Not all the stories of this blog belong to the present days. Some of them belong to older days. This is one of those.
We are in late 2020. Covid, second round. Italy is locked again, though the rules are slightly different this time. During the first wave we couldn’t leave the house at all. During the second wave the doors were open, but every closed space was shut. Restaurants, bars, offices. Gyms.
Now, if you know me, you know I try to go to the gym every morning. I don’t go because I want to get big. Especially because I do easy stuff at low effort. I go because it’s where I detach. It’s my reset button. The place where I manage my endless todo and separate the noise of one day from the beginning of the next. Take that away from me and you get a lion in a cage. A nervous, restless, slightly unbearable lion.
So there I was. No gym. No indoor training. Nothing.
And I thought: I’ll run.
Let me be clear about something. I hate running. I hate very few things in life, and running is comfortably seated among them. I love crossing the finish line of a marathon. I love the feeling you get after a hard workout, that warm exhaustion that tells you something good happened. But the act itself, the running, the putting one foot in front of the other for kilometers while your lungs remind you they exist? I hate it.
Still, I took a commitment. One hundred days of running. Every single day.
I have this system. A personal set of thresholds that I use to measure whether something counts. Twenty-eight consecutive days. One hundred consecutive days. One full year. And then there’s the last one: a habit, which means every day until I die. If I don’t hit at least one of those marks, it doesn’t enter my personal track record. It doesn’t count. It’s a try, maybe a good try, but it’s not a line on the wall.
So I aimed for one hundred.
Why? Well, for a few reasons. First, I wanted to test the popular theory. People love to say that if you do something every day, you’ll eventually love it. I wanted to see if that was true. Second, I wanted to check if running every day would make me faster in the five to six kilometer range. Third, I needed to get in shape, and when you think long term, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Day after day, I went out. Early mornings. Late nights. Rain. Snow. Cold that cuts through your jacket. Warm evenings where the air smells like summer and the legs feel a little lighter. I ran through all of it.
When I reached one hundred days, I kept going. I didn’t plan to. But the body was still moving, the routine was alive, and I figured I would push until the strength left. That happened at day one hundred and forty. Just a little bit beyond the target.
So. The results.
Did I start to love it? No. I still hate it. Whoever tells you that doing something every day for three months will make you fall in love with it is telling you something that sounds nice and means nothing, at least for me. It’s one of those motivational phrases that looks great on a poster and collapses the moment it meets reality. One hundred and forty days later, running was still running. And I still hated it.
Did I get faster? Also no. And this one I can explain. There are real, specific ways to improve your running time. Interval training. Sprint work. Squatting. Jumping rope. Cleaning up your diet, maybe losing a few kilos. These are things that actually change your numbers. Running the same distance, at the same effort, every day, is not one of them. You’re repeating a pattern, not breaking it. Your body adapts, your pace flattens, and the clock stays roughly where it was on day fifteen.
But there were also positive sides.
You learn your body. Not in the way you learn it at the gym, where the mirror tells you what changed. You learn it from inside. You learn what tired actually feels like versus what lazy feels like. You learn the difference between a muscle that needs rest and a mind that needs a push. You learn your breathing. Your rhythm. The way your shoulders drop when you finally stop fighting the distance and just let it happen.
You learn the songs in your AirPods differently. Some of them become tied to specific runs. A street corner, a sunset, a morning where the city was still asleep and you were the only one moving.
And then there’s the willpower. Running in the snow when every cell in your body says stay in bed. Running at 10 pm in the evening because the day got away from you but the streak didn’t. Running in the rain and arriving home soaked and somehow satisfied. Each of those moments is a small deposit in a bank account that pays you back later, in ways you don’t expect, in situations that have nothing to do with running.
And at the end of it all, you are proud of yourself.
I love that feeling of being quietly proud of myself. I mean it the way someone loves the feeling of a clean house, a finished book, or a promise kept. It’s a quiet pride. The kind that doesn’t need applause.
And I knew, even back then, on some rainy evening in 2021, that one day I would tell this story.
So here I am.
P.S. I’m not the kind of person who takes selfies every time I go to the gym. It’s just not my thing. But I suppose a moment like that deserved to be celebrated. So here I am, on 14 February 2021, just after completing my 100th run, surrounded by snow.
