Essay

Brooke Shannon, a mother of three in Austin, Tex., was traumatized by what she witnessed one day in 2017 while driving by her local middle school. She saw dozens of tweens standing around with their heads down, phones up, glazed eyes staring into their devices: alone together. “I went home and emailed 20 moms,” Shannon said, posing a heretical question: What if we kept phones away from kids until eighth grade? What if we all simply…waited? 

She called her idea “Wait Until 8th.” It was hatched out of desperation a decade after the birth of the iPhone. A few months later, the world’s then-richest man Bill Gates admitted that he and then-wife Melinda had kept smartphones from their kids until they were 14. Then The Atlantic published “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?”—a generation the article’s author dubbed “iGen.” 

What had started as a simple idea within one Texas community “spread like wildfire,” recalled Shannon—and became a movement. Run entirely by volunteers, Wait Until 8th garnered media attention from outlets including NPR and the Today show. At its peak it collected tens of thousands of online signatures from parents in all 50 states, who promised to hold off on giving iPhones to their children—to “let kids be kids a little longer,” or at least until their frontal lobes further developed. 

Dana Tuttle, a physician and mother in Marin County, Calif., remembered hearing about Wait Until 8th and weighing whether to commit her child, then eight, to the pledge. “It was such a depressing, inevitable feeling as a parent,” said Tuttle, who often found herself eating breakfast, looking out the window, “and watching all these 10-, 11-, 12- year-olds walking to school with their big backpacks, their arms extended, staring into their phones.” 

“I didn’t know when exactly was the right time [to introduce phones],” said Tuttle. “I just knew waiting sounded good.” So she banded together with Dabney Ingram, a local mom with a doctorate in education research, and in 2018 they launched ScreenSense—“to help families and their communities teach healthy tech use to children.” 

Suddenly, whatever sort of phone-rollout strategy parents adopted, there were options. The efforts signalled a growing awareness that maybe this smartphone thing wasn’t such a smart idea after all. It was a coast-to-coast wakeup call, led in large part by moms—mothers against smartphones, the Mothers Against Drunk Driving of the 21st century.

The tech hubs of San Francisco and Austin didn’t suddenly turn into Amish country, but parents like Shannon and Tuttle started noticing a subtle change. Suddenly, not every fifth grader in Marin was getting a phone for graduation. Communities were having conversations. Schools were hosting speakers. Families were at least establishing rules, if not always following them. “We were making progress,” said Tuttle. “I felt heartened. There was a noticeable cultural shift.” 

And then Covid-19 arrived.

“The pandemic hit and it immediately sent everyone inward,” said Tuttle. Two years later, the fallout has been extreme. Adolescent screen time doubled during the pandemic, according to a recent study in JAMA—on average going to 7.7 hours a day. And that number doesn’t include online school—it’s just pure, unadulterated digital distraction. 

According to the report, girls now spend twice as much time on social media as boys. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony emphasized, the extra screen time has impacted girls especially hard, causing significant increases in anxiety and eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, loneliness and cutting, and, according to the CDC, a 50 percent spike in visits to the emergency room for suspected suicide attempts.

That’s all the bad stuff. Of course, all usage is not equal: A solid chunk of the time that our youngest generation (newly coined as Zoomers) was spending on phones was, in fact, beneficial. FaceTime, Houseparty, Zoom gatherings—these all offered a lifeline for otherwise socially isolated kids. Yet even now, as in-person education and IRL hangouts resume, the JAMA report concludes, “screen use may remain persistently elevated.” 

Today, the average age at which kids get a phone is 10, according to some industry groups. Common Sense Media says the average is 11, and one in five kids has a phone by the age of 8. Its new data, to be released later this year, shows a continued “aging downward,” as the group’s senior director of research, Michael Robb, put it. While it’s tricky to show the effects of the pandemic, he said, “you’ll see that slightly more 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds have smartphones relative to 2019.” (This is despite the fact that a pre-pandemic Pew study found that 73 percent of parents said they believe it’s acceptable for children to have their own phone only after age 12.) 

Whatever the age at which a kid gets a phone, it still arms the kid with a device designed to addict. “Silicon Valley wants the same thing Vegas wants,” said Dr. Richard Freed, a psychologist and the author of “Wired Child.” “Time spent on device. Teen time spent.”  

Freed works with families in lower-income Antioch, Calif., as well as in posh Palo Alto, Calif., and the divide is wide between those communities: “The difference is, tech parents haven’t been duped. They know the dangers. They know Apple and Zuckerberg and all the social media apps are after their kids—which is why their kids aren’t on them!” 

On the other hand, the parents working two jobs and struggling to make ends meet “don’t have access to the inside scoop,” he said. “They see smartphones as a status symbol, something they think helps their kid, something they want to give their kid.” A lot of affluent parents don’t want to give their kid a phone. But just like their children, adults succumb to pressure—peer, family and societal—all too easily.

“I would’ve loved to have made it to eighth. We tried. We failed,” said Jeremiah Rosen, CEO of Sundae, a social media marketing firm in Manhattan. “My daughter would’ve killed us. It would’ve seriously ruined our relationship.” He first heard about Wait Until 8th through a friend of his wife. “She was really pushing it,” he said. “Like, ‘You guys have to do this, too.’” And for a while, they did hold out—even lasting through the first 18 months of the pandemic. Then, last September, the day before the beginning of school, they gave their sixth-grade daughter a phone—albeit scrubbed of social media. “That’s the hill I’ll die on,” said the father, who works in it.

Now, said Rosen, his daughter is constantly looking at her phone. “I’d rather she be looking out the window! There’s a real value in that.” He asked her recently: “Do you feel more fulfilled? Are you happier? Is your life better now that you have a phone?” She shrugged. Not really, she told him. But she uses it to arrange lunches in Union Square and walks around the Village with friends. She plays Sneaky Sasquatch. She listens to Bleachers. She has taken 700 photos. And her parents know her whereabouts; they are reachable, and vice versa. “As an only child, in New York City, I think it’s been a good social outlet,” said Rosen. “She has gained a new level of independence—well,” he added, “while becoming more dependent on her phone.”

*

The thing—the worst thing—about handing kids a mobile device is that it offers them “access to everything,” said Tiffany Shlain, author of “24/6: Giving Up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection.” “Do we really want them to have access to…everything?”

Shlain serves on the advisory board of The Digital Wellness Lab at Harvard’s Boston Children’s Hospital and has been a proponent of Wait Until 8th since the start. Her older daughter, now at Yale University, didn’t get a phone until midway through her freshman year of high school. “I think we were the last one at Tam High,” Shlain said, laughing. She wondered if maybe they’d waited a tad too long, given that Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, Calif., uses apps in its curriculum.

As for her younger daughter—half the parents in her class took the pledge back in fourth grade. But come Covid-19, everybody caved, Shlain included. The pandemic scuttled everything, she said. “We never even used to allow iPads in the bedroom! And then suddenly bedrooms became classrooms.” On one day of home-schooling, it hit her: “The iPad is just a big phone. We’re so adamant about not getting her a phone, but she’s already got this iPad.”

Shlain and her husband, Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at University of California, Berkeley, really wrestled with it. “I was like, what am I doing? I spent so much mental energy thinking about it, I wanted to scream.” They had a big discussion, drew up a contract, and eventually gave their seventh-grader a super-stripped-down iPhone—text, camera and calling only, barely more bells and whistles than in the Gabb phone she had once had but never used. “It just wasn’t the cool phone,” explained Shlain. “You want to think what’s ‘cool’ doesn’t matter, but it’s middle school. It does.” (One San Francisco parent told me about a boy so mortified by his flip phone that he’d walk away and hide whenever he had to send a text.)

The phone, some say, is just a conduit to the real culprit. “Social media magnifies age-old teenage problems,” said Dr. Roni Cohen-Sandler, author of the new book “Anything but My Phone, Mom!” “Before smartphones, kids would hear about a party they weren’t invited to on a Monday; now that party is posted in real time, so they can watch it endlessly and make themselves miserable.” 

In some ways everything has changed, said Cohen-Sandler, and in others “nothing has changed.” Wait Until 8th’s Shannon agreed. “Every day all day, these platforms are just showing kids every BFF they don’t have, every group they’re not a part of, every sleepover they’re not invited to,” she said. It’s ironic: “Kids say they feel so left out by not having a phone—they don’t realize they feel just as left out having one.”

During the home-schooling phase of the pandemic, parents were in survival mode. Now it’s time to recalibrate, many say. Or as Dr. Jean Twenge argued in her 2021 New York Times op-ed, “This Is Our Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the Smartphone Trap,” it’s time to rethink and reduce the amount—and kind—of time kids spend on phones. 

*

After a two-year pause, groups like ScreenSense and Wait Until 8th are rebooting—taking surveys, switching gears, admitting a sense of defeat. They’re still calling for parents to delay giving kids phones, if they can. But if they can’t fend off their kids’ phone usage, the goal is to at least cordon off the most attention-sucking, confidence-stealing applications. Shannon and Wait Until 8th suggest not allowing any social media until kids reach 16.

There is the fear that the idea of Wait Until 8th is too puritanical—a digital version of 1990s virginity pledge craze. Maybe, some suspect, it’s not all that effective. As Cohen-Sandler says, every child is different. There is no magic age or grade when someone should suddenly be able to access everything. That includes eighth grade. As one friend of mine said about her 15-year-old twins: “We waited till eighth—and they’re still fucking addicted.

A lifetime ago, back in 2017 B.C. (Before Covid), my husband and I declared to ourselves (as opposed to signing a pledge) that we would not give our daughter, then 8 years old, an iPhone until eighth grade. So far we’ve stuck to that (although we did gift our kids a landline—a once-cool 1980s ombre phone, which my parents would never let me have, in my bedroom or otherwise). 

Still, I know the end is nigh. As much as I hate having other people’s kids in my car’s back seat, necks curved downward, texting, scrolling and watching instead of chatting (especially after I’ve cheerily said, “No phones in the car, please!”), I also hate wondering: Am I sabotaging my daughter’s social life by barring her from an online one?

Though I’d like to parent like it’s 1994 and tell my kids to meet me at the Orange Julius at 5 p.m. or call me collect from a payphone if they need me, I realize that’s not realistic. So we will probably opt for Plan B: We will start slow, giving her a Wi-Fi–free “on-ramp,” as Cohen-Sandler said: “When your kid gets his driver’s license, you don’t just send him out on the highway with five friends in the car!”

Maybe if we sign other types of pacts and contracts. If we establish trust and communication. If we ban phones from the classroom and the bedroom, from carpools and dinner tables, while walking or talking, certainly while crossing the street. Maybe if our daughter can remain confident and capable of conversing and forming real-life relationships. Then maybe…giving her a phone would actually be more helpful than harmful? After all, devoid of Instagram and TikTok and the Wi-Fi–fueled freedom to forever scroll, maybe a phone is just a…phone, almost as innocuous as the ombre ’80s landline. 

“Pick me up in Dolores Park at 5 p.m.!” my 13-year-old daughter emailed me the other day from her laptop at school. “At the park?” I wrote back in a panic. Where in the park? At 5 p.m.? On a Friday? I’ll never find parking! I’ll never find her! But it was too late. She was offline and unreachable. 

So I did what any mother of one of the few remaining phoneless seventh graders in San Francisco would do. I texted her friend.

Leap Day, February 29, 2020. Sara and Ryan Hall are in the backseat of an Uber, sitting in traffic—and silence—in downtown Atlanta. Shivering a little in her race kit, Sara accepts Ryan’s offer of his sweatshirt. The driver mutters something about road closures. It would’ve been faster to get out and hobble back to the hotel, but they just sit there. Staring out the window, in disbelief. “We were in total shock,” recalls Sara. “We just didn’t see this coming.” 

Sara arrived at last year’s Olympic marathon trials as the second-fastest woman at the starting line, favored to make the U.S. team for Tokyo. Confidence was high. The night before the race, Sara and Ryan told their four daughters, biological sisters adopted at ages 5 to 15 from an orphanage in Ethiopia in 2015: All of mom’s hard work will be worth it for this moment. Ryan, Sara’s husband of 15 years and coach for the last five, even teared up. “I remember…” Sara says. “He’d said, ‘Tomorrow is going to be your day.’”

Except, it turned out, it wasn’t. Atlanta’s tough course “obliterated” her legs, as Sara posted on Instagram. She dropped out at mile 22. DNF. Her dream—their dream—dashed.

Sara had made it to the Olympic trials five times before. But this time was different: “I’d never felt this prepared,” she says from her home in the hills of Flagstaff, Arizona. “It was the biggest heartbreak of my career.”

And then, ironically, she went to Disney World. Well, technically, Wizarding World, at Universal Studios. With Jasmine and Lily, her two youngest daughters, licking her wounds in the line for Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure while Ryan went home to Flagstaff with Hana and Mia. A week later, the world shut down. With the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus and all the unknowns that came with it, there would be no more races. No redemption.

“It was definitely an emotionally hard time,” says Sara. “It’s tough to motivate without a race in sight.”

It was just as tough, if not tougher, for Ryan. A retired two-time Olympic runner, he knows disappointment intimately himself. Now that he’s a coach, he says the hardest thing he’s had to learn, especially as Sara’s coach, is to “be invested in the athlete, but not go on the same roller-coaster ride as the athlete.” And for Sara, for Ryan, for all of us, life has been a roller coaster. An emotional and physical roller coaster. It’s been a year of change for the Halls. One long-haul marathon of a year.

My button-down no longer fits!” says Ryan, over the phone last fall, from a hotel room in Tucson, where he and Sara are getting ready for a dinner function during the pandemic. It’s a fundraiser for Lifesong for Orphans. “It’s like Tommy Boy!” he laughs. “I’ll be twirling around singing ‘fat guy in a little coat’ all night.”

On the menu is steak, mashed potatoes, and asparagus, which Ryan will eat even though he isn’t hungry. He hasn’t been since summer, when he started taking in upwards of 5,000 calories a day. That’s a couple of thousand more than back when he was running 100 miles a week and eight races a year, including the Houston half marathon in 2007. He crushed it in 59:43, making him the first American to break the half’s one-hour barrier. In 2011, in Boston, he rocketed 26.2 miles in 2:04:58, becoming, to date, the fastest marathoner in America.

The fastest marathoner in America who, at 38 years old, doesn’t run anymore. Not competitively. Not weekly. Though on a whim, occasionally: as in, maybe 25 miles in all of 2020. Well, not counting the 43 he ran in September, from Crested Butte to Aspen, in 12:47 with a 6,000-foot elevation gain. “I just hopped in,” he says, about the Grand Traverse Mountain Run. His first. For fun.

And his body has changed substantially since his marathon days. He’s gained a ton of muscle. Since retiring from professional running in 2016, the 5’10” Ryan has gone from 127-pound waif to 200-pound weightlifter. “After depleting my body of so much strength for years and years with intense training and dieting, my body was craving an activity that was anabolic,” Ryan explains. He also just fell in love with “the sensation,” he says, of pulling something so freaking heavy off the floor that he previously couldn’t budge.

He noticed it in his face first. “A marathoner’s face is gaunt,” he says. “Right away, I lost that. I was retaining a ton of water. My face got so bloated. My arms just kept getting bigger and bigger,” he says, not boasting but as a matter of fact. “I barely recognized myself!” Sara and others barely recognized him, too.

“It was a big transition,” says Sara. “I like his physique now, but it took getting used to.” Ryan had looked “emaciated” since they first met after the Foot Locker West Regionals outside L.A., senior year of high school, at 17. But now his body was completely different. “We were in an elevator and this guy walks in who’d known Ryan for years. He was like, ‘Hey, Sara. How’s Ryan doing?’ And I was like: ‘He’s standing right here!’”

In his old life, Ryan was long and leggy, with the kind of natty, sun-bleached blonde mop you’d expect on a kid who grew up in Southern California. Clean-shaven with concave cheeks, he had a boyish, Oliver Twist look about him. He used to gallop the streets with the speed and light and grace of a gazelle. Now, bearded and buff, he spends one to two hours a day working out in his garage. He hoists and huffs, presses and puffs. Veins pop from his neck. Pecs bulge beneath his T-shirt. “Happy Birthday Hulk!” one of his 90,000 Instagram followers commented, with a biceps emoji, beneath a chronological series Ryan posted of bare-chested, six-packed, painstakingly sculpted selfies. A virtual flipbook of his physical transformation over the past five years.

Unlike most of social media, though, it doesn’t come off as a gross display of vanity. Ryan isn’t saying, “Hey, look at my body!” He’s saying: Hey, look at the body. Look at what the human body can do.

As a runner, Ryan used to hate lifting weights. And as a typical baseball- and basketball-obsessed kid, he hated running. Until, at 13, gazing out the car window at Big Bear Lake, God urged him to run around it. And so, a boy of faith, who’d never run more than one dreaded mile in PE class, he begged his dad—and ran 15 miles. From then on he never stopped running, racking up four state championships, a track scholarship to Stanford, and two Olympic teams. Until, at 33, tired of injuries and low testosterone, and just plain tired, he rather abruptly did.

In their old life, before kids, Sara and Ryan traveled the globe to training camps and races with nothing but each other and their Asics. (The company has sponsored the couple since they both graduated from Stanford and turned pro.) In their old life, they concentrated day-in, day-out—like all elite athletes have to—on themselves. In their old life, whenever they were not running, they were in “energy conservation mode,” says Sara. Expending as little energy as possible: literally lying on their couch, watching movies, reading books. The antithesis of parenting, essentially. “With kids, you can’t live that way,” says Sara. “You’re constantly doing things and sensing things and listening to them talk for hours about Harry Potter.”

And talking to them for hours, too—about Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In May, when Floyd was murdered by a white cop in Minneapolis, the world erupted, and the Halls awoke. “Coming from Ethiopia, the girls had never seen themselves as Black before,” says Sara. They didn’t know about racism, let alone systemic racism. Arbery’s murder was especially disturbing, and confounding, for the girls. Why was a man shot and killed while he was just out running? “Suddenly, they were learning what it means to be Black in America. It was new to them. It was new to us,” says Sara. “The family spent the summer having hard, deep discussions. “I had to tell the girls, ‘This country I brought you to, that you’d idolized in your minds as this idyllic place…is not.’”

Motherhood takes up mental space formerly fully reserved for running. That is not necessarily a bad thing, says Sara. “I’m not sitting around overthinking running,” she says. It doesn’t mean she’s leading a balanced life. She wishes she had extra energy to go on a hike with the girls. Or kick around the soccer ball without worrying about getting injured, she says. “When you’re trying to be the best in the world at something, your life is never going to be balanced.”

Being a mom motivates her as a runner, she explains. It has made her value, even approach races differently. “I think: I really fought to create the time and space in my life for this opportunity. I’m going to take advantage of it.”

Ryan, too, has turned his formerly laser self-focus on his daughters, of course. Driving them to the dentist, helping with homeschooling, coaching Hana and Mia, the two eldest, during the pandemic, before team practices resumed. He also personally coaches a dozen or so amateur athletes through Run Free, the online holistic coaching company he cofounded in 2018 with his friend Jay Stephenson. Ryan and Sara have worked on behalf of millions of women and children living in extreme poverty in Ethiopia through the Hall STEPS Foundation, the development organization they established in 2009, most recently raising $50,000 to fund a home for homeless girls in Addis Ababa.

But Ryan’s attention these days is, most acutely, on Sara. Riding a bike beside her as she runs, he watches her every move: How is her breathing? How is her form? Her pace? Her knee drive?

When he was a pro athlete, Ryan never wanted to be a coach. “It always just seemed like what all pro athletes do after they stop competing.” He aspired to no part of that cliché. But soon after retiring in 2016, he received a cold email from a runner in New York City looking for a coach. David Roeske, a fellow Stanford grad, had always admired Ryan’s “gutsy” approach to racing from afar. Recently back from climbing Everest without oxygen, Roeske’s body was wrecked. He hoped to PR in the upcoming NYC marathon that November. He also wanted to PR in the Fifth Avenue Mile, and win or PR the Empire State Building Run-Up, where he’d placed eighth in the past. “I thought Ryan might understand my weird set of goals.”

He did. Ryan took him on. For no other reason, really, then, well, what else was he doing? Plus, Ryan says, “he sounded like a cool guy.” Within a few months, Roeske accomplished several goals, if not those, including cutting his fastest marathon time from 2:37 to 2:34. Ryan told him, ‘Run the first 20 miles with your head, and the last six with your heart,’ Roeske recalls. “As I ran those last six miles I kept repeating, ‘With your heart! With your heart!’ as a mantra, and it fueled me through the finish.”

Ryan and Sara realized he should coach her, too. “It just made sense,” they both say, in separate conversations, like melded couples do. “You want your coach to know everything about you. How you sleep, how you eat, what makes you tick,” explains Sara. Ryan, obviously, knew it all. “He’s always been that person for me, even when he wasn’t my coach.”

Ryan and Sara, both devout Christians, bond over the Bible and statistics. Their lives are steeped in both scripture and the stopwatch. Luke 1:37. Sara 2:20.

Sara says she’s often felt misunderstood by her past coaches. She likes to experiment with her workouts and training. Ryan gets that. “We have a mutual trust. He trusts that I’m in tune with my body,” she says. “That’s allowed me to be more aggressive in my training than a coach would normally be.” Which means: Ryan lets her do crazy, unconventional things professional runners don’t typically do. Like, say, take relatively few rest days and run back-to-back marathons.

“Ryan’s goals are Sara’s goals, and Sara’s goals are Ryan’s goals,” as elite runner Rachel Johnson, 27, puts it. The fellow Christian athlete moved to Flagstaff in 2018 for its “skinny air” and the opportunity to train with Ryan Hall. His was a name she’d first heard from reading magazines like Runner’s World, back when she was a high school track star in Plano, Texas.

After just two phone calls with Ryan, she was sold. “I was like, I’m going to Flagstaff!” She could just tell: “He’d put everything into running himself. It was clear he was going to put everything into coaching, too.” He did. Johnson set several PRs and represented Team USA at the Great Stirling XCountry International Challenge 2019 in Scotland. “He’s made me a better runner,” she says. As well as a dedicated coach herself. In 2019, she moved to Virginia to coach cross-country at Liberty University; she also works for Run Free as a virtual trainer. She often hears herself sharing what she’s learned from Ryan with her own athletes. “He talks a lot about heart goals,” she says, “about how everyone has time goals, but you also need a heart goal.” To run a race with joy, perhaps; or to run without comparing yourself to others. “You may not achieve your time goal, but you can still feel good about achieving your heart goal,” says Johnson. “And you usually end up running way better than if you didn’t have a heart goal in the first place.”

Goals—time goals, heart goals—are what drive all the Halls. You can’t be a Hall (or for that matter, human, really) without them.

Back in 2019, plagued by injuries, Sara started writing her goals on the bathroom mirror, in erasable marker. 2020 Olympics… 68 half … 2:22… It helps focus her attention, she says. She likes how it shows her girls how you go after goals, how to tangibly put them front and center. After failing to make the Olympic team in February 2020, she came home and immediately wiped off “Olympic marathon trial champion” and replaced it with “America record holder.” It was her way of moving on, of looking forward. 

There was very little room left. “Can I have some space to look at my face?” Ryan joked not long ago, then squeezed one in: 200 pounds, he scrawled. “That one was clearly his,” Sara laughs.

Achieved. Ryan has indeed tipped the scale over two hundred. It was a “soft 200, though,” he says. He wants “a lean and cut” 200—muscle, not fat. Bulking up is not as fun as it sounds, he says. But bench-pressing 330, deadlifting 520, and squatting 475 and counting is. The other day he came across some dude on Instagram, from San Diego, who deadlifted 500 pounds then dropped it and immediately ran a 4:49 mile, a world record. It’s a rather niche record relative to the kind Ryan used to shatter, but still: He plans to beat it.

Maybe it’s Ryan’s easygoing yet self-assured tone, or his seemingly innate sincerity, or his guiding belief in God—or just the credibility that comes with super-heroic athleticism. But what in another messenger might be construed as self-help BS comes off as inspirational. “Anyone can be good at something,” he says, invoking wisdom gleaned from his father, who coached him as a kid. “But if you want to be great at something, it’s about finding what you’re made to do, and doing that.”

And Sara, it seems, is made to run. After taking some time off after her Olympic trials heartbreak in Atlanta, she got back in her Asics. And Ryan got back on his bike, pedaling alongside her, shouting “Put yourself there!” and “There is more there!” and “Make it feel easy!”—and, as her tempos and times continued to improve: “New normal!” (As in: this—this!—is your new normal.) In June, she ran a half marathon on the treadmill at her chiropractor’s office, setting a treadmill world record at 1:09:03. In August 2020, in a solo time trial, she ran 13.1 miles along a bike path in Eugene, Oregon, in 1:08:18, a personal record—and beating her mirror goal.

It was just the boost Sara needed going into October 2020’s London Marathon, a windy, rainy, pandemic-style bubble production. It was to be run by some 40 COVID-tested elite men and women, on a 1.3-mile loop, without spectators. Unless you count the cardboard cutouts of Queen Elizabeth and Prince William, complete with thumbs-ups, lining the course.

The first 13.1 was tough. “I was running alone in the silence,” says Sara. Which is not how Sara likes to run. She took it one lap at a time, spending most of the first half somewhere in the middle of the pack. Because of the loop route, she passed Ryan every six minutes or so. He was going crazy. “I was like a caged animal!” he says. “I had all this energy and nowhere to go. I’d see her come around and start screaming super loud.” Soon, Sara started to catch people, including Ethiopia’s Ashete Bekere, winner of the 2019 Berlin. As she moved from ninth place into fifth, then fourth… the switch was flipped. “I wanted the podium,” she says. Heading into the final lap, she found herself in third.

Watching her pain and effort and superhuman humanity, it was as if she had channeled not just all her training but all she’d been through, all we’ve all been through, all year. “I wanted to do something inspirational in London,” she says. She did.

Sara killed it, coming in second and completing the 26.2 miles in 2:22:01, the fastest of her career by 15 seconds, at age 37. Her kick-finish—a surge of the very best kind—blazing past Kenya’s Ruth Chepng’etich, 2019 marathon world champion, brought her, and Ryan, their daughters watching on TV, and people everywhere, runners and not, who happened to see the clip come across Twitter, to tears.

She came home to Flagstaff to flowers and chocolates that the girls had gone out and bought with their own money.

In late December, a mere 11 weeks after London, Sara wowed the world again at the Marathon Project: running circles around the three dozen competitors and mostly spectatorless 4.263-mile loop, finishing first with yet another personal 26.2 mile best: 2:20:32 — on the heels of Deena Kastor’s 14-year-strong 2:19:36.

And yet, Sara’s mirror doesn’t lie: “American record holder”—and breaking 2:20—had been her goal. Crossing the finish line, “the prevailing emotion I had was just disappointment,” she says. Though for the rest of us mortals watching, it was anything but. Instead, we saw a woman rise up, from the biggest blow of her career, during a goddamn pandemic to, once again kick butt, and become the second-fastest female marathoner in America.

People age. People change. Most people do it at a slow, steady clip. Not the Halls. Clearly, they move at a different pace. Over the past five years, all six have undergone transformations of epic proportions. Not to mention the fact that under Ryan’s tutelage, Sara just keeps getting faster, it seems.

In 2015, back in Ethiopia, the girls were prohibited from leaving the orphanage. But the eldest, Hana, had always wanted to be a runner, like the elite women runners of her birth country, and then, of course, like her adopted mom. Three years later, as a junior at Flagstaff High, she became the third Hall to win a state cross-country championship. (And win again.) In November, Mia, still a sophomore, became the fourth state champ in the family. “She took it from a minute in and never looked back,” Sara posted on Instagram, to her 148,000 followers.

Watching their daughters quite literally follow in their footsteps fills Sara and Ryan with immense joy. But so does watching the girls work hard in school. And master the English language after knowing not a lick of it. And rap every single word of “Hamilton” while playing on the banks of Colorado’s Slate River during a family vacation. Hana attends Grand Canyon University with a track scholarship. She’ll compete on the Division 1 squad, pandemic permitting. Mia is chasing PRs in the mile and 2-mile. When Jasmine grows up, she wants to be a Hollywood actress, but in the meantime she has joined the soccer team. Lily, age 10, wants to be a scientist.

“I just hope to show our girls what it looks like to come alive,” says Sara. “The world needs more people doing things they love.” Or as Ryan put it: people doing what they’re made to do.

Was he made to be a runner or a coach? “I was made to do both,” he says. “I think this is a common life experience, where one’s first life purpose is primarily ego driven. It’s about an individual trying to maximize their own potential, which gives way to a second purpose that is ‘other driven,’ where the goal is to help others maximize their own potential.” There is nothing wrong or better about one stage compared to the other, he adds. “They are both necessary and good.”

Helping others, as it happens, requires Ryan to do something he’d never done much of before: sitting. At his computer: at 5 a.m., writing his first book, Run the Mile You’re In: Finding God in Every Step, a religious-running memoir published in 2019. Typing up personalized workout programs for the dozen or so runners he trains virtually through Run Free. Sequestering himself in his garage, recording the weekly companion podcast, on which he chats effortlessly and honestly with guests like his younger brother Chad about booze and body image; with fellow runners Dathan Ritzenhein and Alan Webb, about their high-school heyday when they were dubbed “the big three”; and occasionally with his wife, about training and breakthroughs and his famous high-protein pancakes. He has also sat on his couch watching The 41st Day, the new documentary about his career, from first-time filmmaker Tim Jeffreys. Three times.

“It was hard to watch,” he admits. “I felt like I was just watching a lot of failures, my failures, being played out on the big screen.” The pulled hamstrings and plantar fasciitis, the low testosterone levels, the fatigue that plagued his final years—years he practiced “faith-based coaching.” God was his coach. But even God couldn’t save him from the biggest failure of his career: his 11th mile walk-off and DNF at the 2012 London Olympics.

“I’d so clearly missed what God was telling me,” he recalls. In the months, leading up to the games, he’d had a vision. God had told him about a golden puzzle, which, of course, Ryan interpreted to mean a gold medal. Who wouldn’t?

It wasn’t until his third time watching the documentary—the final scene with Sara and their newly adopted girls—that it all came together. “I had this aha moment,” he says. A healing moment. “Wait a second…God never said it was a gold medal, he just showed me a golden puzzle, put together.” The golden puzzle, he realized, was his family, two families brought together into one.

Ryan may have symbolically—and literally—left his sneakers at the finish line in Sydney, after completing the World Marathon Challenge in 2017, a mind- (and body)-boggling seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, but as a husband and a coach and a father, he runs on. Through Sara who’s not slowing down; through Hana and Mia, who are just getting started; through David Roeske and Rachel Johnson and all the athletes who Run Free.

“Running isn’t meant to last forever,” he says, almost shrugging through the phone. “That’s what makes running special. That’s what makes life special.”

Still, don’t most runners want to run until we can’t? Doesn’t every runner but Ryan dread the day our bodies tell us to hang it up? I ask Ryan: Does watching Sara run—watching her arms pump and her chin lift and her legs churn in long, strong strides, in the prime of her career—ever make you jealous?

He pauses for less than the three seconds that gave way to his famous sub-2:05. Maybe it’s their faith in God, or their faith in each other, or their faith in training—but envy is wholly absent from their relationship. He cites a Biblical verse (Mark 10:9) as a way to describe their marriage: “And the two will become one flesh.”

Sara is hoping to get a chance to run a sub-68 minute half marathon and “get in sub 2:19:30 shape” by fall. Her hopes are concrete, clearly spelled out, right in front of her face as she stares into it every morning. 

After falling short of her Olympic team dreams again, in June, she watched the Tokyo games like the rest of us—at home. Still, today, at 38, her aspirations remain scrawled, and simple (so to speak): “Olympian” and “American record holder.” What she wants even more than the record, though, is to finish first in Chicago on October 10th.

What about Ryan? Apart from breaking the scale, I ask him what everyone, athlete or not, asks themselves —whether in the final days of December or summer’s waning sunlight. “What are your goals for the year ahead?”

At first, it seems as if he misinterpreted the word your—until I realized: no, I did. “Aw, man, there’s so much more there,” he says. “We still don’t know how fast Sara can go. I want her to finish her career knowing.”

“Want to go camping in October?” a friend texted in August. Somewhere pretty, she suggested. Big Sur? “Yes, but …” I replied, “how about May?”

Fall used to be my favorite season. I’d traipse up and down California, from coastal cabins to backcountry lakes to wine-country weddings. But in the last few years, fall has become something I rationally, and irrationally, fear. It’s too unpredictable. Too hot. Too dry. Too smoky. Too anxiety-provoking.

I’m not the only one worrying. As climate change continues to ravage our planet, those who like to explore it — as well as the travel industry that supports them — are inevitably affected, too. Especially precarious and popular California. And yet no one seems prepared.

In 2019, California was the No. 1 state in visitor spending in the United States, according to Visit California, the state’s tourism agency, with tourists bringing in $145 billion to the state economy. It was an unprecedented amount. Travelers splurged at Napa wineries and San Francisco restaurants, San Diego surf-side hotels and Sierra slope-side resorts, Airstreams in Yosemite and yurts in Joshua Tree, stargazing in Los Angeles, whale-watching in the Channel Islands — and don’t forget Disneyland! California tourism saw 10 consecutive years of record growth — until the pandemic. In 2020, revenue plummeted 55 percent.

Now, as travel emerges, pent-up demand has many small towns from Ojai to Oakhurst rocking. This mixed-up moment may not be a fair gauge of what’s to come. What is to come? According to Visit California, a full recovery and then some — $157 billion tourist dollarsby 2025.

And yet: Wildfires consumed 4.2 million acres of California in 2020, and roughly 2 million so far this year alone. Severe drought forced quaint Mendocino inns to beg guests to conserve water. South Lake Tahoe was evacuated. In Death Valley, two hikers died in August from extreme heat, as did a family of three hiking southwest of Yosemite. This week’s welcomed rain came hard and fast, causing flooding, power outages and rockslides. All of this will continue in California’s future.

Though little research has been done on climate change’s long-term effects on tourism in the United States, much less in California, many scientists see the poorly managed forests through the trees.

“Places that are already hot are going to get hotter,” said Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor of economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We’re going to see extreme heat paired with impacted water supplies, and that will make it really hard for visitors to enjoy the activities they’re there to do, she explained. “Who wants to go wine tasting or hiking if you’re baking?”

Hot and unbothered in Wine Country

One of the state’s hottest tourism spots, Napa County, drew 3.8 million visitors in 2018 (and some $50 million in occupancy lodging taxes), according to Visit Napa Valley, the region’s tourism group. But it’s getting hotter.

Instead of four days of extreme heat each year, it will see 36 — a ninefold increase — by the end of the century, projected Lisa Micheli, founder of the Pepperwood Foundation, a Sonoma County climate research preserve (which has burned, twice, since 2017). Roughly 42 percent of Napa County was consumed by fire in 2020: land, vineyards and some 1,500 structures were lost, including one luxury hotel (Calistoga Ranch) and much of another (Meadowood). More power shut-offs, rising electricity bills, decreasing water supply, increasing infernos:These are problems that will only persist, Dr. Micheli said. “Whatever is stressed now, is just going to get worse.”

The science is way behind, said Marshall Burke, an associate professor at Stanford University who studies the social and economic impacts of environmental change. “The rate of change has been so dramatic. If I was the California tourism industry, I’d be really worried.”

And yet, it seems, it often isn’t. In Napa, the luxury hotel operator Auberge Resorts, which already operates two resorts in the region, is opening a third there, and another in arid Santa Ynez. And from Auberge to Airbnb to fully booked destination-wedding planners, not many cared to discuss how climate change will affect business.

“Maybe my head is in the sand, but I’m not going to put that negative energy out there!” laughed Sonja Burch, founder of Intimate Napa Weddings Napa Valley, a local wedding planner. Smoke-choked pools? B.Y.O. water to weddings? Last-minute cancellations? “Everyone is just thinking: ‘We’ll deal with it when the time comes,’” she said.

Perhaps reticence goes hand in hand with livelihoods. California’s tourism sector employed 1.1 million people in 2019, according to a report by Dean Runyan Associates, a tourism research firm. “Leisure and hospitality” is one of the top 10 drivers of California’s enormous economy — below industries like finance, manufacturing and health and education, but above the construction sector, according to a 2019 ranking of gross state products provided by the economist Troy Walter.

Visit California has said little publicly about climate change. At a trade show appearance in September, the president and chief executive, Caroline Beteta,briefly discussed the “natural phenomenon” of wildfire. She emphasized that while the fires in Tahoe resulted in mass evacuations, the flames didn’t infiltrate the “tourism corridors.”

Still, Visit California is starting to think about global warming. “Climate change impacts California in profound ways,” Ms. Beteta later wrote in an email. At a recent board meeting the group designated a board liaison, she noted, “to help navigate the industry’s approach to sustainable tourism and sound practices in destination stewardship.”

(California State Parks wanted to discuss all they’ve been doing to help mitigate the effects of climate change, but because of the Alisal fire, staff were unavailable to talk.)

Palm Springs is one of the few sunny tourist destinations in the U.S. climate scientists havestudied. Francesca Hopkins, an assistant professor of climate change and sustainability at University of California, Riverside, released a paper last year that looked at how climate change will affect snowbird season in the Coachella Valley. Conclusion: rather dramatically. (“And no one cared!” Dr. Hopkins said.) Daily temperatures between Thanksgiving and Easter have historically averaged below 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but going forward, research showed that there will be far fewer days that fall below that “pleasant” threshold. Palm Springs will become uncomfortable, on both ends of snowbird season,she projected, pushing those average daily temperatures toward 96 degrees, and almost doubling the number of extreme heat days.

More tangibly, the probability of having a high-heat day during April’s Coachella Music Festival will increase. Dancing in the desert in 105 degrees? “Even young people could experience heat stroke,” Dr. Hopkins said. “They’ll move the date.” Eventually, she said, people will start to think: “Why go to Palm Springs if it’s so miserable, when I can go to Monterey?”

Low snow, shorter ski seasons

Most research that has been done on climate change and U.S. travel destinations centers on ski resorts — which, facing decreasing snowpacks and truncated seasons, have had no choice but to assess their future. The number of low-snow years has spiked in the last 30 years, said Geoffrey Schladow, director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at University of California, Davis.

“It’s the extremes that will hurt the ski industry,” he said. Extreme lows like on March 29, 2021, when the Sierra snowpack measured 89 inches — well below the 142-inch historic average.

Snow itself has declined as a fraction of the total precipitation in Tahoe, to 33 percent in 2020 from an average of 52 percent in 1910, according to “Tahoe: State of the Lake Report,” research published this year by U.C. Davis. In other words: We’re seeing rain in winter, when it should be snow. “Given that we are at an elevation of over 6,200 feet, have hosted the Winter Olympics and have a snow-based economy, this is a dramatic fall,” Dr. Schladow said. The number does not have to drop to zero, he explained, for Tahoe to no longer be a snow-based economy.

For many out-of-state skiers who must book visits in advance, Tahoe has become too unreliable to bother. Jonathan White, 47, of Boston had a ski trip planned several years ago for Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe). “Lack of snow caused us to bail, and actually just go to Stowe,” he said of the resort in Vermont. (Imagine: New England skiing being better than out West.) Now, if the investment manager wants to ski deep powder, Utah is his destination. The state’s snow, he said, is “much more predictable, when thinking about Western ski trips for our East Coast crew.”

Royal Gorge Cross-Country Resort, Tahoe’s largest — and, at 7,000 feet, highest — Nordic area, has been feeling it. Unlike its alpine sister property, Sugar Bowl, Royal Gorge is “100 percent reliant on Mother Nature,” said Jon Slaughter, the executive director of marketing for the privately owned properties. “It’s scary,” he said, but they’ve been doing all they can, including investing in snow-making machinery for Sugar Bowl and creating “low-snow” cross-country trails: super-smooth, packed tracks the resort can open with just 2 feet of snow compacted to a 6-inch base. The goal is to increase the miles of these low-snow trails in the coming years.

Still, not a lot of U.S. ski destinations “have a climate action plan, or have even done a risk assessment,” said Daniel Scott,research chair in climate and society at the University of Waterloo.In Canada, the Whistler resort has heavily marketed itself as a summer playground — to the point that summer visitors now outnumber winter. A wise idea for Tahoe’s dozen-plus ski resorts, too. Except, wait, wildfire.

Where there’s fire, it’s everywhere

The Caldor fire burned more than 220,000 acres in Northern California this year. The evacuation of South Lake Tahoe cost local businesses $93 million in lost revenue in two weeks, according to the Center for Economic Development at University of Nevada, Reno.

What’s even more disruptive than fire, said Dr. Burke of Stanford, is its erratic sidekick: smoke. Visitors can choose to avoid a place that’s burning, he said, but smoke is, well, up in the air.

This summer, Lori Droste, the vice-mayor of the city of Berkeley, and her family faced a series of doomed trips. In July, they booked a cabin near the McCloud River in Northern California, but had to cancel because of smoke from the Salt and Lava Fires. In early August, they made it to Serene Lakes, in the Sierra — but because of the Dixie Fire, were “basically confined to the Airbnb, because the smoke was so bad,” she said. They planned a do-over, during the Labor Day weekend. “But then Caldor was raging.” They canceled.

Shifts in where we go, when

California is often presented in the media as an object of disaster, as Tom Hale underscored to me. Mr. Hale is the founder of Backroads, the Berkeley-based travel company, which has been operating biking and outdoors-oriented trips in the United States and 54 other countries for four decades. It deals with fallout from it all, from hurricanes in Baton Rouge to floods in Berlin. As we all know, climate change is not a state or country specific issue.

And in California, 2021 has been Backroads’ best year yet; 2022 is booked nicely, too.

“I don’t see natural disasters having a permanent impact on demand,” Mr. Hale said. “Unless thewholestate is on fire — which is not the case. As much as newspapers make it out to be.”

Still, he acknowledges there have been some differences.

“Wine country used to be our bread and butter,” said Mr. Hale, “but we’ve seen a decline in bookings in the last five years.”

A Utah State University study, published in September, found that changing climate conditions are likely to affect the recreational use of public lands across seasons and regions of the United States. California’s public lands are likely to see a decline in visitation primarily in the summer and fall. What people dothere will change, too.

These results hints at what’s bound to happen beyond the parks — to small towns and big hotels; mom-and-pop restaurants; “taco trails” and hiking trails. “When you put it all together, tourism patterns will be altered pretty significantly,” said Emily Wilkins, the study’s lead author.

A shift is already quietly, anecdotally, underway. In Northern California, low snow, early melts and high winds forced the Shasta Mountain Guides tour company to cancel its most popular route up Mount Shasta in April. Yet Casey Glaubman, a guide, offered words of higher wisdom. “Part of mountaineering is being flexible; adapting and adjusting plans is what it’s all about,” he said. “Things are changing, but it doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.”

It willmean running more rock-climbing trips, though. The mountains aren’t going away, he said. “There will just be more rock.”

It might also mean Napa promoting a lush spring, or Joshua Tree National Park touting starry winter skies. (And me perhaps sequestering myself in San Francisco each year until the winter rains begin.) Ski resorts, wineries, desert spas, woodsy retreats and more treasured California destinations will have to learn to attract visitors in different ways, at different times.

“Tourism in California is going to need some serious innovation,” said Dr. Scott, of the University of Waterloo. “Good thing you’ve got Silicon Valley.”

Rachel Levin is the author of “LOOK BIG: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds,” and co-author of “STEAMED: A Catharsis Cookbook,” published in May. She lives in San Francisco.

7:51 a.m.: We’re still in bed. Hazel, Oren and I. Typically, at this time on a Tuesday, I’m yelling at my 8-year-old to put on his shoes because our carpool is coming at any minute and he needs to be ready and out the door. But this morning Oren does not need shoes. There is no carpool, and no one is coming at any minute. Sometimes people do come, though — for a minute. To drop off homemade snickerdoodle cookies. Or tell us they found a salamander that looks like a snake. Or to just chat below our window, Rapunzel style.

8:07 a.m.: Breakfast is Josh’s meal. I escape for a run in the already-too-crowded park. Why is it only male runners who barrel ahead, center path, refusing to budge for pedestrians, while I make giant half-moons into the street?

9:02 a.m.: I return reluctantly, to find my kids engaged, actually engaged, in morning meetings, live Zooms our school started three weeks into quarantine. Hazel is upstairs in her room, on her laptop like a teenager instead of the sweet, 4-foot-6, fifth-grader she is. Shunning his new little makeshift desk in the kitchen, Oren settles into the beanbag, iPad in his lap. This is the 32-minute highlight of my day, and — I think — my kids’ too. They get to hear their teacher and see other kids and share their feelings about what they’re feeling. (“I miss my friends,” is a collective refrain.) I drink coffee and turn on my laptop: headlines, emails, Twitter threads, Instagram. This time is finite and I should not waste it, but I can’t help it: I do.

9:24 a.m.: “Why couldn’t the toilet paper cross the road?” Oren asks his classmates over Zoom. “Because it got stuck in a crack.”

9:30 a.m.: Hazel consults her schedule and keeps to it. Rarely online before homeschool, she now Gchats all day with friends. She also does whatever her teachers ask of her. I don’t even know what that is. I pretend she doesn’t need me.

9:33 a.m.: Oren logs off Zoom with good intentions. He will do all his work, he says. He just doesn’t know what he wants to do first. He wants to make his own schedule, he says, snubbing mine. I wish he would do reading first: 30 minutes of solo reading a real book every day. If only he’d do morning meeting straight into solo reading — that would give me a full uninterrupted hour. How about math? I ask. No, he wants to wait for Dad for math. I don’t blame him. Dad is working downstairs in the cold, dark, windowless basement. Uninterrupted. I’m envious.

Oren and I settle on social studies. He is studying changemakers, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We watch an animated RBG on the iPad. Oren liked watching RBG on “SNL” better. “Does she really lift AA batteries for weights?” he asks. My work is not done.

9:58 a.m.: Ah, Hazel does need me. She lugs her laptop downstairs to the dining room and sets it up an inch from mine. “The Armchair Historian” and its nine-minute segment on the British colonization of India is not making sense. The guy in a blazer and button-down is using big words. “What does subjugate mean?” she asks.

9:59 a.m.: “You said you’d read the Newsela article with me!” Oren wails, referring to the distance-learning education company that rewrites news articles for young students. He climbs into my lap, almost knocking over my third cup of coffee onto both laptops. “Let’s watch Hazel’s ‘Armchair Historian’ first,” I say. He doesn’t want to, of course. I don’t either.

10:04 a.m.: The Newsela article profiles a local changemaker — a woman who plays cello on her front porch during the pandemic. “Why did the woman play the cello?” asks a multiple-choice question at the end. “C,” Oren says. “To help people feel less lonely.”

10:09 a.m.: Writing. Biographies. Pick a family member to interview, the purple slide instructs. Oren picks me. I have a better idea. “Let’s call Grampy in Florida!” I prop up my phone at Oren’s little desk and let my father’s big face fill time and space. “Where were you born?” I overhear Oren asking as I leave the room. My heart warms. Grandfather and grandson connecting across the country and generations during quarantine. “Brookline, Massachusetts,” replies my dad. “How do you spell Brookline?” B-R-O-O … my dad spells as Oren writes each letter with care, and cross-outs. “How do you spell Massachusetts?” he asks. “M- A-… just abbreviate it,” my dad says, already over his celebrity interview.

10: 21 a.m.: “I’m hungry,” Oren declares for the third time since breakfast. He helps himself to another mini-bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, which my husband bought in bulk, because when he thinks school snacks, he thinks 1987.

10:50 a.m.: Live Zoom PE with the PE teacher! We love the PE teacher. “How’re you guys doing?” she asks the kids. “Good,” Oren says, sprawled in his beanbag and sounding like he’s stoned. For exercise, he flips through the anamoji options on the iPad.

11:01 a.m.: Raz-Kids. Oren likes Raz-Kids. A woman’s voice reads “A Job for James.” He listens, looks at the illustrations, and “turns” the pages, sort of like a real book. I turn to my laptop.

11:08 a.m.: The woman’s voice has gone quiet. I suspect foul play, as in: Oren surreptitiously switching from Raz-Kids to Pixel Gun 3D. Because I have a deadline, I pretend he’s still e-reading.

11:32 a.m.: “Oren, what’re you doing?” I call from the next room. “Raz-Kids!” he lies. I let him.

Noon: Lunchtime. Leftover pesto pasta and Hazel’s hand-rolled bean-and-cheese burritos. She’s got serious burrito-rolling skills. I decide she will be OK. Josh emerges from the basement. Everyone eats. I do the dishes.

12:18 p.m.: Josh and Oren descend to the basement. It’s MATH TIME. They do math! Hazel and I go for a walk up and down the street. The same street we’ve been walking up and down every day, sometimes three times a day, for the past six weeks. At least I love this street.

12:40 p.m.: Josh has a work call. Oren reappears. We do math. 7 x 8 = 56. It’s all coming back to me.

1 p.m.: It’s only 1 p.m.?

1:02 p.m.: Hazel sequesters herself in her room to draw the digestive system. She will work on this for the next few hours — while on Google Hangouts asking friends for advice on how to convince her mother to get a dog — until every part, from esophagus to anus (her word), is sketched and labeled and every last bit of large intestine is colored pink. Oren will work on nothing.

1:04 p.m.: Well, technically he is practicing his stealth ninja skills as he makes several attempts to sneak into the dining room, slip quietly under the table and reach his hand up to steal my phone. I urge him to practice ukulele instead. He plays “You Are My Sunshine” once then throws his uke like Eddie Van Halen and storms the pantry for his fourth mini-bag of Doritos, which he stuffs in his sweatpants so I don’t see. Except I do.

1:10 p.m.: I spy two bruised bananas on the counter. Activity opportunity: banana bread! Oren mashes. I mix. We pour the batter into a pan. He licks the spatula clean. It’s a cute, quality 18 minutes.

1:42 p.m.: Oren challenges his friend Zagnut42 to a game of online chess. He loses, too quickly. Rematch? Zagnut42 disappears.

2 p.m.: Desperate measures mean: It’s documentary film hour. “Can we watch ‘Marvel’?” Oren asks. No, I say, this is homeschool. He cries and whines and says then he will watch nothing. So, watch nothing, I reply. Read instead. He agrees to a matinee. “March of the Penguins”! I proclaim. (I love “March of the Penguins.”) “Pumping Iron!” Oren counters. (“Pumping Iron”?) We watch the 1977 trailer starring a young, bronzed, bulging Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He used to be the governor of California,” I say. Oren is confused. “March of the Penguins” it is. The penguins are so not social-distancing.

3:51 p.m.: It’s cold and gray and drizzling. Whatever. I’ve got to get him outside. We’re going for a run, I inform him. Yes, I know I already did.

4:12 p.m.: Oren finally puts on his sneakers. We head down the street, the street I love, and over the grassy knoll and down the creaky wooden steps. It’s wet and slick. “Don’t touch the railing!” I yell. Oren touches the railing. We hang a left and wind up and up, flanked by the lush electric-green hillside, as we walk-run through the middle of the double-yellow-lined road, toward a Twin Peaks devoid of cars and tourists. I hope, post-corona, neither come back. Oren pulls ahead. I watch his ever-longer hair flop in the mist as he plods along the pavement. I decide: He’ll be OK. We all will.