Strides Between Us

by Marc Cianfarani

She kept cards in a drawer.
One every year.
Father's Day.
His name on the front.
No address on the back.

Jake Clark had two things that mattered: the ability to run and a daughter who believed he would come back. He lost track of both.

A walk-on found his way onto a college track team through sheer will, Jake built
something real. A rivalry worth watching, a family worth fighting for, a future that almost held. Then one wrong step ended his career, and the man who didn't know how to be anything other than a runner slowly disappeared from everyone else too.

What follows isn't a comeback. It's a collapse.

Strides Between Us follows Jake from college tracks to city streets, through the years nobody writes about, and back to a starting line he had no right to stand at. It is a novel about fatherhood and failure, about the people who wait and the people who vanish, and about what it costs to disappear and what it takes to face the one you left behind.

Because somewhere, every year, a card was written.

And never sent.

246 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 18, 2026

About the author

Marc Cianfarani is a Canadian writer whose work blends emotional depth, quiet resilience, and a deep curiosity about the lives we carry beneath the surface. For more than thirty years, Marc worked as an advocate reviewing medical evidence and supporting individuals through some of the most difficult chapters of their lives. Those decades of listening to stories of loss, hope, and second chances shaped both his worldview and his writing.

His debut novel, Strides Between Us, grew from a simple image that stayed with him: a man standing alone with a pair of running shoes, caught between who he was and who he might become again. As Marc wrote the book, he found himself immersed in Jake’s journey, often experiencing the emotional beats as if he were living them alongside his character. That process, exhausting at times, exhilarating at others formed the heart of the story: the quiet, human moments where identity is rebuilt one small choice at a time.

Marc is deeply interested in the psychology of resilience, the way memory shapes who we become, and the unspoken burdens many people carry without recognition. His writing aims to give voice to those experiences and to remind readers that any of us can find ourselves standing at a crossroads, one misfortune away from becoming the “Jake” in our own lives.

When he’s not writing, Marc can often be found on the trails around Toronto, reflecting, reading, or walking with his whippet, Dolce who inspired one of the novel’s most beloved scenes.

Strides Between Us is his first novel.