Not-so-great runs

Yesterday in an online discussion group for streak runners, one of the participants, Judy Mick, posted a blog entry titled “Not All Runs Are Great Ones!”

It was good food for thought. As she pointed out, many of us runners rhapsodize publicly about our best runs, our most memorable runs, our most exciting runs, our most challenging runs. Each runner has certain days that stick in his or her memory. I can name a half-dozen or so of my most memorable runs without even stopping to think: the Rio Grande Trail in Aspen after my grandmother’s memorial service; a 5-miler down Connecticut Avenue in D.C. on a Sunday morning last April; a 5-mile road race my son and I did in Bath, Maine, in July of 2008.

But Judy Mick reminded us that we are less inclined to share the not-so-great days. The really awful ones we talk about, of course. The days we run with a fever or stomach virus, or in an ice storm or hurricane, or take a tumble or nearly get clipped by a passing car. I’ve talked or blogged about all of those.

It’s the just not-so-great days that get overlooked, but reminiscing about some of that kind of day reminded us runners of our single common attribute: we persist, no matter what. As streak-runners, we run day after day after day. Snow, rain, heat, gloom of night: like the postal carriers, we cope with all of those. (But unlike postal carriers, we don’t have Sundays off, and we’re not facing the possibility of a second day per week off in the next round of budget cuts either.) So inevitably, some days are not so great for no discernible reason.

And in truth, much of this summer has been like that for me. My long weekend runs, of anywhere from four to twelve miles, have been great, and the half-marathon I ran last month was pure delight. But every weekday morning I head out around 6:30 a.m. for a 2-miler, and those have been just okay this summer. I’ve felt tired and creaky most mornings, and often the bugs have been insistent and the humidity oppressive. Because I don’t bother to eat or caffeinate before my 2-mile runs the way I do for longer ones, I just don’t seem to have any spring in my step. And that’s another thing: I need new running shoes.

So Judy Mick is absolutely right: some days aren’t much fun. And that reality can make streak running all the more challenging; a couple of times this summer I’ve found myself thinking that if this was what running were always like, I wouldn’t bother to do it.

But most of the time I don’t think about it at all. Because that’s the perverse reality of streak-running: once you’ve committed to a daily run, 365 days a year, no questions asked, you stop thinking about whether or not you feel like going running.

And for me, that’s a good thing. Because some days, I don’t. But I don’t even notice that anymore, because I don’t ask myself. I just go. And that’s another day for the streak log. Someday, I’ll decide to stop. But for now, I’ll just put up with the not-so-great days. Or I’ll keep on ignoring them and focus instead on the great days. The memorable days. The days that make the not-so-great days not really matter all that much.

Snow and ice and a polar vortex: keeping up the streak

So far, 2014 has been a challenging year for maintaining a running streak.

 A storm on the second day of January brought over a foot of snow, making the footpath on which I normally run unusable since the town’s budget doesn’t cover clearing the footpaths. This left me with the option of running multiple random laps up and down our long common driveway, from one house to the next to the next and out to the road, sort of a starfish shape, each complete tracing of the starfish earning me about three-quarters of a mile. Which meant I needed to trace the course at least twice even to earn the minimum one-mile requirement that keeps a streak runner on the USRSA registry. And since one mile isn’t really much of a workout, if I want any of the other benefits of running aside from remaining qualified as a streak runner, I needed to do a little more than that. Three or four laps along the branches of the common driveway gets very, very tedious in very little time.

But before the snow had any chance of melting, the polar vortex descended. I had never run in sub-zero temperatures before, but I did last week. Not for very long at a time, though. On the handful of days that it was under ten degrees, I put on as many layers as I could wear while still remaining upright and did just a mile. I found that by wearing tights, pants, a t-shirt, a heavy sweatshirt, and then a lined hoodie belonging to my husband, with sleeves that ran a good four inches past my fingertips and a hem that ended almost at my knees, I was plenty warm enough, at least when the wind wasn’t blowing directly into my face. But all the apparel gave me the shape and mobility of the Abominable Snowman. A mile was all I could manage before the sheer weight of all the clothing exhausted me.

Finally at the end of last week, the sun shone and the chill abated a little bit. It was warmer by only a few degrees, but that was enough to start the melting process.

Which, of course, meant ice.

So I put on my YakTrax, which give me decent traction in the snow but, like the layers and layers of warm clothing, also adds a certain ponderousness to the run. Yak Trax aren’t heavy or clumsy, but just cumbersome enough to make the run tiresome.

And then on Friday I tired of the Yak Trax and convinced myself that the layer of powdery new snow would provide enough traction that the ice wouldn’t be a problem. I enjoyed a pleasant run that day. It wasn’t too cold and the powder did feel nice on my unfettered feet. Until the last ten yards or so of the route, when I hit an ice patch that was invisible under the new snow and fell flat on my back.

My first thought was typical of a streak runner: I was within a snowball’s throw of the two-mile finishing point, so I’d definitely cleared my necessary daily mile and the run still counted. My second thought was that nothing hurt too badly.

But it’s hard to fall flat on your back on the ice and not hurt at all. Soon I realized how sore my tailbone was, and I’d wrenched an arm while trying to catch myself as well.

So it was a tough week for running. But on Saturday, the temperature was well into the thirties by the time I was dressing for my run, and the ice was gone from the roadway. I ran a warm, comfortable, safe, easy ten miles, savoring every step all the more for all the weather-related travails of the preceding days.

“Doesn’t a mile on the treadmill still count toward the streak?” a friend asked on one of the coldest days last week.

Well, yes. According to the rules of the United States Running Streak Association, running on a treadmill is just fine. But I consider being outdoors for at least ten minutes part of the challenge along with completing the mile, I told her. I like having a streak of not only running every day but spending at least a small interval of time outside very day. No matter what the weather. In snow. On ice. During a polar vortex.

Still, this week is better. The air is milder; much of the snow has melted. We’re not even halfway through January; more winter weather will probably occur before the season ends. But days like the ones we had last week remind streakers that it’s almost always possible to get that mile in, one way or another. It gave me a chance to become ever more creative at dressing for the cold weather, and it reminded me of the value of Yak Trax.

The streak continues, and my tailbone has mostly recovered from the fall on the ice. I’ll be grateful for milder temperatures this week. Wind chill isn’t a particularly good feeling, and neither is a bruised tailbone. But persistence feels good, and I’m glad to have made it into another week of streak running.

Running Streak Anniversary #6

The fact that my running streak anniversary was coming up occurred to me only by chance last week. I walked into the office where I work part-time and two co-workers started laughing, confessing they had just been talking about me. “I was telling Halee about your streak running,” Jenn said. “Yes, and I’ve never heard of any such thing!” Halee exclaimed. “You’ve been doing this for how long?”

“I just passed my five-year anniversary," I said automatically, just as I’ve been saying for most of the past year. “Actually,” I continued, as I gave it a little bit more thought, “now that it’s August, I must be at almost six years. Oh wait, my streak anniversary is tomorrow. August 15.”

After completing my first couple of years of streak running, I came to think of it much the same way I think of my wedding anniversary: once you decide you're in it for the long haul, the actual number of years doesn't seem to matter that much. There's something almost binary about these anniversaries: whether marriage or streak running, either you're hanging in there with your commitment or you've decided not to -- a simple up or down vote -- and so it doesn't seem to make too much difference whether it's three years or five or ten.

That day, I posted my sentiments on the Facebook page devoted to streak running and discovered that other long-time runners feel the same way. "I recently celebrated my 10-year Streakiversary, and my 31st wedding anniversary is next month," responded another streak runner. "I must admit I notice my milestones of days (500 ... 1,000 ... 2,500 ... etc. ) for the Streak, but not for marriage  -- just years."

I thought about how strange it would be if we kept track of our marriages in days rather than years. And then I thought about how there’s really no equivalent in marriage to the daily posting of miles, no regular metric to distinguish one day from the next.

Ultimately, I recognize that the parallels only go so far. I'm of the belief that only death could end my marriage, and that’s not a possibility I especially want to contemplate; my running streak is precious but not nearly that sacred, and it really isn't so difficult for me to face the reality that something will eventually end my streak, likely something less drastic than death. Some kind of medical emergency, is what I usually assume, but it could be something as mundane as travel delays or another logistical snafu of some kind.

In any case, each of the two – the running streak and the marriage – are moving along through the years. The first just passed the six-year mark; almost without my noticing; the second hit 21 years last spring, and we took the kids out for a celebratory dinner, as we usually do. (Some of our friends think it’s funny that we take our kids out to dinner on our anniversary, but as I see it, they are the most tangible result of the marriage, so why not include them in the celebration?) I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for a streak anniversary: I suppose I could take my running shoes out to dinner, but the conversation would probably be less interesting than with the kids. (On the other hand, the shoes never argue about who gets to sit where on the ride home.)

It feels good to be past the six-year mark for streak running, but it doesn’t really change anything. The next day I went running again, just as the morning after my wedding anniversary, I woke up once again next to my husband. I’m happy to have both milestones, but neither one inspires a lot of quantifying on my part. Running and marriage: both require tenacity, both inspire joy. I’m in it for the long haul, whatever that might turn out to mean.

34 degrees and raining (a day in the life of a daily runner)

I have often remarked that the best thing about being a so-called streak runner, someone who logs a mile or more of running 365 days a year, is never having to spend time deciding whether or not it’s a good day to go running. I go every day; hence, I never have to choose whether to go.

And there are certainly times of year when that’s fortunate, because if I had to stop and think about it, I almost definitely wouldn’t get out the door.

This past week has been like that: the doldrums of winter, especially from a runner’s point of view. The three consecutive weekends of storms left over two feet of snow on the ground. In our town, the sidewalks don’t get plowed, which means running in the roadway with a three-foot snowbank to hurdle if you need to get out of the path of oncoming traffic. So I’ve been running on the long driveway at my parents’ farm, up and down, up and down; if I do three or four different variations on taking all the different forks in their driveway and then doing a loop around the parking lot of the ice cream stand next door, I can just barely eke out two miles. It’s safe from traffic, but the driveway has been slushy and icy all week; my feet get soaked and my clothes get muddy.

Up and down, up and down. Tedious, chilly and wet; yesterday it was raining as well, compelling me to trot out my favorite quote from Runner’s World founder Amby Burfoot: “There is no bad weather for running. Okay, maybe 34 degrees and raining.” It seems I’ve spent the majority of the past five winters running in 34 degrees and raining.

But this kind of weather is what makes a streak runner, in my opinion. Everyone gets out for a run on a nice spring day. Those of us who “streak” don’t wait for the right conditions – we just go. But to my mind, it’s not really a matter of fortitude as much as simplicity. Committing to running no matter what the weather means freeing up our minds to think about other things, and nothing frees up brain space quite like running perpetual laps up and down a half-mile-long driveway. I don’t need to think about the passing cars (there aren’t any) or the foliage (the trees are bare) or the houses along the way. I just…run, and let my mind fill with whatever it chooses. Anything except the cold damp weather or the icy slush filling my shoes. I try to think about the work I need to attack in the day ahead, or what I should make for dinner, or whether there are any errands I can get done in the afternoon, or how to respond to a complicated email.

The only thing I miss about the days before I became a daily runner was the feeling I’d get after taking the whole winter off from running, when the air was growing warmer and the snow was gone and I’d get a physical and mental craving to go running after not having gone for so many weeks. Now that I don’t take any time off, I never get that feeling, and I miss it. But instead, I get the peace of mind that comes from just plodding along with nothing much to think about. It’s a pretty good payoff, most days.

...And then what?

In Portland for the weekend, we embarked on a long harborside walk after lunch on Saturday: almost four miles, from Commercial Street onto the Eastern Promenade bike path all the way to the entrance to the Back Cove, and up the steep stone staircase onto Munjoy Hill, and from there past the old Victorian homes back into town.

It was brisk and refreshing and great for conversation and a really good workout besides, but when we arrived back in town, I noticed how much my foot hurt.

This had never happened before. I’ve been a runner since I was nineteen years old and I’ve never had a running injury, other than two days of back pain a few years ago that inexplicably arrived and left with no apparent reason.

I left my friends to their shopping and made my way to a gelato shop, where I sat down and had a cup of gelato and thought about my newfound injury. I was fairly sure it was the result of the long walk – though why this particular hour-long walk rather than any other, I didn’t know, since I do walks of this length nearly every weekend. And I was fairly sure that sharp foot pain after a long walk indicated a stress injury, and not one that was about to fix itself.

So for the first time in my four-and-a-half-year-long running streak – at 1,787 days – I contemplated the possibility that I might not be able to go running the next day.

This might be it, I thought to myself. The end of my daily running streak.

And then what?

It wasn’t something I’d thought much about – how it would feel to stop running. But that wasn’t even what I found myself thinking about. More complicated in my mind was what would happen when I eventually got better. Would I start another running streak? That’s what plenty of other runners on the U.S. Running Streak Association registry have done – ended a streak for any number of reasons and then begun another one eventually. When Ronald Kmiec, from whom I first learned about streak running, had a heart attack, he ended a 32-year streak, took five weeks off, and began another one. And what intrigued me about that was that he was in his 60s at the time. He had to know he didn’t have another 32-year streak ahead. But he started at Day One and began again anyway.

It’s hard to imagine what it would feel like to start counting consecutive running days all over again, from the single digits, into the double digits, past Day 100, up to one year, and so on. I’m not sure if I’d do it or not. On the one hand, ending the streak would be a way out of the compulsion of never taking a day off – a compulsion that is definitely not a deep-seated psychological issue for me but merely a mental and physical challenge. On the other hand, I’ve said so many times that being a streak runner means never waking up and having to decide whether it’s a good day for a run, and I sometimes feel like the worst part about not being committed to the streak would be having to decide when to go running.

But as I sat there with my gelato, I thought more about what it means to acknowledge that someday my running streak will end, and it’s a good idea to be able to project some kind of game plan for when that happens, or at least have some kind of idea of what it will feel like. “So you’ve stopped running,” I imagined telling myself. “And then what?”

It made me think about other things that could end. The lease on our house, which we love, lasts another sixteen months; being able to live there is something I’m grateful for daily, but at some point I need to focus more seriously on what comes next. I write for a regional section of the Globe, and my editor assigns me plenty of work, but my editor could be transferred and I might no longer be wanted there. And then what? What would it mean to my professional identity to no longer be a weekly Globe contributor? Right now my kids are young and need me daily, to do everything from make their breakfast to help them work out friendship issues, but they’ll eventually be at an age where they won’t necessarily want to share so much, and not long after that they might even move away from home. And then what?

To my surprise and relief, my foot felt a little bit better when I was done with the gelato; apparently just a half-hour of rest was enough to help. And when I woke up Sunday morning, I felt fine, without a trace of pain. I ran four miles.

So my streak is intact and I’m now up to Day 1,789. But someday, my last day of streak running will come, and unless it’s also the last day of my life, I’ll still have that question to answer. And then what?

With running, with the house, with the kids, with other family members. Live in the present, but have some kind of game plan for what comes next. Even if you’re on a streak – of running, of health, of parenting, of anything – that you’d rather not see end.

913 miles

I didn't know that finding out the sum total of the distance I’d run in 2011 was literally as easy as the touch of a button. But it was.

I knew the website I use to maintain my running log, www.LogYourRun.com, had a feature called “Week View”; I use it often to see how one week of running compares with the one that preceded it. But not until I opened my 2011 running log on New Year's Day did I glimpse a feature I’d never noticed before: not only does it have Week View, but Year View as well. I clicked on it and found a button that said “Total Distance.” And just like that, I had the results of the preceding 365 days of running in front of me: 913 miles.

It sounded like a lot to me at first, with its proximity to the lush round number of 1,000. It sounded like a worthy reflection of another 365 days of running: days 1,239 through 1,603 of my now more than four-year running streak. Then I divided by 365 and discovered it averaged out to only 2.5 miles a day. I would have guessed more, but the important thing to me was that I’d run all 365 days, ane when I thought about my usual pattern – two miles per day most weekdays; four to six miles per weekend day – that average made sense.

Then, just curious, I clicked on my 2010 running log and checked my yearly total. 926. Huh. Thirteen miles fewer for the year that just ended than the one that preceded it. I’m not sure where those thirteen miles went, but most likely they were buried in the snows of last winter. Once there’s so much snow that the town no longer clears the footpaths, running becomes a lot more dangerous and I tend to restrict my route to our common driveway. By running up and down it a couple of times, I can easily clear a mile, but it gets boring quickly, and I don’t often do much more than the minimum. Last winter was a long snowy one.

I suppose it’s natural to be a little bit disappointed that I lost 13 miles between 2010 and 2011, even though it’s not a specific goal of mine to increase mileage every year. And of course, well past the age of 40, I know it would be fair to give myself a little bit of a break, not necessarily expect more and faster (I don’t even bother to track speed of my running these days) from one year to the next. It’s not like I really expect my fitness level to increase every year, now that I’m undeniably in the midst of middle age.

The goal wasn’t to run farther or faster; it was just to keep running. In some respects, that doesn’t seem like a particularly impressive goal, either literally or symbolically: just keep maintaining the status quo? That’s enough for you? Really? On the other hand, the fact that I haven’t missed my daily mile in over 4 ½ years continues to amaze me, not for what it says about my fitness skills or even commitment level but rather about my good luck. Another 365 days without injury, illness, catastrophe or emergency. Truly a blessing of astounding dimensions.

My shortest run of the year was one mile, done on the morning of Tropical Storm Irene, when I was too afraid of falling branches to go farther than the end of our road and back. My longest distance was six miles, a couple of different Saturday mornings; and there were plenty of entries in the 5-mile-plus-a-few-tenths range.

In between those two were the usual variety of runs that fill out any runner’s year. The hottest run: mid-eighties in the early morning during last July’s record-breaking heat wave; I was lucky to get out before 8 a.m., since by noon the temperatures would register well over 100. The snowy runs: by February there were snowdrifts more than four feet high lining the driveway. I discovered new running routes once we moved across town last spring, though I still run the familiar routes around the center of town most days. Because we now live close to a state park, on weekends I found myself in the company of other walkers and runners more than I was previously accustomed to. I headed out one Saturday morning intending to run three miles, then turned back after one mile due to lightning flashes not far ahead. I ran in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, Washington DC and Colorado.

So it was another good year of running and another solid 365 days. Perhaps I should make it a goal to reach 1,000 miles this year, just this once, though I’m not sure where I’d add on another 87 miles compared to last year. If I can make it another 366 days – it’s a leap Year, of course – that will be enough for me.

Snow. Lightning. Heat waves. Tropical storms. With a little luck, I can do it all again.

Just do it

I set my alarm Sunday morning for 6:30. Early for a weekend day, but on the Sundays that I’m not only going to church but also teaching Sunday school and need to be there early to prepare, that’s what time I need to get up if I want to fit in a four-mile run.

And I did want to fit in a four-mile run. At least I did when I got ready for bed on Saturday night. Four miles sounded just great. It would take me about 45 minutes, counting actual pack-up-and-get-out-the-door time (iPod connected, cell phone in waistpack, shoes tied, hat located, dog pacified since she doesn’t get to run with me on weekends), so as long as I was on the road by 7, it would work out well.

But I woke yesterday morning about 6:25 and listened to the rain on the roof and noticed how chilly the bedroom was and looked at the gray sky through the skylight and felt very different from how I felt on Saturday night. No longer did I want to go for a four-mile run at all. Nor a three-mile or two-mile run, or any run at all.

Just get up and go, I told myself. Just go ahead with the plan.

How about after church? the other voice in my head countered. When I’m awake, and there’s a little more daylight on the road.

The weather won’t be better after church, my conscience replied. Plus it’s an extra change of clothes if you go in the middle of the day. Get up and go.

But I’m drowsy and chilly and don’t want to go running.

Then just do a mile. Just get out there for a mile, and once you’ve done that, if you want to, you can do more, and if you don’t want to, you can stop.

This, as I so often say, is the number one reason to commit to a running streak. Being a streak-runner means never having to decide whether or not it’s a good day to go running.

No, there was no question I’d go running before the day ended, but does it have to be so early? the voice in my head went on. I’m up at 5:20 five days a week. Can’t I sleep late on weekends?

But of course, I knew from plenty of past experience how that would go. If I waited to go running, I’d needlessly waste stores of mental energy throughout the morning thinking about how my run still lay ahead. I’d get home from church and not feel like changing into my running clothes. It would be late afternoon and I’d still be dreading the thought of a run on a cold gray afternoon.

Or I could just roll out of bed and go, before I was fully conscious of what kind of day it was.

Just a mile, I reminded myself. If it’s not going well, you can stop.

But any runner knows how that goes, and why it’s such a good trick to use on yourself. As I used to tell Tim, after five minutes in the rain, you’re as wet as you’re going to get; might as well just keep going.

Besides, after five minutes of running, you remember why you run. Lying in a warm soft bed, it’s hard to re-create the feeling of breathing in fresh cool air, the rhythm of your feet against the roadway, the breeze, the smell of wet leaves. All you can remember while you’re lying in bed is why you don’t want to get up yet.

So I got up anyway, put on my running clothes, drank some water, headed out the door.

And as always, half a mile in, I wasn’t thinking about turning back. I was thinking about the next three and a half miles and how good it would feel to just keep running.

Roll out of bed. It’s a lesson I seem to learn over and over again. Rolling out of bed is often the hardest part of the run. And after that, it really truly is downhill all the way.

It's the four-year anniversary of my running streak!

"You're almost at your four-year anniversary!” a friend commented a couple of weeks ago, noting that August 15th would mark the fourth anniversary of when I started my daily running streak. “What are you going to do to celebrate?”

The short answer, of course, is that I'm going to do the same thing every streak runner does to celebrate another year: go running. Because that's how streak running works. We go running (fully dressed, at least in my case: we're streak runners; not streakers) no matter what day it is or what anniversary we may or may not be celebrating. 365 days a year. No days off.

And as I've said before when people ask me about the mindset of streak running, in my case, I don't think a lot about daily running. I don't plan my daily run with much more thought than I plan my morning cup of coffee. There's just no question in my mind that it's going to be there somewhere. Running every day, I like to say, means never having to decide whether or not it's a good day to go running.

So yes, it's four years today; and no, I don't have any particular celebration in mind. When my running streak began, my then 9-year-old son also began a running streak, and at his insistence (to which I was more than happy to comply), we celebrated every single month. At least we planned to. The first month we went out for ice cream sundaes. The second month he asked for an Almond Joy. By the third month, all he wanted to mark the date was a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Even by then, he had the same mindset I do: if you've set your heart on running every day, you just don't think of it as a big enough deal to celebrate.

Still, there have been milestones along the way. On our one-year anniversary, my sister and brother-in-law made us customized t-shirts advertising our streaking success. On our two-year anniversary, my son decided he'd had enough and left it to me to continue the streak. On my one thousandth day of consecutive running, my mother left a beautiful flowering houseplant on my kitchen table while I was out for my run.

So here I am at the four-year mark, with no particular celebration planned. Next year, at five years, according to the U.S. Running Streak Association, I'll officially transcend the ranks, from the category labeled “Neophyte” to the section of the list designated “Proficient.” Four years. One thousand, four hundred sixty-five days, as of today, without missing my daily mile-or-more. It's not so much something to be proud of as something to be grateful for. No serious illnesses or injuries. No family emergencies. None of the things that could have made it impossible for me to get out for a run in any given 24-hour period has occurred.

I'm grateful. And I'm psyched to continue the streak. Celebrate? Maybe someday. For now, I just want to go running.

How to do a running streak: Simplest advice

Through the vagaries of social media in general and Twitter in particular, I stumbled across a group of cyber-friends a week or two ago who were all planning to start a running streak on August 1st. “Welcome to the ranks,” I told them, and enjoyed reading their posts as they built up to the big Running Streak Day One.

My own running streak, following the guidelines stipulated by the U.S. Running Streak Association (USRSA), began on August 15th of 2007. So later this month, I’ll cross the four-year threshold, and since I’m at day 1452 right now, by the end of September I’ll reach Day 1500, another appealing milestone.

Whether this puts me in any position to give advice to the cadre who started their streak yesterday is up for debate. According to the categorization system of the U.S. Running Streak Association, I’m still a neophyte – and will be until I reach the five-year mark twelve months from now. After 1452 days, I can’t exactly say I feel like a neophyte, but of course, to the longest-term streakers on the registry, who have over forty years of daily running under their belts (or under their insoles), calling me a neophyte may even be putting it kindly.

Still, most people who know me and know of my streak do not know other streak runners who are up in the decades-long rather than years-long echelons, so it is to me that they turn with questions. Or one question, really: How do you do it? Maybe it makes sense for me to give advice and maybe not, but here are a few of my standard answers.

• Although most streak runners cover more than a mile a day – many are long-distance or even marathon runners, and my standard is 2 miles per weekday run and 4-6 miles each weekend day – a mere mile is all it takes to qualify for a streak according to the USRSA. And running one mile doesn’t take long. Even a slow runner like me can cover a mile in ten minutes. So even though I’ve never been a smoker, I sometimes liken it to a cigarette break – or, in more contemporary terms, the time some people take out of other activities to check their email and update their Facebook page. Ten minutes. Go out, come back, you’re done. Not that difficult to fit in at all.

• No matter how busy your day is, everyone has a first-thing-in-the-morning. No one stays up all through the night, every night. So no matter how busy the day ahead may be, you can always set your alarm ten or twenty or forty-five minutes earlier to fit in a run. I usually, though not always, run first thing in the morning – whether “first thing” means 7:30 on a Saturday, 6:00 on a weekday during the school year, or 4:45 on the occasional travel day when I’m heading off to the airport for a morning flight. Sometimes I run at the end of the day, but only when I’m unable to force myself out of bed early enough to go in the morning.

• As Yogi Berra purportedly said, it’s not over ‘til it’s over. The day, that is. I try to avoid delaying my run into the late evening, but when it happens, it happens. In my memoir about streak running, I described the latest run I did that year or in fact any time since: it was at 9:45 at night. I wasn’t happy about it, but I still fit it in. My streak-running mentor, who logged a 32-year streak before a heart attack sidelined him for six weeks (after which he began another streak), once began his daily run at 11:50 p.m. It was just a mile that day, and he fit it in before midnight.

• Shed the habit that non-daily runners have of deciding whether or not it’s a good day for a run. Once you’ve resolved that you’re going to do a streak, that question becomes irrelevant, and I found it quite liberating to stop thinking that way. You’ll actually save time as well as mental effort in your day once you no longer have to think about whether you’re going to fit in a run. You are. Case closed. No more time wasted vacillating over that question.

• Another motto I tell myself is this one: You can always run slower. (No one has ever accused me of having a talent for catchy mottos.) The USRSA stipulates how long a distance you have to run to qualify as a streaker, but not how fast you have to run it. As long as there is some fraction of a millisecond between every footstrike when both feet are off the ground, you’re running. Having a tough day of it, or don’t even feel like running at all? Run slowly. You’ll still finish that mile in less than fifteen minutes.

• Any kind of weather is bearable for a mile. Again, I don’t mean to imply that most streakers run only a mile a day. Most run longer, although one exception is Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, whom I actually profiled in the first chapter of my book. He runs one mile and claims he has never once gone a single step farther. In any case, though most of us do more than a mile a day, no matter how cold or hot or icy or humid or rainy or snowy it is, there’s no kind of weather that’s too miserable for you to be out in it for ten minutes. Wear ten layers, or wear almost nothing at all. Do whatever the weather calls for. You’ll be back indoors before you know it.

• In my experience, it’s critical that you have a running route that is reliably safe. By safe, I mean both from traffic and from other dangers. My belief is that you can’t maintain a streak if running in the dark – whether that’s pre-dawn or post-dusk – is not an option. I’m lucky to live at the end of a half-mile-long cul-de-sac on which the only traffic is drivers going to and from the handful of houses on the road. On the days that it is most inconvenient to run, whether due to darkness or weather, I can simply run down our road and back and be done. Not everyone has this luxury, but remember, covering a mile or more doesn’t mean you have to run in a straight line. You can do laps around a high school track – or even a supermarket parking lot -- if you need to.

That’s probably enough advice from someone who has already admitted she may not be in any position to give advice. I don’t even think about the running streak anymore, except as an objective number that I post on Twitter and in my running log daily. But I don’t think about “Oh yeah, I need to do that daily run once again. Or not.”

Running is like brushing my teeth at this point: a new day has dawned, so it must be time to go for a run. That attitude has brought me to the brink of the four-year mark. I’m still a neophyte, but I hope eventually to be well into a decades-long streak.

Maybe if that happens, I’ll have still more insights. But I don’t think so. I think it’s really pretty simple. If you want to do a streak, go out today and run. And do it again tomorrow.

For a look at my streak-running memoir, just click on the image of the book at the top of this page. You can also find the e-book through Amazon.com.)

Simple words of inspiration reinvigorate my daily running habit

For the past few weeks, my daily run has been….well, less than ideal.

It seems my pace gets slower and slower. We’ve had some really hot, humid weather already this summer, and our new neighborhood is a lot buggier early in the day than our old neighborhood was; even if I protect myself with a hat and sunscreen, the horseflies cluster around my dog’s ears and annoy both of us.

So even as my daily streak approaches its four-year anniversary next month, I’ve cut back just a little on distance, reducing my typical weekend 5- or 6-milers to just four miles the past couple of weeks, and not even trying to go beyond my weekday 2-mile route the other five days of the week.

But even though I’ve maintained my daily running streak – which is at 1439 days as of this morning – it just hasn’t been fun. In fact, it’s been a drag. I drag myself out the door. I drag myself along the road and back. I drag myself through the paces of running, day after day, without my usual enthusiasm.

And then yesterday morning, I was going through my usual early-morning routine, the one that begins even earlier than my daily run: I write Morning Pages and then check email before I lace up my running shoes.

Normally, waiting in my email box at this early hour is a daily inspirational quote from gratefulness.org. And most days I find this helpful. Some examples are more meaningful than others to me, but I almost always find something insightful, encouraging, educational, illuminating or thought-provoking in the words of the daily quote. But over the past several days, no daily inspirational email had arrived. And then yesterday the bottleneck was apparently broken, and there were five. But none of them struck me as inspirational at all.

“All attack is a call for help. When you know this, you begin at once to look deeply into the question of what kind of help is being called for,” said one, attributed to theologian and writer Neale Donald Walsch.

“Let us accept the invitation, ever-open, from the Stillness, taste its exquisite sweetness, and heed its silent instruction,” wrote the late British philosopher Paul Brunton.

Some days these missives inspire me, but on this particular day, they neither made me feel like going out to live a better life nor like going out for my daily run.

And then on Twitter I found this one, from Maurilio Amorim, a marketing and technology entrepreneur and runner in Tennessee: "Morning workouts help me clear my mind and awaken my creativity."

That’s right, said the ever-present voice in my head. That’s the part I’ve been forgetting recently. Running isn’t just about the physical sense of well-being and strength. Sometimes, on hot humid days or for any number of other reasons, that sense of physical wellness just isn’t part of the experience. But this is the part I’d been overlooking as of late. I don’t run just for the physical power surge it gives me; I run because, as Maurilio Amorim says, it helps me clear my mind and awaken my creativity.

Stop thinking about how you feel, I reminded myself – the humidity, the sleepiness, the ever-annoying horseflies – and remember this part: the mind-clearing part. That’s still the most important reason. Rather than thinking that your muscles are moving slowly, think of the run as the part of the day where you gather together your dissipated mental energy and channel it into the creativity and initiative required for the day ahead.

Those thoughts stayed with me as I headed down my driveway. Somehow in recent weeks I’d forgotten about the mental clarity I gain from running; I’d let the physical aspects, most of which have been negative lately, overrun my consciousness. And it wasn’t philosophers or theologians, motivational speakers or athlete-gurus, who put me back on track. It was one cyber-acquaintance in Tennessee, with eleven words that I needed to hear.

I suppose it goes without saying that running hasn’t felt so good all summer as it did yesterday.

Relaxing my standards

I broke with tradition this past weekend.

Saturday has always been reserved for my longest run of the week. Several years ago, that meant a 13-mile loop, my own little weekly half-marathon. In more recent years, Saturday runs have typically ranged about five or six miles.

This weekend I did only four. To a non-runner, that distinction may sound trivial, but to me it was significant, because I can run four miles any old day. Five miles was my weekly “stretch goal.”

Five miles isn’t even that long a run, but in the past year or two, I’ve found that distance to present a reasonable challenge to me. My pace has slowed down recently for no clear reason, and although I’m still embarrassed that I clock a more-than-ten-minute mile, the fact is that being out for more than an hour robs me of more of my Saturday than I wish to give up, and that was one reason not to push myself beyond five miles.

But yesterday I didn’t even feel like doing that much. I tend to cleave to routine; it was a big deal for me to admit to myself that I just didn’t see any great benefit to running five miles as opposed to four. In earlier years, I found it so exhilarating to build my mileage; it seemed the longer I ran, the better I felt afterwards.

These days that doesn’t really seem to be the case, though. As long as I’m out for 45 minutes or more, I feel well-exercised and challenged, but more than five miles feels more arduous than exhilarating. And as far as weight control and other fitness factors, running longer doesn’t seem to make any discernible improvement.

Mostly, though, on Saturday it was that I wanted to go for a long bike ride later in the day. I could have done both, of course – a long run in the morning, a long bike ride in the afternoon – but I figured this was a chance to give myself a bit of a break, and shave that last mile off my run in good conscience, knowing I’d make up for it from a fitness perspective on my bike later on.

“Streak runners,” those of us committed to running 365 days a year without ever taking a day off, are by definition compulsive about running. I’m the first to admit that streak running is a silly pursuit, one important and relevant only to those of us who practice it, as I have been doing for the past three years and eleven months. Physically, there’s no significant advantage to running seven days a week rather than six, just as there’s no significant advantage to running five miles rather than four. Not for me anymore, anyway.

And acknowledging this to myself felt more like liberation than like a compromise. True, I’m not as strong a runner as I once was, and that’s part of what was driving my decision to cut back on Saturday. But I’m also not as driven by routine as I once was. I used to believe I had to run as far as I possibly could at least once a week. But whether it’s a sign of emotional maturity, physical aging or just a relaxing of standards, this past weekend I didn’t feel that way. I wanted to put in my 45 minutes, enjoy my four miles, and save some energy and excitement for an afternoon bike ride. It’s good to have a solid commitment and steadfast habits when it comes to exercise, but it’s good to waive them once in a while too. The run was fun; the bike ride was even better. And the freedom from feeling like I had to push myself to the max was the best part of it.

Yes, again with the gratitude

Two different people, unbeknownst to each other, commented in the past couple of weeks that I write too much about gratitude. “We get it, you’re a really good person and you’re always appreciative of everything,” said one of them. The other was more terse: she simply scrawled in the margin of a draft I had asked her to review, next to a passage about how grateful I was for the blessings of the present, “Enough already.”

And yet it’s hard to internalize this particular critique, the way I might if, for example, someone were to say (quite rightly) that I should use fewer adverbs or not always give examples in sets of three. When I get those kinds of criticisms, I tend to incorporate the recommendations swiftly into my writing. But cutting back on adverbs seems to be easier than cutting back on gratitude.

So once again, I find myself thinking about gratitude. Because my two critics were right: it is something I tend to, well, dwell on. But often I write about gratitude for big things, like an absence of current terrorist attacks or the fact that my children are so physically and mentally healthy. I still sometimes catch myself overlooking the smaller reasons for gratitude. Two days ago, I posted a comment on Twitter about starting my day with a two-mile run and then a cup of coffee. Someone I don’t even know, writing under the umbrella of a sports company, posted this response to my note: “A two-mile run followed by some coffee sounds like a perfect start to the week. Keep it up.”

My initial response, I’m sorry to admit, was a bit of an eye-roll. Keep it up? My running streak is now three years and almost three months long. Going on a two-mile run and then drinking a cup of hot coffee is how approximately 95% of my days begin. I’ve run every day for the past 1,180 days. I don’t really need to be urged to “Keep it up.”

But then I read it again, and this time stopped on the first sentence: “A two-mile run followed by some coffee sounds like a perfect start to the week.” Yes. It is a perfect start to the week. And it’s how most of my weeks start. Also how they middle and end.

But it’s little things like this that I sometimes forget to observe with gratitude. My days start with a run and coffee: what could be better? My workdays consist of sitting in a sunny kitchen in a quiet house writing for pay: what could be better? Most evenings, those when I don’t have meetings or social commitments or errands to do, I change into sweats after dinner and read to my kids: what could be better?

My mother told me an informative story recently. She receives her mail at the post office rather than by delivery. Because the paper recycling piles up so fast at home, with all the catalogs, envelopes and inserts that arrive in the mail day after day, she throws whatever she doesn’t want into the recycling bin at the post office before she leaves. Sometimes she even reads the mail while standing at the post office counter and leaves it in the recycling there. (I have a post office box also and do all of these same things.)

Last week, she received a form letter with the results of a routine mammogram. The letter said that the results showed no cause for concern and she should come back in a year. She told me she dropped it in the recycling bin…and then rethought the action. “That’s important,” she thought. “A healthy mammogram? That’s not just a piece of paper to send to the shredder. That’s a big deal. That’s a piece of paper worth bringing home.” It wasn’t just a matter of being generally grateful for good health, which, like me, she always consciously is; it was this particular piece of paper bearing good news: something small and tangible for which to be thankful.

So I’m holding on to that Twitter post because it reminds me that even though I start nearly every day with running and coffee, it’s still a nearly perfect way to start the day. I’m grateful for it. And yes, I say that a lot. But my coffee mug is like my mom’s slip of paper: nothing good should go randomly into the shredder, literally or metaphorically. So I’ll keep that post to remind myself of just how grateful I should be, yet again.

Files off to the self-publishing house

It was three years and three months ago – August of 2007 – that I started thinking about a book I wanted to write. I’d written a Boston Globe story the year before about people who run every single day without ever taking a day off – “streak runners,” not to be confused with streakers – and I thought the topic merited far more than an 800-word newspaper feature. Plus my 8-year-old son and I had started our own running competition, challenging each other to see how many consecutive days we could do together. Tracking our “streak” might make a good appendix to my book about these men and women who run thirty or forty years daily without a day off, I thought.

Three years, three months. Yesterday morning I made my last edit (catching yet another critical typo; they seem to be never-ending when I don’t have the Boston Globe’s copy desk watching my back), converted the 250-page word file to a PDF, and sent it off to a self-publishing house. Final production stages are now under way.

Self-publishing was not my initial hope. I wanted my first finished full-length book to get into print the traditional way, through a commercial publisher. And I did come close. I did my due diligence, identifying literary agents who might be interested in this project, sending off proposals and sample chapters. And plenty of them responded positively, asking to take a closer look at the manuscript. It wasn’t long before I found one who seemed like the perfect match for this project: she liked the concept, she liked my writing, and she definitely had the professional acumen to give my book its best shot at publication.

Still, it didn’t quite work out. Signing a contract with an agent was a thrill, but once I’d done that, I realized that the many unpublished writers who see getting an agent as the Holy Grail are missing the bigger picture. She tried really hard, but we just couldn’t quite get there with a commercial publishing house. By this time, what I thought would be a book about runners had evolved into a memoir about parenting, and how I tried to strengthen my relationship with my growing son through undertaking a running streak. What I thought would be an appendix had turned into the crux of the piece; now the other runners were mere footnotes. “I’m just not sure there’s a big enough market to carry this book” was what most editors told my agent.

And the thing is, I couldn’t disagree with them. A commercial publisher wants to feel assured that a book will sell well into the five figures. Twenty thousand copies. Fifty thousand copies. It depends who you ask. And it’s one thing to say “Yes, I believe in this project of mine; I wrote it to the best of my abilities and I firmly believe it has a market,” but I know enough about the reading public to not be certain at all that there are twenty thousand individuals out there who would part with $24.95 for the privilege of reading my memoir. I’m sure there are inspirational speakers who would say “If you don’t believe in your project one thousand percent, you’ll never succeed with it,” and maybe they’re right. I believed in the value and strength of my project; I just didn’t believe it had twenty thousand potential readers.

On the other hand, if it never saw the light of day, it would have accrued all of five readers, the five friends I specifically asked to give feedback on my work in progress. And that didn’t seem like the right way for this project to end either.

Hence, the decision to self-publish. I’m not out to make money off of this; I’m out to validate a creative endeavor on which I spent three years by finding people who consider it worth reading. Not twenty thousand people. Two hundred. Maybe even five hundred. Five hundred sounds great to me.

I worked on this for three years, and in another couple of weeks it will be in print. Not everyone who reads it will like it; confessional memoirs about parenting, whether or not they take place against the backdrop of recreational running, are not everyone’s cup of tea. But maybe two-thirds of my readers will consider it a really worthwhile read. In my opinion, that would validate my efforts. It’s not the glory of a traditionally published work, but it’s the joy of having something I labored over be read. And at least this time around, I’ve decided that’s good enough.

Reluctant running

I admit that I tend to wax exultant when I talk about running. I’ve expended a lot of ink over the past couple of decades writing about all the great things running has done for me. And I’ve expended a lot more ink over the past three years, both real and virtual, on the benefits of streak running, ever since I committed in August of 2007 to run every day without taking any days off. I’ve written about how it keeps me focused, it gives me the sense of stability that comes from a daily habit, it reassures me that there’s something in my life that I do exclusively for myself, and not to benefit anyone else. Mostly, I’ve written about how committing to daily running means never having to decide whether or not it’s a good day to go for a run. I don’t have to waste time coming up with reasons to go running or excuses not to anymore, because I go no matter what.

What I don’t admit quite so often is that occasionally, there are days when I really don’t want to go, days when I just don’t see how my going running is going to change anything in anyone’s life, even my own. I know from a fitness perspective it wouldn’t really matter if I took a day off now and then. And I know the idea that I’m committed to a daily run isn’t particularly significant in anyone’s mind except my own.

Mostly, it’s a daily habit that I relish and a part of the day I look forward to eagerly. But there are some days when it’s not like that. Yesterday was one of them.

I just didn’t feel like going. For reasons unrelated to running, I was feeling both irritable and overscheduled. A household problem was causing me a great deal of frustration, and although usually running improves my state of mind, this problem was intractable enough that I was certain running couldn’t possibly make me feel any differently where that was concerned. I also felt like I had so much to fit in: church in the morning, then a bunch of errands and a flu shot; then I had promised I’d get to Tim’s baseball game for a few innings; and I wanted to drop in to see my high school friend Courtney, who was in town from North Carolina visiting her local family members. I wanted to spend a little bit of time with my parents, and I wanted to get a head start on the week’s writing assignments, and I wanted to make a well-planned-out and nutritious dinner for my family.

I did not want to fit in a run.

But the streak registry keeps me honest. Having paid my yearly dues is incentive enough not to fall off the wagon; I’m listed on the registry, and it would be so disheartening to have to take the necessary bureaucratic steps to inform the powers that be if I no longer deserved my place on it. The membership fee for the year paid, I might as well get my money’s worth.

Yes, there are some days that running doesn’t feel quite so magnificent as it does most days. Yesterday I countered the fact that I didn’t feel like going at all with a promise to myself to stay close to home; I decided to run up to the soccer fields across the street (it’s seven-tenths of a mile each way) and then do however many laps it would take me to total three miles altogether. I thought it would feel comforting to stay close to home.

And it did, but it also felt boring, because running laps is boring and because I wasn’t in the mood for a run. I felt tired and creaky, and as I ran, my frustration over the household problem that had been bothering me was not lessening one bit.

So yesterday wasn’t typical. I didn’t want to go running and I didn’t enjoy it once I went. But I console myself with the fact that I’d feel worse if I hadn’t gone.

Maybe running didn’t have its usual magic powers over me, leaving me feeling transcendent and powerful and serene, but it didn’t make me feel any worse. And I’d met my daily running commitment.

So yes, there are some days when running is not particularly a joy. But just going is easier than making a choice not to go. So the streak continues, and I know the odds are I’ll have a better run today.

One thousand days of daily running

Last Friday, my running streak hit 1,000 days. Not since August of 2007 have I missed a day of running; every day since August 12 of that year I’ve run a mile or more. As of Friday, that totaled 1,000 days.

Several people who follow my running streak through personal contact or Twitter have been generous with their congratulations, emailing, Tweeting or tracking me down in person to comment on the milestone. My mother gave me a flowering rose plant with a card of congratulations – in fact, she left it on my kitchen counter while I was out doing that one thousandth run -- and my parents even took me out to lunch that day. My minister praised me for it as well. The comments have been flattering.

One thousand days may sound impressive to my friends who are not streak runners but puts me only at just above number 200 nationally on the United States Running Streak Association Registry, whose highest-ranked streak runners have done decades, not years, of consecutive daily running. So even as I reflect upon it, it’s with the awareness that another streak runner, whether registered with the USRSA or not, could be reading this and thinking “Two and a half years? I’ve done three and a half decades! Why are you even talking about it?”

And to some extent, I wonder why I’m talking about it too. A lot of people who ask me about my running streak have one question: How do you do it? The answer to that is so easy as to sound glib, though I don’t mean it to: To maintain a daily running streak, you just run every day. That’s all. And oh yes, you learn to ignore the weather and physical ailments and time crunches and deadlines and complicated travel plans, and you just…run every day. And eventually one thousand days have passed.

The harder question for me, which no one ever asks but which I sometimes ask myself, rather than how do you do it is why do you do it. When I started, back in August 2007, I had a good reason: it was a project I was undertaking with my then 8-year-old son. Our goal was to run together every day for a year, so that was reason enough for me to keep the streak through the first year. And then when that year ended, my son wanted to see how much longer we could go, so once again I needed no further justification: I did it because it was something Tim and I were in together.

But when Tim ended his daily streak at two years, I kept going. That was nine months ago now, and brought me from Tim’s total of 732 days to my current of 1,003. What I did to get here was easy: run. Why I did it is a lot harder for me to articulate.

I did it because I love running. I did it because I wanted to test my ability to commit to a daily practice, one that I knew would be much harder to maintain than my daily writing practice. (Yes, I said earlier it was easy, and in a pragmatic way it is, but there’s been plenty of ice, snow, frigid temperatures, thunderstorms, headaches and meetings that ran late over the past one thousand days.) But the biggest reason I ran for one thousand consecutive days and am continuing to do so three days later is that after a certain point I realized I’d need a really good reason to stop. For me, at this point I don’t need a reason to continue the streak – I continue the streak because I’m a streak runner – but I’d need a compelling justification to end it.

Still, I felt sheepish accepting the congratulations for reaching one thousand days, and couldn’t help suggesting that maybe I’d crowned myself Queen of the Trivial Pursuits. So you ran one thousand days? What good is that to society? Or, to be more blunt, who cares? Of all the things you could have been doing to save the world, or to improve your community, or even to better tend to your own family, where does running a daily mile fit in to the general goal of being a better person?

It doesn’t. Not really. And that’s why I don’t really see the one thousand day mark as a big deal. If I continue to run every day, lots of big benchmark numbers will come and go. But I still can’t get past the feeling that this is less about my willpower or fitness level and more about my ability to cleave on to a trivial commitment and refuse to let it go. Is that a growth experience?

I have trouble claiming it is. I can only hope that other, related talents and abilities related to commitment and tenacity are quietly taking root as a result. Maybe eventually, I’ll apply my streak-running neural pathways to something more valuable to society. For now, I’ll just continue the streak for the only reason I know: because it’s easier than coming up with a justification to break it, at more than one thousand days.