The streak

Run №5
8:19am

During the last mile, you hate the entire world: the cold wind blowing in your face; the music in your headphones; your shorter leg which has been hurting from Minute One; your longer leg which just decided to join; the other runners passing you by; the Starbucks stores with their comfy couches and hot skinny vanilla lattes, surrounding you like Greek Sirens after a horrible cloning accident.

Atypically, you only dream of one superpower right now — being able to fast forward time. Just ten minutes. Alas, so far you possess its less lucrative opposite: a subpower of slowing the world down by staring at the iPhone, awkwardly mounted on your left arm.

“Perhaps you should look at the road instead,” says a voice inside your head.

“I hate you,” you say back.

Run №1
8:37am

You pass an aircraft carrier on your left, then a vintage locomotive on your right. The carrier, turned museum, you knew about before. The existence of the locomotive is a surprise. The second surprise is how it makes your day. Its smell (who smells locomotives?) reminds you of summer trips you took to Cracow when you were little.

That seems far away and long ago. Today is a misty autumn Tuesday morning, year 2010, in lower Manhattan. You start your run at the Meatpacking District, following your friend’s suggestion to go north alongside Hudson River.

It turns out to be a pretty good suggestion. Half a mile after the locomotive, you run past a huge, dilapidated dock bridge, of the type they used to transfer railroad cars to barges. Quite a display of obsolete technology—except, that is, for George Washington Bridge. You’ve been promised the bridge, and you can almost sense it being somewhere on the horizon, but you never see it. It’s too foggy. You run four miles north, then you head back.

Run №3
10:45am

Usually, the first three miles are the worst. You’re still warming up. Your legs, temporarily made out of lead, still suffer after the previous run. You want to quit after every single step, especially as each will cost you a second one later, when you run back. “My brain knows that,” you realize, “but how do my legs?”

It’s asinine thoughts like that that keep you distracted from constantly counting miles or checking the time. Also, designing interfaces in your head. Also, having conversations with people you won’t ever talk to again. Also, imagining yourself at the horizon, a mile or two ahead. But that one gets weird after a while. Actually, it’s weird from the very second you start doing it.

Fortunately, it gets better. Your legs, your lungs, the road, the air, suddenly all stop resisting you. The playlist in your headphones anticipates that, switching from taiko drums to that stalwart be-the-best-underdog-you-can-be training montage from Rocky IV. On repeat.

The sunny Chicago — you switched cities in the two days since — seems to understand your cinematic predilections very well, and ups the ante. A huge flock of birds suddenly emerges from behind you, and soon enough covers your entire sky; the birds fly somewhere carelessly, making fun of your measly 9'30" per mile and the pact you signed with gravity. Who cares. Something happens to you and you only realize seconds later: you are gasping in awe.

Some of the runs are beautiful this way. Just earlier this year: One alongside Sihl in Zürich, with passing trains flaunting their Swiss-designed livery and their Swiss-designed regularity. Running towards Golden Gate Bridge during sunset, and then watching the city’s skyline falling asleep. Unusually foggy San Francisco Bay one Mountain View morning.

Perhaps you run for moments just like this, when both the surroundings and you yourself care enough to give your best, when the very idea of a mile becomes malleable, when you’re enjoying that feeling that right here, right now, you could run forever.

Run №2
6:28am

You never know whether it’ll happen, though, at the beginning of a run. Every time you negotiate with yourself. You’re not very good at it yet, but you try to anticipate how you’d feel, and come up with a goal that won’t feel embarrassing when finished verbatim, but will still leave enough room to push yourself a bit more.

Normally, you aim for one or two times a week, alternating longer runs with shorter ones. But today, you have a crazy idea. “I ran eight miles two days ago,” you think. “What if I try the same distance today?”

It seems like a big deal. You’re not a good runner, you never ran more than 15 miles in a week, and your record is 12 miles — not even half a marathon. And you still remember how dearly that cost you. “I’m in the best shape of my life,” you repeat to everyone who cares to listen, and to some people who don’t, “except that tells you more about my life than about my shape.”

But the idea is crazy enough that it could actually work. And you don’t even notice when that crazy idea turns into an even more insane upgrade of making a habit out of it — running eight miles every other day for as long as… As long as what? Not sure. The idea ends right here. Most of them are like that.

Run №4
7:01am

“Who the hell invented 7am?” you mutter, still half asleep. “There should be a demilitarized zone on a clock face between 2am and 9am.” Sometimes the most demanding part of a morning run is 25 feet from your bed to your bathroom.

Run №5
7:05am

When you were young, you dismissed any sort of weather prediction as a waste of time. You thought one should be able to handle any outdoor conditions without much in terms of preparation. Just go outside and deal with whatever you find out there.

“I guess I am getting older,” you think, putting on a cap bought the prior evening in anticipation of today’s run. Since the previous eight miles, Chicago signed up for a rapid temperature loss program, dropping 30 degrees and flirting dangerously with freezing. (Just the day before, you spent an agonizing hour waiting for the sun to set, trying to capture that perfect Chicago skyline photo; you have not felt this cold in ages.)

You contemplate putting on a second jacket, but decide against it. That turns out to be a rare good decision; within the first quarter of a mile, you’re warm again. It beats running in New York’s Central Park in the hot summer of 2010, or Las Vegas any time of any year; you enjoy how the crisp air makes you feel alive. You don’t know how soon this very thought will come back as a regret.

Run №2
7:05am

The skies are much nicer today. You run the same route; enter the lovely little Riverside Park; finally see the bridge in the distance. In your head, you’re already tapping that little smiley face icon in the Nike+ application. Then comes the stomachache.

It starts innocuously enough, but every step makes it worse. Your face turns into a grimace (your dentist and your personal trainer both make fun of your facial expressions) and you start slowing down. But you don’t stop. It might be that the only thing that keeps you going is the realization that running with a stomachache will get you to the hotel faster than walking there. You forgot to take a credit card or cash or a metro pass with you.

So you run, wringing with pain. “My body wasn’t meant to do that,” you complain. “My body was built to slouch in front of my notebook and do stupid CSS experiments.” The irony in that statement is lost on you. Actually, all of the irony you had got lost somewhere at the three-mile mark. Even the sight of the beloved High Line at the end of the run leaves you cold.

Run №4
7:50am

This time you go north on Chicago’s scenic, beautiful, summery Lakefront Trail. You take mental notes of good places to return to with your camera. At one point, you end up on a little angled pier next to an old, small light tower, surrounded by water, and you suddenly understand the allure of a triathlon — being able to one-up your run and just jump in.

Perhaps you jinxed it right there and then, because the spectacle begins not long after that moment. Light rain, followed by heavy rain, followed by thunder and lightning. You never used the expression “biblical proportions” before; this seems like biblical proportions out of a large-print Bible.

You try to dodge waves — natural ones coming from the shore, artificial ones created by trucks and buses driving on the other side — but soon you give up. You’re already drenched in water anyway. For a mile or two, you’re a bit worried about lightning. Can one hit you when you’re so far away from anything and anyone else? It’s hard to know. So much misinformation out there. Like those car fuel tanks that only blow up in Hollywood movies, but apparently never in real life.

You endure, somehow. The whole scene does seem like Hollywood in that it looks more dramatic than it actually is. It surprises you how great it feels in the end — five rainy miles culminating in a realization that you might have never been more wet before. Close to the end of the run, you take a wrong turn and get lost. Trying to find your way back to the corporate apartment, you notice passers-by checking you out — either because you are soaking wet, or perhaps because you’re smiling like crazy. You just ran 32 miles in seven days.

Run №5
7:52am

“That wasn’t so bad,” you think as you turn around, right after passing the four-mile mark. You instantly understand why. A cold wave stops you in your tracks like nature’s own captcha page and you realize this time around it’s the second half that will be the more painful one. (You don’t know it yet, but the GPS data will later show your speed dropping by some 30% at that very moment.) The skyscrapers that just surrounded you, now tiny and far away on the horizon, add an insult to the injury.

During the last mile, you hate the entire world: the cold wind blowing in your face; the music in your headphones; your shorter leg which has been hurting from Minute One; your longer leg which just decided to join; the other runners passing you by; the Starbucks stores with their comfy couches and hot skinny vanilla lattes, surrounding you like Greek Sirens after a horrible cloning accident.

What keeps you going today is not your brain’s accelerated chemistry. Nor a promise you made to yourself or anyone else. Nor a rationalization that running is good for you. Nor the beauty of nature. Nor fear of being late for a work meeting. Today you’re carried by a simple, irrational belief in a power of a round number. “It would be nice to do five runs. It would be nice to complete 40 miles,” you keep repeating to yourself. For better or worse, it’s easy for an arbitrary goal to become just a goal. “Just finish that last mile out of forty, and we’ll be done.” And so you do. Five runs. Forty miles. More often and farther than ever before.

Forty-six hours later, you curse the alarm clock waking you up at 7am, drag yourself out of bed, and outside into the cold. You ask yourself “when did it start snowing?”, only to realize later this exact quote was an inside joke in the pilot episode of ER, the very TV show that made you fall in love with the Windy City. You look at eight miles of road in front of you; at your battered sneakers; at the ridiculous leather Calvin Klein gloves betraying the extent of your naïveté about this whole endeavour. You say, out loud, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Then you start running.

Written in Chicago in November 2010.