Running makes the city smaller
I want to be able to say, “I’ll be there in thirty,” and cross half the city on foot.
Phone, keys, wallet. Start moving. The distance is something I can cover myself, without arranging a ride or deciding where a bicycle will spend the next few hours.
That is one of the things I am rebuilding as I return to training: places becoming close enough that I can simply go.
Getting home
There is a run in my old records that captures this better than a race result.
July 6, 2021. Four seventeen in the morning. Sofia. I had been out with friends and ran home: 7.59 kilometres in 34:04 of moving time, at about 4:29 per kilometre.
I was living away from home for a research programme that summer. The run took me across the city from Studentski, along empty boulevards. I remember it as a lot of fun. Getting home on foot was a possibility so ordinary that I could choose it at the end of a night out.
The pace tells me something about my old fitness. The decision tells me what that fitness made possible. Seven or eight kilometres did not require a separate occasion. I could run them because I needed to get somewhere.
I want that capacity to remain available throughout my life. It is a practical form of physical agency: a decision to go somewhere can become an action I carry out myself.
That changes the scale of a city. A place several kilometres away becomes a place I can reach in half an hour outside. The distance is still there, but it stops being a reason to arrange transport.
I had been remembering my old training mainly through the workouts: the fast 200s, the repeated 900s, the time trials. Then this memory brought back the rest of it. Running also happened between the workouts, inside an ordinary day.
A city I can move through
Thinking about San Francisco this way makes me smile. I look at the city and imagine a much larger set of places I can reach casually: another neighbourhood, a park, the ocean. A trip can begin because I want to see somewhere, with the run itself part of the reason to go.
I am already bringing small pieces of that back. On October 2, I ran to the gym in Nob Hill and back. Later I ran to Mission to get a burrito and returned. These were useful journeys, and running fit inside them.
The longer outings are still ahead. An hour of comfortable running used to fit inside my life. Recovering that ease, with a pace around 4:30 per kilometre feeling enjoyable and familiar again, would bring much more of the city within reach. I cannot assume that pace today.
For now, the habit can begin with ten or fifteen minutes around the block. Then fifteen or twenty-five minutes somewhere a little farther away. I can become accustomed to the activity before deciding that every free evening needs to produce an impressive route.
The track and the city
The track has a different job. My current focus is an 800+ World Athletics point profile across 800–5000 metres. There I want to be precise: known distances, recorded repetitions, consistent recovery, and an honest account of how the effort felt. Repeating a workout gives me something to compare. Changing it needs a reason.
City running gives me room to play. I can choose a destination, explore a neighbourhood, or fit a run around something I already need to do. I do not want to carry an interval session’s negotiation with the stopwatch into every trip outside.
During the 8 October track session, I could feel my stride opening again and the running felt relaxed. The city runs can grow around that returning ease. Prescribing my old cruising pace now would turn every outing into another test.
The load is where these two kinds of running meet. I am already increasing the speed of the track work. More repetitions and longer runs would add other demands. When we started discussing all of those increases together, I called it an injury landmine. Enjoying an outing does not make its physical cost disappear. The freedom I want has to be something I can keep using.
What has to come with me
There is an adult complication that was much less important in that Sofia memory: the laptop. As a kid, I could simply run. Now I often need to move the things that let me work.
Much of my life now involves a computer in a backpack. I might want to work from a different place, and the machine needs to arrive with me. A bicycle handles that cargo well. It also brings decisions about locking it, storing it, and where I will leave it when I move on. Those decisions matter precisely because the simplicity of running is part of its appeal.
I would like to carry a phone, payment card, ID and a key or two, and still resume work when I arrived somewhere suitable.
That means solving a problem beyond fitness. I would need a screen, a keyboard or another usable way to give instructions, and access to my computing environment. The example I have in mind is the computer cluster at Stanford: arrive somewhere equipped to work, instead of carrying the equipment everywhere. I have not solved the equivalent arrangement for everyday life here.
For now, the laptop gives different journeys different requirements. Some trips can be light enough to run. Others need the things in the backpack. Becoming fit enough to cross town will not, by itself, remove that distinction.
I want leaving home to require a decision about where to go, and very little else.
This is part of my running notebook. The training questions behind the track work are developed in What should a running workout maximize?.