I have been thinking about retirement since the day I started working.

My first job was teaching eighth grade science in Rocky Mount, Virginia. Physical science, earth and space science, the universe explained to fourteen-year-olds in a town where the mountains hold the weather in and the history runs longer than anyone talks about. Rocky Mount is also, depending on who you ask, the moonshine capital of the world. My starting salary was $21,600.

Retirement felt both impossibly far away and completely urgent. I had always been a saver. I understood something early that I have never stopped believing: the feeling of having is different from the rush of spending. I liked knowing the money was there. I made the sacrifice in those early years to protect the later ones.

For twenty-three years alongside my husband Randy, I built toward a number. He had a higher threshold. A big number, the kind that felt like certainty. We shared the mentality. The magnitude was his own.

When I found myself on my own, I looked at that number and I was at half of it.

I am still building. I am still planning. And I have never once stopped thinking about what the end of my life should look like. The finances and the fullness of it together.

What I know is this: I want to run a 5K in the last year of my life.

That sentence contains more retirement planning than any spreadsheet I have ever built.

Gallup asked Americans what they expected retirement to look like. Then they asked actual retirees what it actually looks like. The gap between those two answers is the number that stopped me.

48% of nonretirees expect their 401(k) or IRA to be their primary source of retirement income. 27% of retirees say it actually is.

What ends up carrying people is different from what they are building hardest toward.

62% of retirees say Social Security is a major income source. 36% of nonretirees expect it to be. What most plans treat as a footnote turns out to be the foundation.

82% of retirees say they have enough money to live comfortably. 45% of nonretirees believe they will. The people who are actually there are significantly more at ease than the people still building toward it.

I sat with that for a long time. The plan most people are executing and the plan retirees are actually living are two different things. There is a 37-point gap between what nonretirees anticipate and what retirees actually find. Something is getting built. And something else is waiting to be discovered.

I am building a different column. In addition to the financial one.

Because what Gallup found, and what my own story confirms, is that the assets with the most power to carry you through retirement are often the ones receiving the least attention.

The thing you treated as a footnote turns out to be the foundation.

The column I am building looks like this: health, community, a mind that stays active, and a body that can run.

I want to run a 5K in the last year of my life. That is a retirement plan. It means I have maintained the infrastructure: the sleep, the movement, the nutrition, the relationships, the mental engagement that allows a body to do something hard on purpose, by choice, at the end of a long life.

You build it the way savings are built: consistently, early, with the understanding that today's discipline is tomorrow's freedom.

The 401(k) is the fuel. The 5K is the oxygen. Feed both and the flame holds.

Open whatever you use to track your retirement plan.

Add a column. The one for health, for community, for mental engagement, for the daily practices that Gallup found actually determine whether retirees feel comfortable and alive.

Write it down. The practice, alongside the number. What are you doing right now that the 75-year-old version of you will be grateful for?

That is the retirement portfolio worth building first.

Stay curious. Stay in charge.

— Holly