For the last thirty-odd years, I've been running. Through cities, forests, beaches, and mountains. Sometimes to clear my head, sometimes to provoke thought. Always to feel alive.
Running is the only activity that makes me feel both timeless and painfully aware of every second. And, being me, I've been meticulously recording it. Every distance, every time, every route. The archive stretches back to the early 1990s — a timeline written in sweat and kilometres.
As with any dataset, patterns begin to emerge. For example, I now run longer distances per year than ever before. I also generally run slower than in the past. The enthusiasm and willpower are still there, but the years now insist on setting the tempo.
True, I have no records of the first twenty years of my life. Every run I log now compensates for that unmeasured time. I run for every day I've ever lived — for my school years, my first steps, even for the time when I lay content at my mother's breast. Every day, measured or not.
The script that computes this diagram takes the cumulative distance I have run for each day of my life, and divides it by my actual age in days. The result is a long decimal number. This number changes every day, albeit imperceptibly. But over large stretches of time the change becomes tangible. So for example around the year 2000, only a decade into my (recorded) running period, the average run distance was about 0.049 km (mere 49 metres) per day of my life. In the year 2010 it was some 0.176 km, and then 0.624 km in 2020.
Every day I don't run, the number shrinks. Every run pushes it back up again. It's a cat and mouse game between effort and time. A rebellion against entropy.
Before visualizing it, I imagined a series of heroic little peaks and anxious troughs. Local maxima when I outdid myself and reached a high number of kilometres per day of life, but then I lagged behind in temporary exasperation.
Instead, the line barely trembles.
Its primary characteristic is a steady growth over time.
It would be nice to cross the symbolic value of 1 km per day of life. But it is not an easy task. Despite my efforts, with time ticking, the average distance climbs only sluggishly. Sometimes it makes me think of Zeno's paradox — an aging Achilles chasing a tortoise, closing in but never meant to catch up.
But while the goal is absurd, it is realistic. There is a finish line with a large, defiant "1 km" at its centre. As long as my legs and lungs obey, there's a chance to reach it. The pursuit has become its own reward. So I don't give up. My life is many things. One of them is the pursuit of the One.
On the surface, it's just a vanity project tracking an exotic metric born of a runner's obsession.
But this number, the visualization, and the story they tell are, in fact, inherently autobiographical. Some people compose symphonies, paint, or raise statues. Some build empires, others destroy them. I choose to run — to draw a humble line winding through time itself.
It's also a proof of life, one dot at a time. If I ever stop running, the line will reveal it. It will crest for one last time — and then slowly fall, forever. An obituary in the form of a diagram.
Perhaps the most striking thing the visualization reveals is defiance — the refusal to lie still. Each run is a small protest against decline. The pace slows, but the will endures. And when, one day, the curve finally stops climbing, it will still be speaking. Not of speed or glory. It will tell a story of a race that never needed to be won. But it was meant to be run.
In pursuit of an average (GPT)