Anniversaries, like the two masks of the theater, can come with laughter and celebration or tragedy and tears.
Today, July 7, I will wear both masks simultaneously.
First, the celebratory anniversary. Or, as the United States Running Streak Association terms it, my “Streakiversary.” Simply put, I have run a minimum of 3.1 miles every day, without fail, for the past 20 years. The math adds up to 7,306 consecutive days and 83,337 miles, more than three times around the Earth, and more than 100 pairs of shoes, for a daily average of 11.4 miles.
With humility, I must point out that 106 runners have USRSA-recognized Streaks longer than mine, including four surpassing 50 years!
Sometimes we don’t fully appreciate something until it is taken from us. So it was for me with running after I was rear-ended at a stoplight by a drunk driver speeding 65 mph. While I was fortunate to have walked away from the wreckage, my neck required a diskectomy and fusion of two vertebrae, and I feared I would never run another marathon.
Six long months later, my doc finally gave me clearance to go on a short run of one mile. I gleefully, also slowly and painfully, went three-plus miles. Before I knew it, I had unintentionally run 100 consecutive days and decided to try for 365 and like Forrest Gump just kept going.
As with U.S. postal workers, I have not been detoured by rain nor sleet nor snow. Nor by injury and illness, Covid-19 and a kidney stone, wildfire smoke and a wildly painful cracked rib.
I have run at all hours to accommodate family plans, vacations, time zones. On the streets of London after a long travel day, I kept The Streak alive as midnight neared, causing one Englishman to holler, “Hey, bloke! You must be a Yank ’cause you’re bloody crazy.”
Crazy, perhaps, but psychoanalysis might reveal something else at play. While I did not realize it until a couple years later, it now seems beyond coincidence that my Streak began on July 7, 2003 – the due date of my wife’s and my third child. A baby lost to miscarriage. Was my Streak’s birth a subconscious response to death?
The pregnancy was a surprise, a wonderful one infused with champagne bubbles, but because my wife was 44, a high-risk one infused with worry. Only after making it safely into the second trimester did we exhale and allow ourselves to get fully excited.
Then the heartbreak of no heartbeat.
“You can try again,” family and friends say at such times. And: “At least you already have two healthy children.” They all mean well, but the heart does not listen to rationalizations.
We chose not to know the gender, perhaps trying to protect our hearts just in case, although we had picked out Sienna for a girl. A few years later, my wife had a powerful dream of a child on a playground swing. The girl, the same age our child would have then been, smiled and waved. Rather than being overwhelmed by renewed grief, my wife felt deeply comforted.
Surely thus influenced, even though it came a few years thereafter, I too had a real-as-can-be dream where I was running on the beach bike path, perhaps my very favorite route, alongside a child the same age ours would have then been.
She was smiling and happy.
I will think of heras I extend my Streak today, on her summer birthday that never was, imagining Sienna also turning 20, my eyes assuredly as salty as the sea.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
