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Running at dawn was so satisfying, I did it the next morning, and the next. After three days, I had a little streak going. That's what runners call it when they run every day for many days, or years, in a row. The longest-running active streak belongs to seventy-three year-old Jon Sutherland from Utah, who's been running every day for 20,114 days and counting—-more than fifty-five years.

A streak has a natural length, a clear beginning and end. The important thing is to let it be what it will be without forcing it. This is the tricky part. Though the definition of a streak is unbroken effort, every streak is meant to end. If you get too stubborn to let it go, you'll kill the thing it's supposed to teach you. You don't necessarily know what this is while you're in the middle of the streak, but once it's over and you have some distance from it, the lesson may become clear. If you think you understand the meaning of the streak while you're doing it, think again.

 

 

I'd never run a streak before or even thought of doing one, but after five days, I couldn't imagine not running up the mountain. It wasn't the novelty of it. It was the fact that I didn't have to decide. Doing the same thing every day is easier than having to choose what to do, until it becomes harder, and that's when you know it's time to do something different. It made me think of the Zen saying, "The way isn't hard to follow. Just avoid picking and choosing."

Because I didn't have to expend energy choosing where to run, my way was clear. Up the mountain and back down again. I could usually make it in time to help make our daughters, Pippa and Maisy, breakfast and get ready for summer camp. They were five and seven that summer, and sometimes they'd just be waking up when I got home.

By the end of the first week, my quads were sore, and my Achilles tendons had begun to balk at the daily eighteen-hundred-foot climb up the mountain. Still, I had no plans to stop, even though I knew at some point I must. I just didn't know yet how it would end. I didn't stop after ten days when my ankles were so tight they felt like coiled springs. Not after I tripped over a root and skinned my knee on a rock. I washed the dirt from the abrasion, got up the next morning, and went back to the mountain; I memorized the root and kept an eye out for it so I didn't fall again.

I was writing a book about my father that summer, and running up the mountain was how I got to my desk each day. Like most rituals, it contained an element of superstition; if I ran up Atalaya and had a good day writing, then I had to do it again the next day to ensure the same result. Superstitions are entertaining, but at their core they imply a lack of trust: you think you depend on consistent, external elements in order to produce your best work, when in fact, it comes from within.

A central principle of Zen is constancy—making continuous effort. This is the Buddhist version of a streak. You show up every day to meet your life as it is, no matter the weather, your mood, whether you want to or not. You build a structure around meditation—where you sit, when, and for how long—and you keep going. You can make anything a continuous practice, an expression of constancy—running up a mountain or writing a book or baking bread.

"We cannot keep still," Suzuki Roshi wrote. "We have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant and careful, and alert. Put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully. Once you know how the dough becomes bread, you will understand enlightenment."

Running up the mountain was putting the dough in the oven every day and watching it rise. Gradually it would become something different, I just didn't know what.

* * *

I'd spent all winter and early spring training for a race, a hundred-kilometer ultramarathon in the hills outside of San Francisco. Though I'd run the distance once, a year earlier, it seemed foolish, implausible. There are two ways to interpret such trepidation: one is to be frightened, the other curious. I decided that my inability to imagine myself running sixty-two miles was a good sign: it meant that running was fresh for me again, that nothing was assumed, and therefore anything was possible.

I decided to believe this.

Many days I ran across a dry, dusty mesa just outside of Santa Fe, eight miles east of the Rio Grande. The mesa is mostly level, with small rolling hills and negligible elevation change, the opposite of a mountain. The trees there are bushes, really, hardly higher than my head, and offer very little shade. Some days it was unpleasant and windy, and I would set out to get it over with as fast as I could. I'd flick my wrist a dozen times a minute to see if I was running a 7:54 pace or 8:01. If I could rush through my run, I'd be done for the day. I could go home and write and get to school by three o'clock to meet the girls, who were growing so fast they'd soon no longer need me to walk them home. I had to hurry to be with them, and then I had to slow time so it wouldn't end.

This was impossible, of course. It would never work. Trying would only bring me more heartache.

Success in running is measured by speed, but I'd always struggled with this aspect of it. Ever since I was young, running had been a way of writing and seeing—a way to slow time and slide inside of it. It was like a magic trick: your body could be running fast, but your mind was moving very slowly, opening wide and inhaling the world. If I wasn't careful, racing would strangle the very thing I loved most about running.