Of course this wedding day must start with a run. We take a casual loop around Northeast, past the wedding venue and around a lizard sculpture, past Ecuadoran laborers at a bus stop and Somali men in thobes, down gentrifying streets and past industrial back corners with piles of gravel behind fences, the sun drying out a damp fall morning in this city that brought us together. The groomsmen and some fellow travelers gather in a boarding house of an Airbnb just off Lowry, and the group journeys toward formal dress in halting stages. In one corner there is heated debate on development design standards and in another an acoustic guitarist warms up; a romcom from our teenage years rolls on the TV, and we hydrate en masse ahead of the night’s scheduled debauchery. Honorary Hamm’s are cracked open and first toasts made; the Portland boys cannot tie ties. Our early strides are all in form.

Work and last second forgotten items intrude on my scheduled pre-ceremony Zen, but I know these runs well enough to adjust my pace accordingly. I take a lap around the neighborhood with friends I have not seen in years, gather a circle of the old guard, high-energy free spirits and intellectual heavyweights alike. Naturally an urban planner marries in a site of urban renewal, golden fall light pouring in through the spacious windows of a repurposed industrial space, a collision of Episcopalians and Latter-Day Saints and areligious philosophers of various stripes, brought together just as Northeast amasses something of everything Minneapolis has to offer. We eat, we drink, we party. We release the bride and groom back to their hotel and retreat to our house. Sometime around one some pizzas arrive and someone has put dish detergent in the dishwasher and I am sipping Liquid IV out of a martini glass, brotherly ties forming with kids I’ve only known for two weekends, each of us drifting off into a contented sleep at our own pounding rhythm.

Between now and May five good friends will pair off, a run that feels more significant than most in this matrimonial season of life. Their number includes my most frequent grad school correspondent, three of the four people I have ever called a roommate for any length of time, and my lead co-conspirator in the hockey world. These ones feel weightier than weddings past, a signal of some new brave new era, and there will be time to see what it all means. Minneapolis is a fitting place for this wedding sprint to start because it is here, ten years ago, that a cousin’s wedding on Nicollet Island gave me the platonic ideal of what one should look like, a weekend that in some ways set in motion my own move to Minneapolis to orient my life a year later. During that ceremony I had a moment of unseen panic, a crushing fear that I might never have a day like this. That day is not here yet but the paralysis is gone, the tools that killed it in 2013 the same ones I use to seize this moment. I dive in.

First up in this wedding relay is Kory, the college runner who, predictably, leads the pack. I could tell from a simple reading of a profile in a grad school mentorship program that this explosion of energy with a powerful sense of self would pair well with me. Our story has been burnished by serendipitous ties: he went to college in Oregon with the son of my parents’ best friends, and some members of the wedding party know this mutual acquaintance well; his wife’s parents live a block from my aunt and uncle in Irving Park, Chicago. He endured me as a mean TA in his first year of grad school, drank in bits of the Minnesota hockey gospel, and has even been receptive to my crusade to impose nuance and ambiguity upon his politics. Pre-Madeleine he spent nights on the couch in my Minneapolis apartment’s living room, plaintive after missed connections, our own bond growing as we hiked together, schemed career moves together, and took in marathon weekends together.

And then along came Madeleine, a fellow runner who also barrels straight into the breach, from Boston Marathons to her work in emergency rooms. They share a wavelength, an unrelenting pursuit, and yet Madeleine Era Kory is more able to modulate, settle into a chill ease that previously came only among us boys. The restless flame has not been quenched but instead channeled, paced into some version of the cycle through life that has always been my own aspiration. The grad school era sidekick has shown his sage old mentor how it’s done.

Before the ceremony, a few of us have been assigned a duty: make this dance floor rival that of any wedding I’ve ever attended. Mission accepted. The Vikings’ DJ dials up a long night of music. Cardboard cutouts of Kory and Madeleine’s cats bob about, and the mother of the bride tears it up to the end. I am at home here, able to unleash pure, unrestrained exuberance, bringing it with all I’ve got and one with the pulsing mass. My body may not have the stamina it had ten years ago but after any setback I can rally, and that is all that matters. I am, like the friend I celebrate on this night, built for marathons like this, here for runs both literal and metaphorical, ready to grind my way through whatever comes next.