us, the wild

We run before the city wakes.

There is an hour between the last bar closing and the first bus. It belongs to nobody. Nobody is watching it and nobody is selling it back to us. We take it.

Running was here long before the watch. Before the leaderboard, before the weekly summary, before the small grey graph that decides whether the week was any good.

Those things measure something that cannot be measured, and then ask us to feel about the number. We have felt about the number. It is not the thing.

We are not against the effort. We are against the accounting of it.

No splits. No pace. Nothing to upload. If it happened and nobody logged it, it still happened. The cold was still cold.

The streets are empty at that hour. The air is sharp and the light is sodium and the city belongs to us in a way it never does at eight. We are not training for anything. We are out because out is better than in.

We make what we needed and could not find. Dark, quiet, built for the hour and nothing else. When something stops being useful we stop making it.

Come or do not. We will be out either way.