While many of us spend countless training hours running in solitude, there is a special place in our hearts for our fellow runners. People that find it totally normal to meet at the trailhead before dawn and run 25 miles before most people have gotten out of their pj’s. Trail time can be simultaneously infinite and immediate. Things get real when you share some miles with a stranger in the wilderness. Barriers break down, and within minutes you’ve made a lifelong friend. For me the trails are a place of communal compassion, where we shed any remaining artifice of our public personas, and open ourselves up to the rawness of the human condition.