Last Friday, I broke my running streak.
I had a hunch it was going to happen. We were leaving on our annual backcountry ski trip to High Camp Hut, at 11,000 feet in the San Juan Mountains, which was presently buried in five feet of snow.
“I think I’m going to break my streak,” I told my strength coach, Mark, before I left.
I’ve known Mark for two years. During this time, I healed from a broken ankle, walked the last 50 miles of a 100-mile ultra marathon, and recovered from knee surgery. He raised his eyebrows and grinned. “I have a feeling you won’t.”
There’s a central concept in Zen called continuous practice. It means making positive effort for the good every day—whether in writing, meditation, cooking, coding, tennis, or piano. You don’t practice to improve your skills or gain something from the experience, but to apply yourself with determination and stamina, open to wherever the process will lead you.
But continuous practice doesn’t mean rigidly clutching to routine. Sometimes we have to let go to keep going.
To reach High Camp in winter, you have to ski three miles uphill on an unplowed forest road. The morning we went in, it had snowed a few inches overnight. If you strayed off-trail, you could punch in up to your knees. I’d packed my sneakers and my trail spikes, figuring that once I got to the hut, I could run back along the road to keep my streak alive. It would be arduous and slow, but I could do it.
I didn’t.
Instead, I skied. My friends and I went out before sunset, cutting a leisurely three-mile loop through forest and meadows, telling each other secrets the whole way. Except for our voices, the forest was silent and utterly still. When we glided out of the woods just before dark we could see, across the meadow, a wisp of smoke curling out of the sauna’s chimney; in the kitchen, our friend Win was making spaghetti. The children—eleven of them, just in from sledding—were a giant jumbled pile of wool socks, red cheeks, and long johns, squished together on the two sofas in front of the wood stove.
I thought, briefly, wistfully, about my streak. There was still time to slog out a mile by headlamp, but why? Just because I decided, on a random Monday in November, that I would run every day in a row for who knows how long? It had been the right thing then, and for all the days since, but here, high in the snow-cloaked San Juans, it no longer was.
“A streak has a natural length, a clear beginning and end,” I write in Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World. In June 2016, I ran up and down the mountain near my house every day. It was the month before I shattered my leg in a river accident. Looking back on it now, my streak seemed almost prescient, as though part of me knew that my running wouldn’t, couldn’t, last. “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.”
When I saw Mark this week, I told him, “I broke my streak.”
“Good,” he said, smiling. “What do you think you learned from it?”
I’d been thinking about this very question since getting home from High Camp. I started my streak to see if I could heal my body for running by running. I’d gotten stronger in those three months, inside and out. I wanted to practice beginner’s mind, to approach running anew, and retrain my body and mind to respect short distances.
Most of all, though, my streak taught me about endings. How to know when it’s time to change course. Running every day made me strong enough to not run every day. It was what led me here: to this very morning in late February when the light was just right and I woke up, filled with possibility and ideas. When I got to the trailhead, the sun was high and bright, just like my mood, and my mind said, let’s do this, and my body said yes.
I ran five miles interspersed with 20-second hills. I was only going to do four intervals. I can’t remember the last time I did speed work. But my legs remembered. They knew what to do. I ran twenty instead. I felt something I hadn’t in months—not just turnover or speed but purpose. Focus. I knew this feeling: It was the curiosity of beginning again.
On our second day at High Camp, we’d followed ski tracks up to the base of Sheep Mountain, crossing the abandoned logging roads we’d run in September at Mountain Flow Camp. I’d let my streak go. It felt natural to swoop along the forest loop with my friends, to wedge into a sled with Steve and barrel down the long hill, whooping the whole way, and to carve fresh ski turns into the powdery slope and boot-pack back up, over and over, until dark.
We have a saying in our family: High Camp always delivers. In the ten years we’ve been going there—pulling toddlers on ski pulks, and later taking three hours to cajole kids on skinny skis, in the middle of a snowstorm, our time in the wilderness has always provided us with just what we needed: whether three feet of fresh snow, starlit nights, or always, the love of family and friends and the deep peace of mountains, where you can finally hear your own heart.
On our last morning, we woke to a dusting of new snow, though none had been forecast. High Camp always delivers. As always, our time there had gone far too fast. We flew back down to our cars in a fraction of the time it took us to ski up, eyes forward, into our next new beginning.
Become a paying subscriber of work in process
and beginning Tuesday, you’ll receive an additional weekly post. This week’s topic is imperfection. Subscriptions start as low as $5 a month and come with lots of perks, including discounts on upcoming flow camps, first dibs on registration, and more.
The countdown is on!
Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World comes out 4.16.24, and there’s still time to pre-order and have it delivered to your doorstep on pub day!
For more tidbits & treasures, check out my very fun podcast conversation with Trail Runner Nation, live today wherever you listen!
Finally, I’m thrilled to unveil my new website this week, with a fresh design and updated content, plus all the info on upcoming Flow Camps—including a women’s retreat at High Camp, Sept 5-8, book tour events, and other opportunities to practice with me or do a self-directed writing residency at my “little house” retreat in Santa Fe.
Happy Friday & have a great weekend!
warmest, katie