One evening, a few Septembers ago, I sat alone in my bedroom quietly crying. I could barely walk up a flight of stairs. It was already dark. There were fewer than four hours left in the day. When my boyfriend came in, I tried to compose myself, which only made me cry harder. He asked if my fever had spiked. If I needed Tylenol. If he should call someone.
“I haven’t run,” I said.
He stared at me. “That’s why you’re crying?”
I nodded. I’d just tested positive for COVID for the first time, but I wasn’t crying because of the fever or the nausea or the ache in my hips and lower back. I was crying because I was three and a half years into a running streak I’d started, accidentally, during the pandemic, and I was about to lose it. By then, I had run every day since April 27, 2020: through heat advisories and travel days and negative temperatures; through grief; through minor injuries; through days when I didn’t want to leave the house and days when leaving the house felt like survival.
