What I learned running nearly 100,000 miles. 2,686 to go.

It's getting close now. You don’t solve your life while running. You uncoil it.

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A Life in Miles: Approaching 100,000, One Step At A Time.

As I write this, my personal odometer reads 97,314 miles. Just 2,686 shy of that neat, audacious six-figure milestone: 100,000. A number so vast it feels like it belongs in a NASA report, not a runner’s log. For context, that’s more than four laps around the Earth — a fact I regularly trot out at dinner parties and am met with equal parts awe and discombobulation.

This life-on-the-run began inauspiciously: a shy, dyslexic kid in the English countryside, running more from angst than for medals. Sport was my escape hatch — a way to find pride when long division and spelling was not going my way. I ran, cycled, scooted, and occasionally sprinted for the school bus, though rarely caught it. My friends lived five miles or more away. Naturally, I jogged to them. Friendship required cardio.

At around age eleven, I started keeping a log — a running diary, if you will. (Long before Excel spreadsheets and GPS watches, we had the analog marvel that was the notebook.) It all began, oddly enough, with Mr. Benson, my headteacher and accidental muse, who once remarked that I was “not a natural runner.” But he added — with that slight pause teachers reserve for life-shaping footnotes — that I had grit. And grit, as we now know, is the gateway drug to endurance sport.

Running is radical reconnection. The ordinary becomes cinematic. It’s like walking through life with the saturation turned up.

That comment nestled quietly in my subconscious, and like any good British child with a deep love of stationery and personal validation, I took it upon myself to become a runner — or at least, to record every attempt as if I already were one.

My early entries were charmingly chaotic: bike miles, race results, lap times, weather notes, personal bests, and occasionally, my lunch. If it could be logged in columns, I logged it. My notebooks were obsessive, meticulous, and alarmingly tidy — a kind of papery security blanket. It wasn’t until years later that I stumbled upon Excel, and later, the seductive data visualization vortex that is Strava. But even now, I still keep handwritten ledgers made of recycled paper, each mile inscribed with the sort of care usually reserved for holy scripture or tax records.

These numbers — 97,314 and counting — are not just digits. They're footsteps of self-worth, of coping, of proving, of becoming. They're a breadcrumb trail from that gangly, nerdy kid to the person still lacing up their shoes nearly 100,000 miles later. It's not an exact science, no. But it's exact enough.

So, as I inch toward this oddly spiritual milestone of 100,000. The pointless, arbitrary, and utterly irresistible number is getting bigger and closer. Enlightenment, probably not, likely just blisters — but it’s been one hell of a journey.

Some people measure their lives in years, others in milestones. I have, somewhat absurdly, measured mine in miles—100,000 of them, give or take a few miscounted laps. Over the past 25 years or so my little legs have propelled me through every country in the world, through skyscraper cities, poverty stricken mud hut villages, desserts, ice fields, volcanos, chaotic street markets, busy highways, along narrow deadly ledges, across trickling streams, and mostly through silence and ponder. The tally, if you’re the sort who cares, averages out to about 11 miles a day. That’s the math. But life, as you quickly learn out on the road, doesn’t always work in neat equations. It’s been largely bolstered by recent expeditions and big challenges. So that certainly helped the mileage account.

Running that far doesn’t make you a guru. It doesn’t give you better abs (trust me). But it does peel back your layers like miles of onion skin, exposing all the soft, ridiculous, magnificent truths of being human. The kind you don’t always get sitting still.

At first, once my feet were in their rhythm, like most fledgling runners, I ran to prove something. To look better, to be faster, to outpace whatever itch was creeping up behind me. I was chasing time, youth, validation, perhaps even a better body. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. Running stopped being an activity and started becoming a lens—a way of seeing the world that no longer hinged on achievement but on presence.

There’s a particular kind of alchemy that occurs when you’ve been moving under your own power for long enough. You begin to notice details that non-runners might miss: the way the light hits wet tarmac at 6:00 a.m., how city streets breathe before the world fully wakes up, the eerie calm of snowfall collecting on your eyelashes running in the mountains, the smell of dawn. Running turns the world inside out. The ordinary becomes cinematic. It’s like walking through life with the saturation turned up.

And your mind, once so eager to rattle off shopping lists and unresolved conversations, eventually quiets. Not right away. At first, it’s just as loud and petty and neurotic as ever. But if you keep going—through the ache, through the doubt—it starts to hush. Not because you’ve conquered your thoughts, but because you’ve outrun the need to control them. You don’t solve your life while running. You uncoil it.