My running streak

How it started

In early May of 2020, I was working from home and—like many people experimenting with sourdough starters—was looking for a challenge to take my mind off the pandemic. I’ve always enjoyed running: I ran cross country in high school, and I’ve been a casual runner off and on ever since. I’d heard about something called a “running streak”: you run at least one mile a day for as many consecutive days as you can. Could I do it? I decided to give it a try. 

Today—October 26, 2025—marks 2,000 consecutive days of running at least a mile a day. That's almost five and a half years. My daily average is 3.6 miles. Some days I just clock a mile, and other days I go much longer: on 18 days I ran at least 15 miles. I’ve run daily through six rounds of chemotherapy and four cases of COVID. I’ve jogged around airports. It’s been a blast on many days and a slog on some. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it (I’ve heard rest days are a good thing!), I’m glad I’m doing it.  

Running through rough times

At the end of 2023, I was diagnosed with a cancer of the lymphatic system. Even though the prognosis was relatively positive (my doctor told me there was an 80 percent chance the treatment would send the cancer into remission), it meant six rounds of grueling chemotherapy: I spent the better part of a day getting infused with chemicals, a week feeling crummy, then two weeks trying to forget about it before starting the cycle all over again. At that point, I’d already been running daily for three and a half years. I thought: If I really have to take a day off, I will. But what if I could just eke out a mile every day at a slow jog (not a walk, but not much of a run either). On chemo days I’d wake up early and jog a mile or so before treatment. Then, on recovery days, sometimes all I could manage was a mile on the treadmill at home. But it felt good to push myself just a little bit, even on those tough days, and to retain this little piece of myself when I felt so foggy in my brain, so not myself in many ways.

In early 2020, I traveled to South Africa to speak at a conference. On the flight there, I started feeling symptoms of COVID: extreme fatigue and a deep, nasty cough. I got to my hotel and crashed. The next day, I slept off and on until late into the night. At 11pm, I thought: It’s now or never for a run. Thankfully, my hotel consisted of a series of little bungalows, so I could exit directly to the outdoors, with no one around to infect so late at night. I started a slow jog around the hotel grounds; my lungs felt terrible, but I could manage. In the distance, I saw a couple of geese. While I was still far away, the geese hopped up and started racing towards me, squawking and honking. I was terrified, turned tail, and picked up my pace to a run back to my bungalow to escape those crazy birds. Thankfully, I’d hit a mile. (The next morning, I looked out the glass front door of my room and they had wandered up to my door, no doubt seeking to finish the job they’d started the night before. True story!)

Inconvenient runs

I sometimes travel internationally for work. On my way to Kenya in 2023, I had a layover at the Abu Dhabi airport. I jogged a slow 1.23 miles around the terminal, sometimes jogging in place behind crowds of people.

Earlier this year I flew Washington, DC to Singapore. I departed Washington on Saturday evening (Washington time) and didn't land until Monday morning (Singapore time). Even I was wary of trying to jog a mile up and down the aisles of an airplane, so I tried a different solution. I jogged a mile in Washington on Saturday morning, then another around the San Francisco airport on Saturday evening during a layover (already Sunday in Singapore!), then another after landing in Singapore on Monday morning (still Sunday in Washington), and then another on Monday evening in Singapore. Somehow, among all that, I feel confident that I got a Saturday, a Sunday, and a Monday run.

The long runs

Earlier this year, I had a few days between jobs. One morning I woke up at 2am, drove down to the Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge on the Virginia shore, and jogged 13.1 miles up the beach and then 13.1 miles back (4 hours 52 minutes). It was beautiful, and for an hour at a time, I didn't see a single person. 

In June of 2024, I had finished my last chemotherapy treatment a couple of months earlier and had a surprise free day. (It was a holiday at work and I'd expected to drive my kids to a camp all day, but a friend took over the driving at the last minute.) So I thought: I wonder if I could jog a marathon today. I went to the grocery store, bought some Gatorade, granola bars, and fruit snacks, parked by a trail near my house, and started jogging. 4 hours 57 minutes and 26.2 miles later, I finished my first post-chemo marathon.

Another time I was in Mozambique for work and my meetings fell through on my last morning. What better way to see the city of Maputo than by jogging around it? 26.5 miles later (5 hours 20 minutes), I'd seen more than on any previous visit!

I've done a couple of official marathons as well, the Richmond Marathon in 2024 (3 hours 53 minutes) and the Greenway Trail Marathon earlier this year (5 hours 50 minutes).

Wrapping up

It's been fun to run in lots of different places. Over the last 2,000 days, I've run in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK, Uruguay, and Zambia. Plus a lot of states across the United States: California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, and Virginia, maybe others. I enjoy running with friends, and I also enjoy running solo. I’ve lost count of how many audiobooks I’ve listened to while running outdoors—or how many movies I’ve watched on treadmills. 

I'm not sure how much longer I'll manage a daily running streak. But I'll enjoy the ride run as long as it lasts!

Technical appendix: how I manage my streak

As Runner’s World puts it, “the rules [of a running streak] are simple: run at least one mile every single day on either the roads, a track, over hill and dale, or on a treadmill.” Over time, I’ve evolved a number of guidelines for how I measure my streak.

1. I only count the run if it includes at least one continuous mile. So if I run half a mile in the morning and half a mile in the evening, I would not count it. Each run has to be at least a mile long to count.

2. If I run outside, I record whatever Strava (or whatever running app I’m using at the time) tells me minus 0.02 miles. That 0.02 adjustment is for a little bit of error with stops and starts.

3. If I run on a treadmill, I put a couple of penalties in place. (Come on, man, get outside!) First, I record whatever the treadmill shows minus 0.1 miles. Second, I almost always run at 3% incline. 

Using these guidelines, over the last 2,000 days my average daily distance is 3.64 miles, my median is 3.50 miles, and my mode is 3.50 miles.