According to the U.S. Running Streak Association, I have just become an “experienced” runner. That is how the organization—to which I have not paid the annual $20 dues and therefore am not a member—classifies people who have run “at least one continuous mile within each calendar day under one’s own body power” for at least 10 years.
If I were a USRSA member, I would be ranked 156th in the country. Which isn’t bad as long as one doesn’t consider that the longest unbroken streak—as of Dec. 13, 2016—is 17,369 days, or 47.55 years. That belongs to a fellow named Jon Sutherland, listed on the USRSA Web site as 66 years old, a writer from West Hills, Calif., whose circadian habit was the subject of a 2015 CBS Evening News report.
I have crunched the numbers. For me to rise to No. 1 on the list (which is available at runeveryday.com), the 155 folks ahead of me would have to take a day off—not bloody likely—and I would have to persist in pounding the pavement every day until I am 107 years old. (Plus, I’d have to start paying that yearly $20 fee.)
But that’s not the goal, any more than brushing my teeth every morning for the next 37-plus years is. It’s just custom now.
It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I was moved to attempt occasional jogs, mostly after a colleague greeted me one day with, “Welcome to Fat City,” and partly because my newspaper assignments included coverage of elite track and field meets. I often was surrounded by people giddy about physical activity, just as the running boom began to spread beyond accomplished athletes to everyday citizens.
So I joined the program already in progress.
By the time I had lined up a series of interviews with 1972 Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter at his Boulder, Colo., home in early ’76, I was fit enough—barely—to join Shorter on the first three miles of his 10-mile afternoon run, which had followed his 10-mile morning run. He generously (and drastically) slowed his pace, until I went into oxygen debt and watched him disappear over the horizon.
But the thing about running is that you trundle around for a while, begin to feel the mental and physical benefits and, before you know it, you’re hooked.
“It is an addiction,” 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist Meb Keflezighi told me recently. “If you miss a day or get injured—elite athletes get it, others get it—you don’t feel good.” Mary Wittenberg, who was race director of the New York City Marathon for 10 years, argued that running “is not a sport you dabble in. The more you do it, the easier it gets.”
(Finishing the 1978 Long Island Marathon, with Pete Alfano)
My two marathons are now decades in the past, and I no longer am interested in knowing how fast I’m going. (More accurately, how slow.) But, somehow, the two or four days off per month, through some 30 years of loping and rambling and trotting, disappeared as well. I went for a leisurely 5-mile run on Dec. 13, 2006 and haven’t missed a day since, putting me in the company of those listed by the USRSA. There are dietitians, teachers, attorneys, salespeople, bankers, coaches, landscapers, pastors, photographers, journalists, nurses, engineers, accountants, concert pianists…all manner of humans.
And all, apparently, are carriers of what Shorter has called “the disease of running,” which he once described as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“Oh, yeh, you’re OCD,” Shorter confirmed to me during a chat in 2012. “You’re just channeling it. I think some people are born with a need to move and a need to exercise. And it doesn’t go away. So why fight it? You’re lucky.”
One of the New York City Marathon’s marketing pitches was its Run for Life “manifesto,” calling on all citizens to “run for the rush, run to be strong, run off dessert, run to like yourself better in the morning, run to keep your thighs from rubbing together, run because endorphins are better than Botox, run to sweat away your sins, run so bullies can never catch you, run with your thoughts, run your troubles the hell out of town…”
A morning ramble gets the show on the road. It guarantees that something has been accomplished that day. It makes the breakfast Cheerios taste better. Even if, at 3,654 consecutive days, I still am 196 days short of my wife’s daily streak of brisk walks (which are fast approaching my running pace), I feel as if I’m getting somewhere.
