Further Chills

Another zero-degree morning, another run, thirty-one days in a row.

The psychology of the streak-running phenomenon, now that I’ve been made aware of streaks as a popular phenomenon, is brilliant and insidious. I’m at 31 now; that means that if I were to take tomorrow off, it would be more than a month till I regained the ground I’ve built up. The higher the streak gets, the more intense the pressure not to break it, in a cycle of heightened stakes. I feel the temptation to break my own streak this week just to dispel that haunting duress.

2 thoughts on “Further Chills

  1. There’s an annual strava/reddit Advent run group and I’ve participated in it several years. That’s the longest I’ve tried for, but this year I went ahead and made it Advent through Epiphany. Worked out well. I might try a Pentecost streak sometime, but probably not this year.

    1. Well done! I ordinarily just make myself run every day (bar weather, as Saturday, or bad health or whatever); if I know on rising that the first thing I must do is put on my trainers and run, it happens almost automatically. So extra running for a liturgical season isn’t really operative for me, though of course it would be a good motivator for someone who was just starting, or who needed an extra incentive.

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