Pace Setter : April 2026

Etched in Mud: Running & Making

Etched in Mud: Running & Making by Michelle Merlis

Snowy, windy, cold. Another typical winter training run in the Berkshires. One of those days without much of a running agenda other than some easy miles. The kind where I find the mind easily slips in and out of focus, thoughts bouncing around like they’re in a ticket tumbler, a few lucky winners plucked from time to time to occupy some space as your feet carry you forward step by step. Bolted from the inner walls of my mind, something catches my eye. I double back a few strides. Oddly enough, it’s the corner of an otherwise unremarkable guardrail. It’s not even exactly clear to me why there is a guardrail here; probably some measure of compliance with the local conservation committee (a rather common occurrence where we live). Snow fills the pockets of air that would otherwise occupy the space between the guardrail and the ground (it has been a long, snowy winter) and the guardrail looks like it has taken its fair share of hits, probably from snowplows that weren’t even aware of its existence.

[“The” guardrail.]

I don’t know if all guardrails look this way. I haven’t thought to check since and certainly never paid attention in the past. But the curved end is home to a softer grey that reveals etching and cracking that look less like material damage and more like something geological. I’m lured in. Time, at least my running time, is on pause.

A few months prior to this run, I started taking ceramics classes at the Berkshire Art Center (BAC). The class offerings are wide and diverse but I landed on slab making classes (i.e. making things out of clay slabs as opposed to “throwing” them on the “wheel”). I had actually tried to get into a class earlier in the year, but it had filled before I could register. Overall, the decision to even sign up for an art class was born out of the summer of uncertainty. With so much of what I’d come to know as my present day life (a life revolved around running, lots of running) having unravelled with Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, and Anaplasmosis, I was forced to ponder a future that was vastly different. If I wasn’t a runner, who, or what, was I?

 

Like anyone who was born in the ‘80s, no visit to my parents’ house (or theirs to mine) is now complete without a handoff of “things from when you were growing up”. Their desire to declutter intersecting with their lack of desire to throw away anything sentimental or potentially harboring emotional, and very rarely, financial value, compounded with the fact that as young adults, we often just move out leaving the space we once occupied frozen in time with the relics and memories of our youth, usually means I’m transporting a box of CDs, books, photographs, or clothes from their space to my now very modern and extremely minimalist space (no, this does not stress me out at all, thank you for asking - just kidding, it definitely does). Piece by piece, articles of my past come to occupy my present.

 

If we were sorting my past into buckets, the biggest one would be for items related to basketball. In fact, it probably would need to be a full sized shipping container instead of a bucket given the enormity of the game in my life. But another category that comes up time and time again, is art. My parents’ house is littered (decorated?) with art my brother and I created over the years. Honestly, I can’t believe some of it is even mine because I’m certain I wouldn’t be able to replicate some of these paintings and drawings today. Whenever the topic comes up, my parents will usually add, “you were ALWAYS drawing”.  

 

It seems there is something about getting older, watching your parents get older, watching your siblings have kids, and living through chronic illness that makes you spend more time reflecting and reaching for parts of who you once were. Surely when I was growing up, I didn’t dream about spending most of my waking hours at a desk, staring at a computer screen, writing emails and organizing information in a host of Microsoft business tools. (Edit: Okay, apparently by the time I was in second grade, I did dream of some version of this, somehow convincing my parents to let me use whatever money I’d been bestowed up to that point on an oak roll top executive desk. Psst, Mom, these actually look like they’re worth some money now! But you get the point, at some point, before this point, there was a little girl whose world view revolved around nature and art and kick-ass Polish food.)

 

Throughout high school and college the creative part of my brain was satisfied largely by photography. I bought a DSLR camera and revived my grandparents black-and-white film Nikon. I traveled to Egypt, Greece, Brazil, and South Africa with the digital camera as an appendage and meandered the streets and cafes of Chemung and Tompkins Counties with my film camera, spending hours in my college’s dark room developing whatever seemed to show promise. But as I moved on to graduate school, and then a career, and then more graduate school, parts of my world, and my identity, became smaller. It seems now, on reflection, that the part that became the smallest was creativity. Surely it was expressed in other ways, but really how creative can you actually be writing a 100+ page thesis about the economics of cover crops?

[A developed black & white film photo of a friend who was making ceramics.]

 

I have, of course, also always considered my athletics a form of creative expression, and I’ve been doing something active virtually non-stop since I could walk. First, there was dance - the choreography, the costumes, and the storytelling through movement. Then, there was basketball - the ballhandling, rhythm, and swag inspired by the AND1 Mixtapes and Nike Freestyle Commercials, the art of a play perfectly drawn and executed, the step, the pump fake, the release, the follow-through, the swish of the ball in the net. And, now, there is the running - a perfect blend of science and art - the design and execution of a training plan, composing beautiful routes, the art of learning and following your lines, dancing through the rocks, roots, and trees, bringing all of the pieces together into a performance coordinated by your legs, your lungs, your heart, and your mind.

 

In the fall of 2025, I found myself starting to run and train a little bit again, and at the beginning of my pottery journey. Despite having reached what felt like a certain level of mastery with running, I felt like a beginner all over again. And, of course, I was a true beginner with ceramics, but for the first time in a long time, I was feeling like I was accomplishing something.

[A photo of handmade clay pots in a village in South Africa.]

 

There is something magical about being a beginner again. Sure, it’s frustrating and you make wild mistakes (case in point, I broke the first piece I ever made after dropping a glass jar of liquid wax on it… yes, that jar broke too and the liquid wax went everywhere), but you’re also rapidly learning and you haven’t yet created rules or narrowed your focus. You’re actively exploring and answering what calls to you because it’s what you are genuinely interested in, not because it’s what someone else thinks or says you should be interested in. I’m now in my third course, and at a minimum, for 3 hours every Wednesday, I get to do something with my hands. I get to walk through the doors of BAC, like entering a sci-fi reality portal, and travel to the ceramics studio in the basement where a handful of people who largely know nothing about me gather to make art.

Aside from the wonderful people I’ve met in the class, the instructor, and those in open studio (a time you go and use the studio on your own outside of class to work on your projects), and the reconnection to this long lost part of my identity, there is also been a synergy with my running.

While I’m out running I find myself observing more. I’m looking at the colors and the textures differently. I notice the shapes of rocks and trees and the curves of ridgelines that I whizzed by before. I’m constantly searching for organic inspiration. How can I embody the desert elements in a piece of ceramics? How can I mimic the contrast of the snow on the deep green pine trees with a glaze? Why am I drawn to this obscure and unremarkable guardrail and how can I mimic its features on a piece of clay? (I’m still actually trying to figure out the answer to this exact question.)

At the same time that running has been inspiring my work in the studio, I’ve also been finding that spending time with my clay or in the studio often clears my head and makes me feel more expansive. It has reminded me to revisit the basics and practice them often. To keep things simple. To experiment and take chances. To not be afraid of failure. Because of all of this, some of my most enjoyable runs this winter were after morning sessions at BAC. As it turns out, a little bit of art can go a long way – literally and figuratively.

[One of my projects this year was to make custom lamps for the Electric City 10K winners.]