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| Hot days, cold days - every day's a walking day when you're determined not to miss. |
My friend Coogan looked at me
for a minute, a slice of pizza stopping just short of his chin.
“You did what?”
“I walked today,” I said, not
sure what he meant. Coogan noticed the pizza again, took an absentminded bite
and continued, speaking around a thin-crusted mouthful of pepperoni and cheese.
“I mean – what was the other
part? The days or something.”
“Oh, this was Day 3,123.”
“Of what?”
“That’s how many days I’ve
walked without a miss.”
Now he was remembering. My
friends usually know better. This happens when you talk to a fanatic. A golfer
can recount every swing on a cloudy 18-hole Saturday. Pilots grow rhapsodic about the view from above, the
beauty of a surging stratocumulus. I knew a basket collector who could hold the
floor for an hour if no one collapsed or jumped out a window. The truth is, I
know better than to bring up my personal obsession, but if they ask me…
“That’s right,” Coogan said,
remembering too late. “The streak.”
“Well, no big deal,” I said.
“It’s now – “ I had pulled out my phone where I keep the log that has grown, at
least one mile per day, since Sept. 6, 2012.
“As of today, it’s 8,378 miles
without a day off.” Not smug or overly self-satisfied - just sounded that way.
Coogan turned his attention to
the pizza box between us, hunting for one of the small rectangles in the
flickering light of the gas fire pit. We were on my deck on a Saturday night, stars
just coming out, nobody around but a dog barking for company, two yards over.
We were in school together a
long time ago and have teamed up for a few trips and football games over the
years. Now he was my guest, driving back from seeing Glenn in New Mexico,
headed home to D.C., and just stopping by for the night. He had pizza, the
fire, and a break from the road, so maybe he felt the need to play along.
“How’s that going?”
“Oh, the walking? Yeah, I’m at
(consulting the phone record again) 3.0335 average miles per day on the
streak.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s for the streak, of
course. For this year, I’m at 3.8235.”
Coogan yawned. Guess it had been
a long day.
“That’s good,” he said.
“Not all the time,” I said,
finding a square he had missed in the box. “I told you about the duck, right?”
“The time that duck was taking
off as you jogged by and it crashed into your leg?”
“Yeah, that was weird. A
mallard. He was fine, maybe a little wobbly when he took off again. I imagined
him telling the other ducks later: “It was a beast, I tell you, nine feet tall
at least, and running at me….”
“But you survived,” said Coogan,
staring into the fire.
I ignored that.
In my phone’s Notes app is a
record, updated with each day’s mileage, and average steps for each month. I
don’t know why I count the steps, too. People are funny, I guess. If Coogan wasn’t
so tired, he’d probably want to know about some of my top days, like December
26, 2018 – 18,773 steps, sir. But that’s only about seven miles for me, and I
know I had a few longer days – oh wait, here we are: 10 miles on April 18,
2020; nine miles on May 26 that year; a few eight-mile days in July, August,
and November of 2019.
I continued looking through the
log. People don’t always show it, but you can tell they’re secretly grateful to
hear about these exploits.
“Ah, here we go - the list of
cities where I’ve run or walked. We didn’t do business trips last year, but in
2019 I did Austin, Detroit, Richmond, and San Francisco. Year before that: DC,
Denver, New York, LA….”
It’s hard to be humble with that
record, but I don’t like to brag.
“Yeah, that’s great,” Coogan
said. He wasn’t planning to travel until things settled down but had talked
about getting back to Zambia.
When we got out of school Coogan
spent a tour in the Peace Corps, working on development projects in west
Africa. He came back home and hitchhiked all over the country for a few months before
picking up a Yale MBA, becoming a senior vice president with a large retail
company and then going back to Africa again for a U.S. agency. He’s visited
more than 80 countries and can tell you about the second-longest plane ride in
the world, 18 hours from Washington to Johannesburg. That’s almost as long as
the ride from Singapore to Newark, New Jersey. He’s soft-spoken, very
well-read, and now semi-retired. He hikes a lot and has done a good chunk of
the Appalachian Trail.
My handful of cities didn’t seem
to register, but he was polite.
“Where do you walk around here?”
Nothing as interesting as the
Appalachian Trail, though Fort Harrison State Park is about 10 minutes away and
has some pretty interesting trails, yes sir.
“Mostly here in the
neighborhood,” I said. Fact is, I just get my miles done wherever I can,
usually listening to a podcast or a book. To stay out of traffic I’ll do laps
around the local high school parking lot, seven-tenths of a mile per lap.
As walking adventures go, it’s
been a quiet career, marked more by what some friends unfairly call a
questionable obsession with record-keeping than with fully embracing the gifts
of nature, the kiss of a cool spring morning, all that stuff.
But I’ve got the log. Coldest day: Minus 7 on Jan. 8,
2015. Now that was a morning. And it was 1 degree on Dec. 27, 2017. Probably a
four-sweater walk.
Hottest day: June 26, 2017 in
Phoenix, where it was 93 degrees at 6:30 a.m. But it’s a dry heat.
Earliest? A 3 a.m. run before an
early flight to San Francisco.
It’s been a life of adventure, sure,
but Coogan was a little tired.
“I told you about the dog,
right?” This was a harrowing experience, enough to turn a person’s blood cold,
surely.
“The time you got bit by a dog
in the neighborhood, and he knocked you down?”
“Well, he didn’t knock me down,
exactly. He just startled me a little and I was backing up, and --.”
“And you fell.”
“Well yeah, he came out of
nowhere. Usually, he was kept in by an invisible fence, but this time he just
charged right out.”
“Charged you?”
“Yeah.”
“Bit you, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They had to
come out and call him off.”
“Who was that?”
“Some kid whose dog it was.”
“A kid?”
“Yeah, a little guy. He comes
out and says, ‘Pepper, get over here!’”
Coogan was still staring at the
fire, but he shifted a little and looked for his glass on the table next to us.
“Let me see if I got this
right,” he said. “You’re out running, and you’re attacked by a dog.”
“Right.”
“And a little kid comes out, and
he saves you from – Pepper, was it?”
“Well…”
“The little kid saved you.”
“Yeah, but...”
“From ‘Pepper.’”
“Just came out of nowhere, it
was wild.”
“Yeah, good thing you weren’t
killed.”
“Yeah, well you weren’t there,
Bub. Pepper was a violent offender.”
Coogan hid it well, but underneath
I’m sure he was impressed. We’re both seasoned citizens of the world, I guess
you would say. He looked into the fire and yawned.
“Well,” he said. “You’ve had
some adventures, that’s for sure.”
- John Strauss, 2021
