner 5. And for a while, it felt like the world of Abel was built just for me.

Where it all began. Where it ends.

And now it’s ending. And yes, I’m a little heartbroken. But also... weirdly, it makes sense. My running journey hasn’t been the same since my injury. I can run again, but not in the same way. My leg reminds me that time moves forward, whether you want it to or not. And now the app is echoing that back to me: the story is finishing, the missions are done. It’s like we’re syncing up again—just like we used to, only differently.

To Six to Start: thank you. To the writers who made me care deeply, to the actors who brought the world to life with nothing but their voices, to the sound designers who made me jump at just the right moments, and to the brilliant (and possibly mildly unhinged) minds who took a quirky little idea and transformed it into a fully immersive, deeply emotional, and genuinely life-changing experience—THANK YOU! You didn’t just make a fitness app. You built Abel Township. And I got to live there.

To the community: thank you. For the memes that made me laugh-snort my coffee, for the playlists that somehow hit the exact right emotional beat at the exact right kilometer, for the endless support, and for the wildly specific debates about continuity and canon that would make a Marvel writer sweat. Thank you for the photos of your runs, your gear, your scenery, your pets in Runner 5 bandanas. Thank you for the encouragement on the good days and especially on the bad ones. For being weird with me. For the secret spaces and the not-so-secret Facebook page. For turning a solo experience into something shared, silly, supportive, and surprisingly sacred. I came for the zombies. I stayed for you.

Crazy, kooky, loveable people.

To Runner 5: You did good. You kept running. You mattered.

To Moonchild: No comment. Actually, many comments, but this is a farewell post, so I’ll keep it civil.

And to myself: Thanks for getting out there, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.

Maybe there’s a spinoff down the road. Maybe not. But I’ll always have the playlists, the memories, and the deeply ingrained Pavlovian response to break into a sprint the moment I hear: “Zombies, 50 meters.”

Time to cue up Live and Let Die one more time.

And maybe... just keep running.

Grace in Our Steps

 At the entrance to my property stands a 15-foot wrought iron gate, heavy yet elegant, swinging open and closed with the steady hum of a pneumatic boom—a hydraulic arm that moves with deliberate grace. It’s a familiar fixture, like a garage door, opening and closing at the press of a button. When it opens, it swings inward, the boom pulling it toward home; when it closes, the hydraulics push it outward, toward the road. If I step out for a walk, a run, or to fetch a package, I open it with a voice command, our smart speakers linked to its controls. When I return, I punch a code into the control box by the road to close it from the outside. As I stride forward, the gate begins its closing arc—swinging toward me—our paths crossing in opposite directions, it sweeping closed, I walking forward.

For no reason I’ve ever fully traced, I always walk through on the left, near the hinges. My steps run parallel to the gate as it closes, and I angle slightly right, just enough to slip ahead of its swing. I don’t rush. I don’t pause. I simply…walk. Yesterday, mid-stride, a question bloomed: How do I know how to do this? How do I weave my steps so flawlessly through the arc of a fifteen-foot iron gate—without faltering, without grazing its edge? I’ve never practiced. I’ve never counted seconds. Yet I pass through as if the gate and I have rehearsed this dance for years.

The answer, I realise, is one of those sacred, everyday miracles we so often hurry past.

We do this daily—gliding past a stranger in a crowded hall, snatching a ball from the air, ducking a low branch on a wooded path—all without conscious effort. Our eyes, muscles, and minds working in unison, drinking in a stream of silent cues: an object’s speed, its angle, the rhythm of our gait, the tilt of our balance. Our brains anticipate and adjust, solving a live physics problem not with equations but with grace. It feels effortless. It feels ordinary—like starlight, like a heartbeat—until we pause to truly see.

Because it’s far from ordinary.

Every time I pass through that gate, my brain is running a quiet marvel of a program. The gate swings on its hinge, its outer edge slicing faster than the inner near me. Even at the slower hinge side, it carves a dynamic arc through space. Without a thought, my mind tracks its motion, forecasts its path, and tunes my steps—my forward stride, my subtle rightward drift—to match its curve. Scientists call this predictive processing, a neural gift that lets me sense where the gate will be a heartbeat from now. My cerebellum refines my gait, my parietal cortex maps my body against the gate’s sweep, and somehow, it weaves together into a fluid waltz.

That’s astonishing.

More astonishing still is that I never noticed until yesterday. It was just…a step. A tiny moment in my day.

This small awakening unveiled a deeper truth: our lives brim with uncelebrated wonders—whispers of the divine threaded through breath and motion. The way we pour coffee without spilling, thread through a bustling crowd, or toss a crumpled paper into a bin across the room—each is a fleeting symphony of perception, prediction, and movement, polished by experience we don’t recall learning. We don’t solve these riddles with conscious math but with embodied wisdom—a deep, wordless knowing that feels like second nature.

We save our awe for the grand—symphonies, medical breakthroughs, rocket launches (no, not that rocket launch). But brilliance pulses just as brightly in the mundane: in the way my steps align with a swinging gate, in the silent harmony of body, mind, and world. This is the breath of God animating muscle and motion, presence made manifest in the mundane. This is incarnation—not just in flesh, but in function, in the quiet genius of being human. And we pass it by as if it’s nothing.

When we pause to see—truly see—the veil parts, the ordinary transfigures. A gate becomes a stage. A step becomes a prayer. A walk becomes a hymn of coordination and grace. And in that fleeting clarity, we glimpse the divine woven into the fabric of our daily lives.

And tomorrow, I’ll walk through again—without thinking, without counting—and I’ll know, now, that I’m dancing with the divine.