On the worst day of his life, the race-champion-turned-beer-hauler couldn't find his running shoes. Late summer, late morning, empty streets baking in the sun outside the suddenly silent house where his wife and her two kids had lived until the night before. He had wept when they left, called people he hadn't spoken to in months, wept some more, thought about mistakes he had made, worried that he would never be able to correct them, tried and failed to sleep and finally drifted off, and now it was nearly noon and he was lost and alone and his hands were bloody from a job he hated and the only things that might help were nowhere to be found.
Where were his running shoes? Under the bed? On the porch? In moldering boxes in a dank garage?
When he was winning races no one his age had ever won, covering distances far ahead of people twice and three times as old, back when many knew him as simply "The Kid," he had owned drawers full of nylon running shorts, stacks of wicking jerseys, rows of high-performance shoes provided by his sponsor. All of it gone. Finally, buried in the corner of a bedroom closet, he found a pair of beat-up three-year-old The North Face shoes. He pulled on a ratty cotton T-shirt and a pair of baggy basketball shorts. He hadn't run a step in two years. Now, he didn't know what else to do.
He laced up his shoes. He stepped outside into waves of September heat, and he thought about how happy he used to be, back when happiness was something he wouldn't even have named, it had come so easily. He looked up at the brown hills. He knew what movement and the air of the high desert could do for a man. Had he squandered his one chance at it? He took a deep breath and shook his hands. He needed to make it up the winding trails, up into the hills, to suck in the thin air, to sweat. He hoped it would heal him.
He started running. He kept his eyes on the mountains ahead of him. Halfway around the block, he stopped. The one thing that had never betrayed him, his body, now betrayed him. He bent over, hands on his knees, gasping. He had jogged only half a mile.
He shuffled back to his house, not just alone but a failure. Broken. Would he ever find the joy he had taken for granted? If he did, he wouldn't take it for granted again. He decided he would try running the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. That was when The Kid started his improbable comeback.
He felt ancient. He was 24 years old.
* * *
"One of the biggest disappointments of my life is I didn't run more with him."
That's the sad wisdom of the man who was most responsible for building The Kid into a champion. That's the ache of a father who shared his passionate love of running with his son, then watched as that passion got stuffed into the far corner of a dark closet.
It is spring 2013, almost five years since Paul Bonnett's middle son, his most troubled son, his fastest son, stopped running. Almost three years have passed since James Bonnett--The Kid--tried to run into the mountains and couldn't make it around the block. James will turn 27 in a few months. Paul, 51, is sitting with a scrapbook on his lap in a hotel lobby in the metro Phoenix area, where both Bonnetts live, trying to make sense of what happened to his boy, and what might happen next.
Paul flips pages, thumbing photos of James at 6, at 10, at 12. He reads race times aloud, describes medals. Then he grows silent. "I was saving for retirement at the age of 19," he eventually says, "and I don't think he's got anything saved. I didn't push him to work through high school. I said, 'You've got the whole rest of your life to work.' Now I wonder. We were always running together. Should I have pushed him to a job?" Paul wonders about other things, too. "He's gotten hypoglycemia a couple times. I think sometimes he overestimates what he can do. I don't think nutritionally he's where he should be."
Paul would be meeting James the next morning to jog a few miles together. If Paul were different, he'd tell James what he was thinking. If James were different, he would listen. But as Paul says, "we aren't so good at the 'Let's have a conversation' stuff." He returns to the scrapbook, flips back to the beginning. Back to where the story starts.
He wondered if hed ever get adventure back into his life.
* * *
Paul Bonnett didn't know what to do with James. His oldest child, Charlie, 7, was dutiful, serious, never a problem. His youngest, Jesse, barely a toddler, was easy. But James--5 years old, dark brown hair and luminous hazel eyes--was the riddle. He wouldn't sit still. He couldn't settle down. He grew frustrated at the slightest challenge, and threw tantrums. The first-grade teacher at Desert Shadows Elementary School in Scottsdale, Arizona, called Paul and his wife, Mima, and asked them to come in. Something needed to be done.
One doctor said more physical activity would help, so Paul and Mima enrolled him in soccer. He had talent but was easily distracted. They put him on a pee-wee basketball team. That didn't pan out. Neither did baseball or football or almost any other sport. Mima thought if she could just love her son more, it would help. So every time he threw a tantrum, she hugged him and told him that she loved him. I love you. I love you. I love you. It was the only thing that calmed his kicking and screaming.
Another doctor diagnosed James with attention deficit disorder and put him on medication. After trying it for six months, however, Paul and Mima were distressed to see his behavior get worse. They disagreed on many subjects, but agreed on this one: no more drugs.
Paul was 32 and he knew about needing help. As a boy, Paul had been like James, dreamy, slightly lost. His parents had divorced when he was 12, and when he and his mother moved from the mountains in California to Phoenix two years later, she had to take a job downtown as a nursing assistant. "And she said to me, 'I can't pick you up until 5 o'clock, so find something to do until then,'" Paul recalls. "was five-foot-nothing and 98 pounds. So I joined the cross-country team as a sophomore.
"The first run was horrible. The coach drove a pack of us out into the desert, in his pickup truck, and it was 110 degrees. He told us, 'Okay, now run back to school.' Five miles, 10 miles, I don't know. It was my first run ever." It was a rough start, but he stuck with it, up until knee pain forced him to miss his senior year. "My best day in high school I was the seventh best guy--on the junior varsity team."
Paul stopped running in college, but he kept moving. He loved camping and wandering. He took a job as a social-studies teacher at an English-speaking school in Torreon, Mexico, and one day he flirted with the pretty girl whose brother was selling hamburguesas from their parents' carport. In 1983, eight months after Paul and Mima's first date, they were married. They stayed in Mexico for two years before moving to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, up in the mountains where Paul felt at home. Paul was teaching again, and right around the time his third son was born, a fellow teacher told Paul how much running helped him deal with stress, so Paul, at the ripe old age of 29, took up the sport again.
He discovered he wasn't bad--a few years later he would win the Man Against Horse 50-mile Ultra Run (which is exactly what it sounds like) four times (he was the first person to ever beat a horse in the race), and would win the Across the Years 24-Hour Footrace. He would turn in respectable performances in California's fabled Western States 100-mile Endurance Run and Arizona's elite Zane Grey 50-Mile Endurance Run. When he was running, it was easier to deal with the responsibility of having three kids, one of whom doctors wanted to medicate. Running had helped Paul when he was an adolescent, and it had helped him when he was an adult. Maybe running would help his troubled son, too.
James had been running a little with Paul since he was 4, but now they took it up in earnest. They ran around the block together, and then they ran farther. And farther. And James calmed down. His performance at school improved. As he got older, his tantrums decreased, too.
James kept running. He ran a four-miler when he was only 5 years old, a half-marathon when he was 8. He started waking up extra early to run with his dad on the weekends.
Paul ran Arizona's Mount Ord Marathon in 1995, and James, then 9 years old, asked if he could run the first half. The course snaked up a mountain, down the other side, then returned the same way. On his return ascent, Paul stopped to talk to his son, who was descending. Father asked son how he was doing. Fine, James said. Paul told him to stop at the aid station at the bottom of the mountain, where Mima was working as a volunteer, and to drive with her at race's end to the finish line, where they would all meet.
When Mima showed up at the finish line, Paul remembers, "I said, 'Where the hell is James?' and she said, 'What?!' I said, 'He was supposed to be with you.' She raised her eyebrows. I said, 'Oh, sh-t, he can't do a marathon."
James had turned around at the aid station before she could stop him. That was his first marathon. When he was 10, James ran 53.18 miles in the Across the Years 24-Hour Footrace. The next year, he ran 84 miles in the same race. He also placed 19th in Arizona's Crown King Scramble, finishing the 50-K Trail Run in 5:09:11. In 1998, when he was 11, he won the 19 and under division of the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in 3:28:08. At age 12 he ran 101.4 miles at Across the Years, taking second place, and ran the Crown King in 5:03:04, finishing ninth.
James had been a novelty, then a local hero, but as he ran more, and won more, opinion shifted. To nonrunners, and to runners who didn't know the Bonnetts, he became something else.
People sniped--especially on a Web site called ultralist.com--about how pushy Paul was, how he was warping his son. Others said Paul was abusive, that Mima was complicit. They would stunt his growth. They were selfish, controlling. People approached Mima at races and told her she was abusing her son. She thought of all the driving she did, all the cooking and packing and volunteering at aid stations. She smiled grimly and replied that if anyone was getting abused, it wasn't James.
The critics didn't know that Paul and Mima checked regularly with doctors, who told them to make sure James ate and slept enough, and that he had fun. They didn't know that Paul never pushed James to run. They didn't know that Paul gave each of his three boys a choice of vacations for their 10th, 16th, and 18th birthdays: Little Jesse chose visits to Major League Baseball parks around the country; Charlie liked New York City. James, though, chose what Paul loved best, which was to be in the mountains. Every summer, in fact, Paul and James would pile into the Jeep, or the van, or whatever car Paul owned at the time, and head out. They hauled their folding Coleman stove, their two-person tent, their sleeping bags, a Wiffle ball and bat, and a deck of Uno cards into Nevada or California and one year into Canada, and Paul would cook and James would clean and afterward they would play cards and then maybe play a little Wiffle ball. They hiked trails and forded streams, and every day, they ran.
They ran at home, too. They would get up at 4:30 in the morning, before the heat became unbearable, and put in 10 or 15 miles, often on the golf course near their home. Paul would talk about running and tactics and strategy. He'd talk about pace and course terrain, about taking what a course offered, picking up speed downhill but not pushing too much. He'd talk about aiming to make certain splits, but how a smart runner had to adjust to elevation change. He would talk about how the important thing was to do your best, but that at its heart, "Ultrarunning is not about beating the next guy, it's about 'Let's get through this together.'" He'd talk about what a bad runner he had been in high school, but how even a bad runner--even the seventh best runner on the junior varsity team--could become a pretty good runner if he trained and worked hard.
"Slow and steady," Paul would say. "One foot in front of the other."
In the hotel lobby, Paul turns the page of the scrapbook, points to a favorite photo. No medals, no finish lines. Just a smiling little boy gazing from the photo.
"Him and me going out for runs," Paul says. "Those were our best times."
* * *
"I want to die. I keep calling and calling and having no answer."
Mima Castillo is describing what it was like for her when James was at his lowest point, when he had cut himself off from family and friends. It is three days after her ex-husband, Paul, flipped through the scrapbook. Mima is sitting with James in Prescott, Arizona, on the upstairs patio of a downtown restaurant almost two hours from Scottsdale in the high desert. James had driven here to have lunch with his mother.
"I'm a proud mom," she says. "James, on top of being such a great runner, is so humble, and he has such a good sense of humor. He can be a comedian if he wants. Or a model. He's friendly and I have never, never heard anybody say anything bad about James."
That's one reason it hurt so much when James cut off contact. Another reason, though, is because she understands how awful divorce can be.
Paul and Mima separated in 2001, when James was 14, "not quite old enough to go out with friends all the time, but old enough to understand what was going on," James says. "Right at that wrong age." Charlie was 16, hanging out with his friends a lot. Jesse was only 10, so if he knew what was going on, he couldn't do much about it. James? His grades dropped. His mood soured. He ran even more.
"I used it as an outlet," James says. "There was a really big jump in improvement in those years. I was old enough to get out and go run."
James was a very good high school runner, both in cross-country and on the track team, where he ran a 4:40 mile and a 9:50 two-mile. But he was too short to be a star (he's 5'8" today), not fast enough to be a state champion. He qualified for state track and cross-country meets but never won a state title. But during high school, he was also running 24 hours, 48 hours, 50 kilometers. At distance, he was in a class by himself. He held several USATF Junior long-distance track records. When he was 18, he finished sixth in the Zane Grey and 23rd in the Western States, and that fall was invited to become a member of The North Face Endurance Athlete Team. That meant free running gear, no more race fees, travel expenses paid. It meant lots of time to run in the mountains.
By then he was enrolled at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, where he planned to obtain a degree in Fire Science. His parents were divorced, but they each seemed happy and they were getting along okay. James would fight fires, and keep running. He'd spend as much time as possible in the summer in the mountains, in the dirt. That was the plan. In the meantime, he continued working a job he'd held since high school at a pet hotel, where vacationers left their cats and dogs.
That's when he started to lose his way.
* * *
Women liked James, with his long hair and high cheekbones, his dazzling smile and easy way. Being a local hero didn't hurt, either. But one woman was different. She was a few years older, for one thing. And she had children already. And she was kind, and she could tell things about The Kid that The Kid was just beginning to realize himself.
One thing he was beginning to realize was that the more successful he had become, the less fun running had become. Being a sponsored athlete, a runner for The North Face, meant more emphasis on winning. No one said it, but The Kid knew it: The ethos of ultrarunning that his dad talked about on those morning runs might be all about getting through difficult things together, but unless you got through it first, or near first, no one--not even the most enlightened, dirtbag-loving sort of sponsor--was going to be paying your travel expenses.
Did he remember how it felt to just go, to go hard and fast in the cool desert mornings with his dad, to return to breakfast when his classmates were just getting up and to think about how lucky he was? He did, and he didn't. His presence was required at races. He wasn't sure if he was slowing down, but he knew the competition was getting faster, and he was finding less pleasure in running. It wasn't so much about freedom anymore, or companionship, or joy. It was about work.
The woman seemed to sense that. She asked him to come hike with her, to enjoy the outdoors at a slower pace. She suggested he relax, slow down. He did exactly that, and he noticed new things. What a great mother she was to her kids. How happy she seemed. What really struck him was that after a short, mostly happy life as a famous runner, he had met someone who seemed to not care about his running. She seemed to like him for who he was, rather than what he did. She didn't seem to care whether he ran or not. In fact, she seemed to like it better when he had more time to spend with her and her kids. So he ran less.
Within months they were engaged. He'd be a good husband and father--those were more important than being a good runner. He faded away from The North Face Team. He faded away from competition. In October 2008, he finished 18th in The North Face 50-mile Endurance Challenge in Madison, Wisconsin.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below.
It seemed like the right thing to do. He'd lost his competitive itch. And as the wedding neared, when he felt like running--just for fun, just to relax--it seemed wiser to spend time with the kids instead. He was going to be part of a family now. And soon he was married, with all of those obligations. He loved his wife, and he loved her kids--he was beginning to think of them as his kids. There just wasn't time to run--especially after he got laid off from the pet resort. He found a new job cleaning up at a hospital, then he took another one for Crescent Crown Distributing, lugging beer to stores around Phoenix, into and out of trucks, into and out of freezers until his knuckles were scraped and bloody.
He wanted to be a good husband, a good father. He didn't want to be responsible for another failed marriage, another failed family. His wife's oldest was 13, around the same age James had been when his parents split. He didn't want to inflict that pain on the boy. So he threw himself fully into the world of his immediate family. He stopped returning calls from his parents. He stopped talking to his running friends. When he came across trophies stashed in a box, he saw them as things, just metal and wood and plastic. He felt freer, and wiser.
At the restaurant in Prescott, Mima smiles at James. She is happy her son is back in her life. But for the better part of two years, he wasn't.
James won't say exactly what happened, why the marriage fell apart. But it did, irrevocably. And when it did, when his wife and kids left him alone in his house, James was left crying and wondering what went wrong. If he was no longer a husband and father, who was he? If he couldn't even jog halfway around the block, who was he?
* * *
The next morning, he started to look for an answer.
The morning after that, he carried a stopwatch. He didn't look at the mountains. He knew they were beyond him. He knew he was broken, that even at his healthiest and happiest, he was still his father's son, more canny tactician than natural talent. He knew he had a long torso and short legs. He knew he couldn't hammer a five-minute mile after two years of not running. He looked at the watch. He'd shoot for five minutes, total.
On that second day of his return to running, he made those five minutes. He made five minutes the next day, too.
He made it six days that first week, five minutes a day, a little farther, a little faster, each day. He looked at the stopwatch and told himself what his dad had told him years earlier. Pace yourself. Take care of your body. Pay attention. Build yourself up. He had been a good listener. And now he was starting to understand.
The second week, he made it 10 minutes. The third week, he got up to 15. During the runs he thought about getting back to trail running, to distance. He thought about what he had lost. He thought about what the counselor he saw had told him about his marriage--that he had to move on, that he had to let go, stop blaming himself.
The weeks wore on. He would wake in his empty house at 3 a.m. and check in with his employer by radio phone. He would drive to bars, grocery stores, and convenience shops, and he would haul six-packs and 12-packs and 30-packs in and out, in and out. It was hot, sweaty, backbreaking labor, and when he had to haul cases and cartons and barrels into freezers, it was cold, too, and he couldn't feel his hands.
Gear & Accessories.
James hauled beer from 4 a.m. until 2 p.m. every day, with Tuesdays and Thursdays off. He picked up double shifts, too. When he wasn't hauling beer, he was running or eating or napping. He didn't have a television, or a computer. He didn't have a cell phone. He wasn't ready to socialize yet.
So he read. He was a slow reader. He would read a paragraph, then stare into space and think about that paragraph for five minutes. He'd read for two or three hours every evening. He read Into the Wild and Elle Purriers Hot Streak Has Lasted Years and Born to Run. He read "anything that had an adventurous, real kind of story in it." He read Into Thin Air. He wondered if he'd ever get adventure back into his life.
Sometimes he walked to the library, a mile away, and in between reading books, he would sit at one of the computers and watch videos of runners leading adventurous lives. Runners with sponsors. What struck him is that they weren't running all that fast. They were occasionally walking. They were enduring. Every night, he was in bed by 8. It was still light outside.
A month into his comeback, which only he knew was a comeback, he asked his father to go for a run. His father didn't say how delighted he was. His father hadn't told James how heartsick he'd been during his son's terrible isolation, how all the time he was spending alone was frightening him. Sure, he told James, a run sounded great.
They started out from Paul's house, ran alongside the canals toward the zoo. James told Paul that maybe he could squeak out two miles and Paul said okay. He talked about taking things slow, about building back up. They were running only a 10-minute pace, but after a half-mile, James remembers, "I was dying." He told his dad they had to turn back.
But soon 10 minutes turned to 15. Fifteen minutes turned to 30 minutes. He called his old friend Justin Lutick and told him he was up to 50 minutes. "Let's do an hour," Justin said.
He started volunteering at local races, where he ran into more friends. He showed up at the 12-hour Javelina Jang-over Night Trail Run at the end of September, and it felt like a coming-out party, like maybe he hadn't lost his friends after all. He wasn't ready to race, but he was invited to blow the horn.
He ran faster, harder. He got up to 90-minute runs. He started doing speed-work. Running was something he did, but it wasn't who he was. But the more he did it, the better he felt about who he was. After about five months of living alone, he'd also decided to move in with his father, in March 2011.
He discovered he wasnt bad--a few years later he would win the Man Against Horse 50-mile half-marathon Then he quit running altogether.
The Kid ran it in 1:29:58. Set a course record.
* * *
It was early spring in the desert, and he was running, but he wasn't a runner. Or was he? Could he do what he loved, and could he do everything in his power to win at what he loved doing, without becoming that thing, without sacrificing who he was? He pondered those questions while he ran.
He ran with the Coury brothers. He ran with his friend Mark Cosmas, who was just about to open a running store. He ran with Josh Grisa and Brian McKinley. It was mid-March and he was sore after his half-marathon, but his friends told him he should run the Leona Divide, in California, a 50-mile trail race.
He was putting in five-hour runs. He was doing 11-mile fartleks.
On the long runs, he and his friends talked. He told them about his marital difficulties, about how he thought he had failed his ex-wife and her kids, about how he had failed himself. His friends told him about their bad times, about how bad times could lead to better times. How bad times could break people, but that broken people could heal and become stronger. Funny thing about running was, races had only one winner and winning was great, but running with people was at least as great. He understood what his dad had been telling him all those years.
He wanted to race again. He wanted to win, too, no doubt about that. He remembered winning and how great that was. But if he didn't win--well, he wouldn't be great with that, but he knew that winning wasn't the best thing about running. He thought he knew that, anyway.
He talked to his dad. He told him he had signed up for the Leona Divide trail race, 50 miles. Father knew son wasn't ready. "I thought he might die," Paul remembers.
James didn't know if he could finish. But he knew he could start. He figured that if he blew up, he blew up. Even that would be okay. He didn't wear a watch, or a Garmin, which he'd tossed shortly after he returned to running. He thought he would run with the leaders. He thought he would try to have fun.
He went out fast, next to Josh Brimhall and Jorge Pacheco. The three ran until mile 25, and to Bonnett's delight, he felt fine. Then Brimhall sped up. Bonnett and Pacheco sped up, too. After two miles, Brimhall turned to his companions. "That was my move," he said, and the three grinned at each other. At mile 27, after a two-mile descent, overcome by feelings of happiness and good fellowship, The Kid turned and offered Brimhall a fist bump. Brimhall returned the gesture and immediately seized up with a pulled hamstring. Then it was Bonnett and Pacheco. At 29 miles, the leaders saw the mountain rising in front of them. They slowed, then walked, preparing for the 1,200-foot, two-mile climb. The Kid could see that Pacheco was hurting. He asked what was wrong. "I dropped all my S Caps," Pacheco said.
Bonnett remembered what it was like when winning was so important. He also remembered how ultrarunners were different, how his dad had told him that ultras were one sport where hanging out with friends was as important as anything else. He remembered watching how happy his dad was hanging with those people he ran against. He offered Pacheco his S Caps and Pacheco gladly accepted. And after gobbling them, he shot off like a rocket, leaving Bonnett wondering if maybe fellowship had its downside, too.
Pacheco put a quarter mile between himself and Bonnett in the climb. The Kid saw that when he crested the mountain. But he remembered what his dad had told him about descents, how to take advantage of the terrain. Halfway into the descent, he pulled even. Over the next 10 miles, Bonnett put 10 minutes between him and Pacheco. Then he felt his body give out. But he kept going. He crossed the finish line at 6:24:46, three minutes off the course record.
It was April 2011. A pair of first-place finishes, after two years of not running. If he defined himself by his running, those medals would be all he needed. But he needed something else. So two weeks later, The Kid drove to the Grand Canyon with the Coury brothers. James carried one water bottle and a Chipotle burrito. He didn't wear a watch. There was no starting gun, no finish line, no race. Just friends, running together. Just affirmation.
Toward the end of the run--fast, easy, fun--Bonnett had a thought, pure as the cool desert air.
"I'm back," he thought. "I'm finally here."
* * *
Early spring in the high desert, and The Kid, 26 years old, is in a car driving back from lunch with his mother. He points out a thin scratch that squirrels up a mountain sliding by the highway. That's a running route he takes. And there, in the distance, that's another run. The choices of trails up there are endless. Yes, Bonnett agrees, it's funny how things work out.
When they got back from the Grand Canyon, the Coury brothers asked James if he wanted to work for them, to help set up and organize races as part of Aravaipa Running, their trail- and endurance-running event company. Even before the Leona Divide race, Mark Cosmas had asked if James would work for him at iRun. He was still hauling beer, but now he was seeing his parents and friends more. He was a runner again, but he was more than a runner. That summer, another running friend called.
"Don't tell anyone about this, but would you be interested in running for Adidas?"
The Kid quit his beer job. He moved out of his dad's house and into a nearby house with two roommates, both runners.
In 2011, he won Nevada's Bootlegger 50-K, then, the next year, its 25-K. He placed sixth in Utah's Moab Red Hot 33-K; second in Oregon's Gorge Waterfalls 50-K.
On April 27, 2013, he lined up at the Zane Grey 50-miler. His father had run it seven times, once finishing as high as third. James had paced him in many of those races and had run it himself twice, finishing sixth once, fourth another time. The Kid told himself what his dad had told him. "You know that course. When it's smooth, go fast, and when it's rocky, take what you can."
He had last run the race in 2007, run it in 9:15:56, good for fourth place, when he was a runner, first and foremost. Now he was something else. His mother and brother Jesse crewed, but because of a timing mistake, they didn't show up at the first aid station. His dad was supposed to run the last five miles with him, but he, too, messed up on his timing and didn't show. No matter. They were all at the finish line. The Kid finished in 8:40:18. First place.
"I know now that I can lose things," James says, as he sits in a car speeding on a highway through landscape he has run so many times he can't count. "I can lose anything. All my life I always said, 'If I lost running, I lost who I was.'"
But by last spring, he knew better. The days to come would bring enormous gifts. His running success would be the least of it. But he didn't know about those gifts as the scrubby hills and soft blue sky and high desert slid by.
Finish lines matter. Winning counts. Any serious runner who doesn't know those things is lost. Any serious runner who knows only those things is doomed. James Bonnett has felt lost and doomed in his relatively few, densely packed years, but even a year ago, even before the jumbo-sized gifts, he'd acquired some wisdom.
Times he is feeling low, he thinks of the morning his wife and her kids left. "That feeling will never leave me," he says. "If anything is bad on the trails or blowing up on a run, I always, always look back on those days, especially on that morning and how awful it was, and I realize what a great opportunity I have to be out running. I'm living a happy life, rather than just living a life."
James has a girlfriend now, a 23-year-old ICU nurse and ultrarunner named Erin LoStracco, and she delivered their first child on July 3. It's a boy, and his name promises an adventurous life: Zane. James has taken a job as girls cross-country coach at Phoenix's Central High School, where he now coaches alongside the boys cross-country and track coach, Paul Bonnett. He and LoStracco recently moved out of the house they shared with other ultrarunners and bought one of their own. It's just four miles from his dad's.
James will turn 28 on August 14. He hopes he can be as good a father to his child as Paul was to him. He laughs when asked if his father pushed him or if running so much, so young, hindered his development.
"The reason I stopped running wasn't that," he says. "I had a pretty normal childhood, except in the summer when other kids played baseball or went to summer camp, I got to go to the mountains and take great trips and do big long runs with my dad.
"If a 10-year-old marathoner asked me for advice, I'd say: 'Do it for yourself, don't listen to anyone's opinion but your own. If you want to do it, do it. If you don't want to do it, don't. Nothing can stop you but yourself.'"
Bonnett plans to run with his child. Or not. "It's his choice," the former prodigy says. "If he wants to run, he can run. If he wants to be a swimmer, he can be a swimmer. Or a baseball player. Whatever he wants to be."
Bonnett considers but doesn't dwell on the past. He doesn't wish for what he doesn't have. It doesn't do any good, for one thing. For another, he has all he needs. Shortly after that terrible morning of loss, the day he couldn't even make it around the block, Bonnett changed the way he ran. He stopped wearing a watch, or a Garmin. He has a good sense of time, and distance. If he loses his way, as he does every so often, and knows he will again, he tries to stay in the moment, to think about where he's going.
One foot in front of the other.
He's pretty sure he's headed in the right direction.
