My walking obsession, or "Did I tell you about the time….'

 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