When something in your life keeps hurting, there are two lessons available. One is to get tougher. The other is to walk away. Jon Vroman recorded this one alone, on a walking trail near his house, no studio, no guest, no script, thinking out loud about a question most men only ever get coached on half of. You’ll hear the wind and the gravel under his feet. That’s the point. This is the first episode of a new series called Walk With Jon: unfiltered, unedited, one continuous take.

The nut kicking line

Jon’s metaphor for it: picture standing in a line where you keep getting kicked, and a coach beside you saying the lesson is resilience. Toughen up. Build grit. Focus your attention somewhere else. Sometimes that’s exactly right. But almost nobody coaches the second lesson, which is that you’re allowed to step out of the line. Learning to let go, to say no, to move on, is also a lesson, and it’s the one most men never get permission to learn.

Two ultramarathons, and the one that hurt him

Jon works the idea through his own body first. A 52-mile walk-run in 2006, doing it again in 2007, and an anniversary run ten years later that he says genuinely hurt him. Grit got him through the first two. It’s not obvious it should have gotten him through the third. He brings in David Goggins and Ben Greenfield, who traded hard training for long walks, as two different answers to the same question: does this event serve your body, or only your mindset?

Where this actually shows up

The line isn’t just about endurance sports. Jon runs it through marriages, business partners, employees, and kids of divorce who say, as adults, that they wish their parents had separated sooner. Both paths, staying and grinding it out, or walking away, produce beautiful stories. Both produce regrets. As he puts it:

“All of it’s true.”

The question isn’t which path is universally right. It’s what you’d hear if you got quiet and honest enough to actually ask yourself.

How to actually tell the difference

Jon leans on a method a friend introduced him to through the Hoffman Institute: ask your emotional body, your mind, your heart, and your spirit the question separately, then integrate the answers instead of trusting whichever one shouts loudest. He measures the answer against four core values he keeps coming back to: truth, love, respect, responsibility. His other rule: there are no bad decisions, only decisions, and even the hard ones come with blessings attached. It’s okay to not be okay, and even indecision is a decision.

This is the first Walk With Jon. He’s asking for two things: send feedback, and tell him what you’d want him to think through out loud next, since he processes verbally and this helps him as much as it helps you. Listen to the full walk on the podcast, where Jon also talks about Front Row Dads turning 10 and heading back to Philadelphia, where it started in 2016.