The perks of succumbing to Brownian running motion

Everyday running is really just inhaling O2 and external stimuli for the purpose of exhaling CO2 and personalized impressions of life's miniature comedies and dramas

Although I make it plain that I run for around an hour a day and maintain lazy but easily fortifiable competitive goals, I don’t write much about my own present experiences. However mundane my efforts may be, it would be worth getting into them more for no other reason than to distort the picture I’ve painted here by so heavily emphasizing morbidity and wrongness, either in direct rants or through darkly humorous barrages of media imagery. A few readers have commented that they worry that I spend too much of my time immersed in the slime oozing from comprehensive sociocultural decay, or whatever ails my soul, to be enjoying much of anything.

Although definitely cranky on the inside most of the time and unpretentiously wondering (owing more to mechanistic global factors than to exquisite personal pain or hardship) if I should even stick around beyond the lifetime of my beloved pet, it’s absolutely not the case that I anchor my days in activities assured of boosting my circulating misery titer. Every single one of my days is—barring injury or other unforeseen circumstance—rooted in the assurance of a run, usually two. I also do a fair amount of walking for someone who already runs daily. And of the (checks Garmin connect) roughly 3,200 miles I’ve covered on foot so far this year, I don’t recall regretting a single step.

If I were not still a runner, I would not call myself one, and I would not be writing articles or books or participating in podcasts and interviews as if I were still one and had picked up anything useful along the way. It almost shocks me how many of the leading voices of the sport today are not only stuck indoors racking up long strings of training-log zeroes, but even suggesting others join them in self-loathing slugdom. Worse, some of these slugs used to at least run recreationally but have since quit doing any serious training, making them less suitable envoys of the sport than someone one week into his or her first stab at the activity and loving it—bilateral quad soreness, extra laundry and all.

(Ah, but quitting is a thing among the pampered, hair-twirling laptop class. Or is it?)

If you’re someone who claims that running is your favorite thing to do, yet your social feeds are continual bursts of “maybe tomorrow…couch and hot chocolate today!”, then you are a poser and nothing more. People who really do depend on running make themselves quietly obvious to those around them. They endure a lot of injuries, and whether stressed or happy, they choose running as a primary psychological modulator. Aside from planned or inevitable unwanted days off, there is never even a question of whether these people will run (or substitute another activity with considerable reluctance).

As cool as you think it sounds to say “running saved me”—the kind of exhortation always good for dozens of “likes” even with zero context—well, if you don’t know what it’s like to truly feel that, consider not announcing it to the world, especially when the world can plainly see who and what you really are. Becoming a jogger at some point may have opened the door to embarking on a shoddy journalism career or an influencer gig, but that’s not close to the same thing.

Besides dumping on the entire sport, I do a few things differently from most longtime, regular runners with a history of competing at a high enough level to be written about in local newspapers (and occasionally even in Runner’s World)¹. I’ve described some of these habits before. One of them is rarely timing my runs, instead relying on a glance at the time of day on my watch when I start and, if needed, biometric data automatically gathered by Garmin to determine how long I was out there. I also do most of my running from home, which is in a densely packed neighborhood but has easy access to both paved and dirt rec paths and side streets almost no one uses, especially after a certain time of day. Because I’m just running for time, it doesn’t matter what ground I cover and in what order. But I probably do 90 percent of my running in the same four adjoining neighborhoods in Boulder.

I’ve also mentioned how vital it is to ignore how shitty you feel at the very start of any run, apart from obvious exceptions such as testing a possibly healed injury that turns out to remain a problem spot or discovering that the tired feeling you had all day might in fact be an illness—something mild like a cold, serious like pneumonia, or uniformly lethal like covid. If you’re mumbling “Fuck this noise” or the like to yourself while still within sight of your home or your car, think about your own attitude in the 30 or so minutes before you took your first steps. You’ll likely discover having marshaled all manner of flimsy reasons to pack it in early no matter what.

I usually feel reasonably good when starting a run, and if I don’t, there’s usually an identifiable and manageable reason (e.g., extreme heat or cold, too fucking early, sour stomach from gulping black coffee, the cardiorespiratory aftereffects of huge clouds of weedsmoke in my house, a typical consequence of leaving Rosie unsupervised.

Some runs clean up extremely well after the first 10 to 20 minutes, provided I take it easy rather than say, “If this how it is today, then it’s 20 minutes of sucking wind like a lacrosse bro” and basically punish myself for three or so miles. And I don’t do the latter thing often anymore, even when unencumbered by the quadrupedal main reason I run as much as I do.

Brownian motion is a term describing the behavior of a large collection of gas molecules free to move about and collide. Because a given gas molecule is equally likely to move in any direction after a collision with another gas molecule, probability theory dictates that, on average, any given molecule will be found at or very close to the same spot it was at the start of the tracking of its movement. This idea is often presented in physics courses as a drunk starting to wobble toward home after leaning against a lamppost for a breather and being so plastered that his every step is equally likely to be north, south, east, or west. If the drunk makes truly random choices, he will never stray far from the lamppost, which will represent the spot where he’s most likely to be found at any time.

My running routes are not quite dictated by sheer randomness, but I do make semi-random lefts and rights at the same set of intersections continually within the same run. I’m often trying to remain close to the house because of the promise of ugly weather or incipient darkness (if for some reason I don’t have a light). Sometimes, I will glance down a side street as I pass and see something that might be interesting at the other end, usually a group of people making noises of exhortation or glee, and head that way so that I don’t miss anything.

Rosie seems to like tracking other runner-dog pairs, so we often stalk such combos from a non-creepy distance (a meter or more is standard) while pretending not to. She fixates, I watch her, and it passes the time.

Combining all of this—my using a stopwatch and rarely if ever using any of the same exact routes twice—guessing how long I’ve been moving can be a challenge. Those of you who run a fixed set of routes, or simply don’t make a lot of turns, can generally tell about how many minutes you are into a run by looking at the scenery even if you aren’t wearing a watch that day. I usually have none of this context, so I like to guess. And I like to play this game whenever I experience a sudden change, be it the onset of real fatigue or a sweeping feeling of relaxation even while moving up a hill.

I’ve become pretty good at this. Maybe I always was, but I was never prompted to experiment in this way in my more competitive days because I usually had a watch on and ran the same batch of suburban or flat-out country road routes. While any doofus can make a guess that’s less than five minutes off when he’s only ten minutes in, it gets tricker after negotiating some hills or a single-track with rocks and roots that tax rarely recruited muscles.

I don’t run enough mileage so that I can go out and run seven or eight miles at 80 percent or better effort and not start to notice the generalized leg fatigue. This rarely resembles a bonk-in-the-making, but it’s kind of like a subtle reversal of what happens 10 to 20 minutes in. Instead of everything going from a little clunky to as smooth as things get, every step, while still powerful, takes a little more work. If I am anywhere near 7:30 pace for the duration of a run, something like this happens about 55 minutes in. It’s startling how consistent this pattern has been this year.

I also find myself doing impromptu pickups that last maybe two or three minutes, approaching or maybe exceeding a pace I could hold for 5K. This never seems to happen unless I’ve been running for at least 35 minutes. At this point, though, I may be starting to look for patterns that aren’t there.

When I started running in 1984, and each of the times I’ve re-started after a significant layoff, my sense of the passage of time was practically nonexistent. There is no rhythm in an absence of running fitness, only reaching. In fact, the first time someone starting from ground zero looks at his watch mid-run and has a thought that leads with “I’ve already been out for…” instead of “I’ve only been out for…”, then than person has crossed an important threshold: Running is no longer painful enough to prevent your mind from drifting from the task of maintaining forward motion.

Most people I know do not have the freedom to run in semirandom directions. This is either because they run with other people or simply prefer to run a course with a familiar distance and layout. Choosing to shoot off in the direction of something that might be interesting strikes me as a significant freedom. Perhaps I’m just nosy.

Seasonal changes make running on the same streets a different experience. Hallowe’en is a great example. Rosie is preparing a post about being continually fooled at this time of year by all the fake monsters and such that people have laden onto their lawns lately.

I have a feeling that if I embark on any kind of fitness test soon, it will require me recruiting a local young dirtbag who can reliably run 90 seconds a lap on a track for a while without continually signaling how easy this is. I know people like this and where to find them, especially if they live close by on a side street.

I got the idea for this about five minutes before I started writing it, so the results may be mixed. But spontaneous writing beats exhaustive research projects about how much everyone and everything chews ass, so I may inflict more of it on people regularly. And as much as I shouldn’t, I will start taking more pictures. I did a run in South Boulder today that triggered some special memories, and all I had to do to access them was decide to bang a left onto one of the NIST access roads.

1. Jonathan Beverly wrote that May 2005 “Editor’s Note” for Running Times, which was later absorbed into Runner’s World.