A sneak peek at the athlete-turned-author Nicholas Triolo’s forthcoming book
On the morning of Tuesday, June 27, the Milkweed Editions team hosted a special guest in our office in Minneapolis. The guest in question was none other than Nicholas Triolo, a prolific mountain and trail athlete by day, and an esteemed writer and editor by night. He’s the current Senior Editor at Outside Run & Trail Runner Magazine, and the former Digital Strategist for Orion Magazine—so suffice to say, he’s encountered his fair share of exceptional stories. But the creative athlete didn’t visit to boast about previous work experiences: he came to share an exceptional story of his own. It is the story of his book in progress, a memoir called The Way Around, which is scheduled for publication with Milkweed in the Fall of 2025.
On his forthcoming memoir, Triolo had this to say about the pulse that drives it forward: “I’ve been confronting questions about the intimacy of landscape…What does it mean to move through landscape, and what happens when we interrogate the shapes and routes we take?” A fraction of his answer is “long, psychedelic journeys afoot:” a practice so deeply embodied it becomes a spiritual connection to land. But his experience as a runner, and his relationship to the ground beneath his feet has been infinitely complicated by the dissonance he experienced after being thrust into the world of competitive athleticism, where routes were predictably linear, and progress was measured by reductionist acronyms and fastest run times. That dissonance was the fuel he needed to reframe his mindset, challenging himself to seek circuitous routes, to investigate the stories of runners and walkers who traveled not to reach a summit, but to reach some satisfaction deep within themselves, and to embark on a decade-long journey quite literally around the world, charting new circular routes in every place he touched down.
Triolo’s story is certainly about a runner and his journey, but it is also a story about land and landscapes, and the practices some cultures have employed for generations to engage with land spiritually. It’s a story of the community we find in isolation, the clarity we encounter through ritual, and not least of all, it is a story on learning how to center our interactions with ourselves, others, and the ground that keeps us tethered to earth around compassion rather than competition. We are so thrilled to be the publisher of this singularly thought-provoking memoir, and we can’t wait to share more about it with our community. In the meantime, you can keep up with all the latest on Nicholas over at his incredible website, and you can find out what he’s currently reading over at his Bookstagram review account, @mandorla_200.