The year started on a high. On my second run of January — January 2nd — I hit a number I’d been watching for: eight hundred runs since the very beginning. It gave me a surge of energy and a clear target: reach one thousand as soon as possible.
Conditions were the usual: mornings just above freezing, two to four degrees; afternoons around ten. Running was my only sport by then, so the hundreds came quickly. The nine hundredth run fell on May 21st.
Austria
In late May and early June, a work trip added a new country to my running list: Austria. The first stop was a small village where I was determined to run — but the village was so small that the road simply ended. I ran out along the main road beyond the edge of town, managed one eight-kilometer loop, and moved on.
The next stop was Vienna. We were housed in a classic building in the city center with colleagues. I knew I’d get out running whenever the schedule allowed. I did the obligatory sightseeing too — I didn’t want to be the one who skipped everything — but what I really looked forward to was discovering the city on foot, at pace.
The terrain was completely unfamiliar, and I spent a lot of time looking around while running. Three runs, eight kilometers each, all of them passing through the historic center. I stumbled on a few places I’d never have found otherwise — and went back later to explore them properly. It was a weekday, so the streets were packed with traffic and people. Not ideal, but I’m not lost in big cities.
On one of those runs, though, something every long-distance runner encounters sooner or later made its urgent appearance: the gastrointestinal kind of emergency that turns the last kilometer into a sprint of a very different sort. That particular run had a very sudden ending. It’s one of the unspoken realities of the sport — the kind nobody puts on their running blog. But I think it’s worth being honest about these things. I’ve decided I’ll write a proper piece about it one day on the other blog, because it’s something every runner should know about.
A Perfect Summer, and a Run Down Memory Lane
That year’s summer stayed within an almost ideal temperature range the whole way through. Not once did I have to run above thirty degrees. I handle heat much better than cold — a tendency that gets more pronounced with age — but even I have limits, and I’ll write about those later.
Toward the end of summer, I went back to my home country for a few days. It was a strange feeling, running the same routes where it had all started six years earlier. The landscape had changed in places — new buildings here and there — but I was focused on something else entirely: the memories. The mentality of the people in the two countries — where I was living and where I came from — is quite different. I’d noticed it many times. One of those moments happened on this trip.
One morning, I was running on a bike path — the kind where a painted line separates the cycling lane from the pedestrian side. I had my earphones in, as always, when someone behind me started shouting in less than polite terms for me to get out of the way. I was surprised: the path was three or four meters wide, completely empty, and he could easily have gone around me. But I was in his lane, and he expected me to move. A brief exchange of words, and we each went our separate way. I still remember that moment to this day. I’d been on the other side too, plenty of times, as a cyclist — but I only ever rang my bell when a group of pedestrians was blocking the entire path. The difference between the two countries is, unfortunately, typical. Nothing like that has ever happened to me here.
One Thousand
October 17th. I reached it: one thousand runs. One thousand times I’d laced up and gone out the door. That number meant something. It pushed me forward. I immediately started calculating when the next thousand might come. I like playing with numbers that way — they’ve pulled me through more low points than I can count. I wrote about that in a separate piece here.
The rest of the year passed quietly. The usual ten-kilometer distances all the way to December, with a new milestone already floating in front of my eyes for the year ahead: ten thousand kilometers.
2008: 259 runs / 2,480 km
Since 2002: 1,057 sessions / 9,255 km