I wake up in our dark, quiet hotel room in Lijiang in China’s Yunnan province. My family is still asleep. I’ve already laid out my clothes the night before — a Nike Aeroswift singlet, shorts, arm sleeves, gloves, and a jacket — so I can get dressed without turning on any lights. I check the weather on my phone: 35°F now, climbing to around 40°F by the time I’m halfway through my run.
Principle: dress for the second half
Early in my running life, I overdressed. Now I check the forecast and dress for how it will feel midway through the run, not at the start. My rough guide: 55°F and above — singlet and shorts; 45–55°F — add arm sleeves and gloves; below 45°F — long sleeves; below freezing — add a jacket. I layer so I can remove layers and tie then around my waist if I overdressed.
I grab my Nathan ExoDraw handheld bottle that I filled the night before with Skratch. I drop SIS gel into a pocket of my Nike Dri-FIT ADV shorts. They have four gel pockets in addition to a zipper phone pocket. In marathons, I wear 262 shorts with plenty of space for my 8 gels.
I eat a Rice Krispie treat standing by the window, looking out at the rooftops of the old town in the dark. Then I pull on my CEP socks, which have just enough compression and thickness to work in this cold without extra layers. I lace up my New Balance shoes — wide feet mean I’ve been a New Balance runner for years, I can order them online without trying them on and they always fit. Then, I slip out the door.
Principle: minimize what I carry
I’ve experimented with phones, extra gear, various setups. Now I keep it simple: gels and hydration in my shorts or handheld bottle, and if I want audio, I use my Apple Watch and AirPods in transparency mode so I stay aware of my surroundings.
Both of my wrists have watches on them. I’ve gotten a few raised eyebrows at this, but I’ve never found a single watch that does everything I need, so I stopped trying.
The Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar is my running watch of choice. I’ve used Garmin for my entire running career. What it does better than anything else is let me follow a route and follow a structured workout at the same time. Most of my runs are structured even when they’re easy — a typical run might be zone one for the first mile, zone two for the main block, zone one to cool down.
I chose this model partly for the LCD screen. In direct sunlight, it’s more readable than OLED. The solar panels are a bonus I don’t rely on, but if I’m caught with a low battery I’ll leave the watch face-up on a windowsill to pull in a bit more charge.
The heart rate monitoring is better than older models, though I still get occasional bad reads — wrist-based optical HR has a known limitation with darker skin tones.
The Apple Watch on my other wrist is cellular. If the run goes long, I can send a message to the family. More importantly, it’s how I listen to audiobooks — I download them directly to the watch, put in my AirPods Pro, and run.
Before I head out, I spend a few seconds on my Garmin choosing the route and workout. The night before, I built the route in Strava — I’ll do this anywhere I travel, using its autogenerated routes based on terrain preferences and distance. The heatmap data means it biases towards the most popular roads. The route synced to the watch automatically.
I start moving. The first miles are slow. It takes me a few minutes to calibrate my pace.
Principle: run most miles easy
I follow Matt Fitzgerald’s 80/20 principle: 80–90% of my running is zone one or zone two. The hard efforts — weekly hill sprints and threshold runs — are genuinely hard and occasionally leave me with feeling sore. But the majority is easy to prevent injury and maximize improvement.
The old town of Lijiang is empty at this hour. The entry gates haven’t started collecting fees yet and the tourists won’t arrive for hours. I run through narrow stone lanes past shopkeepers unlocking their storefronts.
iPhone 14 Pro · 24mm · f/1.8 ·
1/121 · ISO 125
I love the quiet busyness of a place before it opens itself up to visitors. The sun is coming up revealing the mountains.
iPhone 14 Pro · 24mm · f/1.8 ·
1/372 · ISO 80
I can see the outlines of the old architecture, the layered rooftops, the stream that runs through the center of town catching the early light.
iPhone 14 Pro · 24mm · f/1.8 ·
1/154 · ISO 64
Principle: use running to explore
Whenever I travel, I run. The pace of running is ideal for getting to know a place — fast enough to cover real ground, slow enough to notice coffee shops and side streets that I’d blow past in a car. A five to ten-mile run through a city gives me a genuinely good map of what’s worth revisiting.
Lijiang’s old towns at dawn, before anyone else is awake, is a version I wouldn’t have found any other way.
By mile 3 I pull out my gel. I take one every three to four miles on anything six miles and above. The SIS gels are my standard. Between those and the Skratch in my bottle — which has electrolytes and a bit of sugar — I have enough to run long without ever feeling hungry. I’ll carry Skratch packets if I need to refill my bottle.
The run today is easy, so fuel and hydration needs are minimal.
Principle: cross-train
Going into Chicago Marathon training this year, I’m planning to bring in more afternoon cycling as a form of doubles — a run in the morning, a ride in the afternoon — rather than doubling up on running miles. The bike gives me more without adding more impact.
Five times a week I lift weights for twenty minutes. Running creates imbalances; lifting corrects them before they become injuries. I treat some of it as loaded dynamic stretching. Twice a week I ride on Zwift, which adds cardiovascular load without adding impact.
Running like this — the cross-training, the lifting, the long aerobic base — is a system that only works if the pieces fit together.
Running isn’t just a way to see places anew, it’s how I find a special mode of thinking. The easy miles create a rhythm that lets ideas surface and recede on their own schedule. I’ll be working through something I’m writing, then twenty minutes later I’ll come back to it from an angle I didn’t expect. The breakthroughs happen in the gaps between engagement. I solve as many problems on runs as I do at a desk.
The hard efforts — the weekly hill sprints that leave me with the kind of soreness you’d expect from lifting, not running — are a different thing entirely. These moments help me practice sitting with pain and focus on pushing through.
Running also cleaned up the rest of my life in ways I didn’t anticipate. I used to run to outrun a poor diet. Now I eat well because it makes the running better, and the running makes the sleep better. When I get to the end of the day physically tired, I don’t lie awake overthinking. I just fall asleep.
And so the cycle begins again at night. I lay out my clothes. I fill my water bottle if needed and leave it on the counter. I set a Rice Krispie treat by the door.
Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this. Images in the cover image are Olympic pictograms and are property of their respective owners.