Come Run With Us
Nicole and I are running the Salina Crossroads Half Marathon on November 7, and we would like company. There is a team, and there is a shirt.
I run. Not fast, and not with much style. I finished the Salina Crossroads Half Marathon in 2024 in about two hours and twenty-nine minutes, came back in 2025 and ran it a few minutes slower, though I felt better doing it. It has become a small annual tradition that I sort of fell into.
This spring I have been getting back to a regular workout routine, and while I was still deciding whether to sign up again, Nicole registered before I did. We ran a few marathons together over twenty years ago in seminary and had not lined up for the same race since. This year we are training together again.
Somewhere in that I started thinking about the other United Methodist clergy who run. Several of us were at Salina last year, on the same course on the same morning, and I did not know it until afterward. We never found each other. So Nicole and I decided to run Salina together, and we want to invite you along. We started a Circuit Runners team and made a shirt. Not a program. Just a way for us to find each other.
Nicole and I started it, and Methodist runners of any kind are who I most hope to find. But you do not have to be Methodist, or clergy, or anywhere near Kansas. If you run, you can be a Circuit Runner wherever you are.
The starting line
The Salina Crossroads Marathon runs Saturday, November 7, 2026, in downtown Salina, Kansas. Flat, fast, fully paved, and a Boston qualifier. The full, the half, and the 10K start at 8:00 AM, the 5K at 8:10, and the kids’ half-mile fun run at 11:15. Every runner gets a medal. Salina is about thirty minutes up the road from McPherson.
Sign up for any distance. Whichever one fits your year is the right one, and the 5K counts every bit as much as the full.
Right now the team is two people, and there is plenty of room. I would love for you to take one of the spots. You can register at runsalinacrossroads.com and choose the Circuit Runners team during sign-up, or join the Circuit Runners team directly.
Let me be plain about how small the ask is. I am not writing training plans, tracking anybody’s mileage, or checking on whether you ran this week. You do not have to be fast, and you do not have to be a runner yet. There are more free training plans online than anyone needs, and if you would rather ask a person than a search engine, I am glad to help you find a place to start.
I hope you will come. If you do, we will try to find each other before the start, take a bad photo, and then run our own races at our own paces.
The shirt
Circuit riders is the piece of Methodist history that fits, and running is what some of us are doing on that same ground now, slower and on foot. Circuit Runners holds both, and it needs no explanation on a shirt.
It carries Hebrews 12:1 across the back: run with perseverance the race marked out for us. There is no race name on it and no year, so it travels.
The store is open at bonfire.com/store/circuit-runners.
Everything is priced within a few dollars of what it costs to make. Making money is not the point. I would rather these spread than earn.
And if Kansas in November is not going to happen, I hope you will find a race closer to home. Wear the shirt there and tell me how it went. The verse on the back does not name a course.