The Longest Mile: Reflections on Running, Resilience, and the Climate Crisis on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11.

On September 11, 2021, I found myself collapsed on a curb in front of a weathered bodega near the East Broadway subway station in Chinatown. My breath was ragged, my lungs felt like they had been scrubbed with wire wool, and my right foot was pulsing with a rhythmic, dull throb. I reached down, unlaced a sneaker that I had only recently realized was a half-size too small, and peeled back a sweat-soaked sock. My middle toe was a mess, bleeding through the fabric—a physical price for a sudden, desperate ambition. That morning, I had run 13 miles. Before that day, my longest distance had been a casual five. Yet, as I sat there clutching a half-empty bottle of Gatorade and staring at my battered foot, a thought crystallized in my mind with surprising clarity: maybe I could run a marathon.

That day marked the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a milestone that demanded more than just a moment of silence. For me, running has always been a form of kinetic meditation, a way to process the static of the world through the steady cadence of footfalls on pavement. That particular anniversary required more miles than most. It was the day I caught the "racing bug," a transformation that would lead me to complete the New York City Marathon two years later. Since 2021, I have made it a personal ritual to undertake a long run every September 11th. Now, standing on the 25th anniversary of that world-altering morning, I have finished another commemorative run, and in six weeks, I will once again line up in Staten Island to traverse the five boroughs in the New York City Marathon.

My history with this city is inextricably linked to the events of 2001. I moved to New York in the summer of that year, a 22-year-old with a fresh college degree and the unearned invincibility that comes with youth and a new job at a magazine. My daily routine was a cinematic cliché: walking through Washington Square Park, coffee in hand, feeling the hum of the "greatest city on earth" beneath my feet. I lived in a SoHo apartment that devoured nearly every cent of my entry-level salary, but I didn’t care. I was part of the skyline.

On the morning of September 11, I had actually left for work but realized I’d forgotten something. I doubled back, and as I walked through my door, the landline was ringing. It was my sister calling from New Jersey, her voice tight with a panic I didn’t yet understand. She told me to turn on the television. I watched the flickering images for a few minutes before the reality of proximity set in. I went up to my roof. From that vantage point, the blue sky of that Tuesday—a sky so clear it felt artificial—was being bifurcated by a plume of thick, oily smoke.

What lingers most vividly in my memory of that autumn isn’t the immediate chaos, the pervasive scent of pulverized concrete, or the heartbreaking walls of "Missing" flyers that papered every lampost. Instead, it is the memory of a brief, strange era of American life that lasted roughly six weeks. It was a period where a version of the country emerged that seemed to have reached a rare, silent consensus on what actually mattered. For a moment, the friction of partisan identity and the noise of consumerism were replaced by a profound, collective empathy. We looked at each other on the subway; we spoke to strangers; we stood in lines for hours just to donate blood that wasn’t even needed. But as the years turned into decades, that version of the country didn’t just fade—it disintegrated. Over twenty-five years, that hard-won unity was squandered, replaced by a polarization so deep it often feels irreversible.

During that haunting fall of 2001, I walked everywhere. I walked from SoHo to the Upper West Side, tracing the spine of Manhattan over and over again. I would walk up to a bar near Columbia University where, during a summer publishing course, I had first discovered the sharp, cooling sting of a gin and tonic. I walked because I couldn’t sit still, but also because the weather was inexplicably, stubbornly beautiful. November 2001 turned out to be the warmest November New York had ever recorded at that time. There was no "cider-and-scarves" reset, no crisp morning that demanded a heavy coat or the tucking of hands into pockets. I found myself craving a cold snap—a literal and metaphorical frost that would kill the germs of tragedy and allow the city to go quiet under a blanket of snow. It never came. The warmth felt like an intrusion, a refusal of nature to acknowledge that the world had changed.

I thought about that "non-winter" during my run this year while listening to an interview on NPR. Michel Martin was speaking with John Avlon, who served as Rudy Giuliani’s chief speechwriter during the attacks. Avlon’s perspective was poignant: he argued that the true lesson of 9/11 wasn’t the unity itself, but the fact that we failed to sustain it. He suggested that we shouldn’t require a catastrophe of such magnitude to find common ground. While his point is intellectually sound, it leaves a glaring question: what are we supposed to unite around in a fractured age? Looking back from the vantage point of twenty-five years, I believe the answer has been staring at us from the thermometer.

The unseasonable warmth of late 2001 wasn’t just a meteorological fluke; it was a harbinger. It was a preview of a world where the dependable cycles of the seasons would become erratic and hostile. In the twenty-five years since the towers fell, we have seen this trend accelerate into a global crisis. We have seen floods in Nepal wipe out mountain villages that had stood for centuries. We have seen "heat domes" settle over cities like Portland and Vancouver—places never designed for triple-digit temperatures—resulting in thousands of heat-related deaths. We have seen the sky over New York City turn a terrifying, apocalyptic shade of orange, the color of a traffic cone, because of wildfire smoke drifting from forests a thousand miles away.

This realization shifts the narrative of 9/11 from a purely political or historical event into an environmental one. The natural world, which we once assumed to be a stable backdrop to our human dramas, is now the lead protagonist. The premise of outdoor life—the very thing that drives people to run marathons or hike mountains—is that the environment is a permanent, dependable sanctuary. But that permanence is now a subject of debate. If Avlon is correct that we need something bigger than ourselves to rally around, the changing climate has been making its case with increasing violence. The warm autumn of 2001 was simply the moment the climate started making its case to me personally.

The New York City Marathon itself serves as a perfect microcosm of this struggle and resilience. In 2001, the race was held just weeks after the attacks. There was intense debate at the time about whether it should proceed. Ultimately, Mayor Giuliani and race director Allan Steinfeld decided that the race must go on as a symbol of the city’s defiance. On November 4, 2001, more than 30,000 runners took to the streets. It was a healing moment, a physical reclamation of the city’s geography. But even then, the weather was unseasonably mild, a hint of the "new normal" we were entering.

Now, as I prepare for the 2026 race, the stakes feel different. Training for a marathon in your 40s is a lesson in humility and the management of decline—much like watching the world grapple with the climate crisis. You learn to respect the limits of the body and the environment. I find myself obsessively checking the ten-day forecasts, not just for my training runs, but as a way of monitoring the health of the planet. I no longer bet on a cold snap in early November. The "perfect" running weather—50 degrees and overcast—is becoming a rarity, replaced by humidity and heat that turn a 26.2-mile journey into a dangerous feat of endurance.

Yet, despite the grim reality of our squandered unity and our warming planet, there is something inherently hopeful about the act of running through New York. When you run through the five boroughs, you see the city in its rawest, most unfiltered state. You see the resilience of the neighborhoods in Queens, the vibrant energy of Brooklyn, and the grueling incline of the Queensboro Bridge. You see people of every conceivable background cheering for strangers. For those few hours, the unity that Avlon spoke of—the unity we felt in the weeks following 9/11—manifests again. It is a fleeting, localized version of the country we could have been.

My 25th-anniversary run is now behind me, a quiet tribute to the 2,977 lives lost and the city that refused to break. But the "real" run is still ahead. On November 1st, I will join fifty thousand others in a pilgrimage across the asphalt. I will carry the memory of that 22-year-old on the roof in SoHo, and the 42-year-old with the bleeding toe in Chinatown. I know better than to expect a frost, but I’ll bring my throwaway sweatshirt to the starting line anyway. It’s a small act of faith—a hope that, perhaps, the seasons might one day find their rhythm again, and that we might finally find a way to unite around the preservation of the only world we have. In the meantime, I will keep running, one mile at a time, through a city that never stops moving, under a sky that never forgets.