Never Forget
A 9/11 Remembrance Run in the Gloom
Friday, September 11, 2026 — 25th Anniversary
AO: Mills E. Godwin High School, 2101 Pump Road
The Thang: Hilly 4.3-mile run
Conditions: Dark. 72 degrees. 97% humidity. The thermometer was a liar. The air had the texture of a wet wool blanket wrung out over Henrico County. Breathing felt like work before the first hill even showed up.
The Gloom
Before sunrise, eight men and two furry co-conspirators assembled in the Godwin lot. The theme was not fitness. The theme was memory. Twenty-five years to the day after nineteen men turned four airliners into weapons, we ran West End hills because forgetting is easy and remembering is work.
LuLu and Wally treated the whole thing as a social event with extra cardio and zero historical burden. Lucky them.
The Route — 4.3 Hilly Miles
Start and finish: Mills E. Godwin High School.
1. Old Prescott Road
2. Glen Eagles Drive
3. John Rolfe Parkway
4. Pump Road
5. Ridgefield Parkway
6. Raintree Drive
7. Falconbridge Drive
8. Pump Road back to Godwin
Nothing here is a mountain. Everything here is a reminder that gravity is undefeated. Legs paid the bill. Lungs co-signed.
What Happened on September 11, 2001
This is not a slogan. It is a record.
On a clear Tuesday morning, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial flights departing the East Coast for California. They chose long-haul jets because the tanks were full. Fuel is a weapon if you point it at a building.
No one survived any of the four aircraft.
The Toll That Day
Official count, excluding the 19 hijackers: 2,977 people murdered in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field. They came from more than 90 countries. They were two years old and eighty-five. About three-quarters of them were men. That last number is not a talking point. It is a hole in a lot of families.
• World Trade Center site: 2,753
• Pentagon: 184 (59 on the plane, 125 in the building)
• Flight 93, Shanksville: 40
• FDNY firefighters killed that morning: 343
• NYPD: 23. Port Authority Police: 37. Other responders bring the first-responder death total that day to roughly 441.
Thousands more were injured. Then the slow second massacre began: cancers, lung disease, and wrecked bodies among the men and women who worked the pile. In some departments, 9/11-related illness deaths have now matched or passed the number who died on the day itself. The buildings fell in two hours. The dying did not.
The Butterfly Effect
One evil morning did not stay one morning. That is the part we skip when the flags come out and the slogans get easy.
Nineteen men with box cutters and a death cult set a chain in motion that became the War in Afghanistan (October 2001), the Iraq War (March 2003), and a generation of campaigns across Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. Historians will argue forever about which wars were necessary, which were optional, and which were sold on bad intelligence. The dead do not join the argument.
Brown University’s Costs of War project — the most cited independent tally — puts direct deaths from post-9/11 war violence at roughly 900,000 to 940,000. Add indirect deaths from destroyed hospitals, famine, dirty water, and collapsed public health, and the estimate climbs to about 4.5 to 4.7 million people over more than two decades. About 38 million were displaced. The United States spent on the order of $8 trillion. Roughly 7,000 American service members were killed in those wars. Tens of thousands more came home with wounds you can see, and wounds you cannot.
That is the butterfly. A clear Tuesday in September. Four airplanes. Then years of funerals on several continents, some of them for people who had never heard of Lower Manhattan. History does not stay in the box you put it in. History can repeat itself. It can also mutate, travel, and come back wearing a different uniform.
None of that math makes the original 2,977 any less sacred. It does mean “Never Forget” is not a bumper sticker. It is an assignment: remember the dead, tell the truth about the day, and do not pretend the bill stopped when the towers stopped burning.
Count-O-Rama / Name-O-Rama
PAX: 8 men
Furry friends: LuLu and Wally
Total: 8 + 2
FNGs: none reported
Circle of Trust
We finished the way men are supposed to finish things that matter: standing still, saying names, and not rushing the silence. Prayer requests were taken. Announcements were made. The humidity did not break. The date did not change.
A short prayer is enough if it is honest. For the 2,977. For the first responders who ran in while everyone else ran out. For the passengers on Flight 93 who decided that if they were going to die they would at least choose the field. For the families still setting an extra plate in their heads. For the men and women sent to wars that grew out of that morning, and for the civilians who never voted for any of it. For this small circle of eight and two dogs who showed up in the dark when showing up was the whole point.
Moleskin
There is a cheap version of 9/11 remembrance and an expensive one. The cheap version is a flag emoji and a sentence that could fit on a coffee mug. The expensive version is standing in a dark parking lot at Godwin, lungs full of Virginia soup, and admitting that one act of concentrated evil reordered the century for people who were not even born when the towers fell.
We ran hills because hills are honest. They do not care about your mood, your politics, or your hashtags. Neither did that Tuesday. The men who flew those planes wanted spectacle and body count. They got both. What they did not get was the last word. The last word belongs to the firefighters going up the stairs, the passengers saying “Let’s roll,” the families who buried empty caskets, and whoever is still willing, twenty-five years later, to get out of bed in the dark and refuse to treat memory like optional equipment.
LuLu and Wally will forget this run by lunch. That is their job. Ours is the opposite.
Never forget 9/11.
History can repeat itself. Show up anyway.
Aye.
