My column tomorrow deals with the issue of streaks, as in consecutive days doing something good, or not doing something bad. The news peg for this, of course, is that Lent is ending and the folks who have been successfully maintaining deprivation streaks — giving up everything from chocolate to pop to cell phone texting while driving — are able once again to give in to their urges.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am attempting to give up TV for a month. Not for Lent, but just to see how it affects my life.
I think streaks, if they work, are great motivational tools. Whatever it takes, right?
In addition to giving up TV, and filling that time with more productive stuff like reading, playing piano, brushing up on my Spanish and listening to music, I'm also attempting to exercise more. As I write this I've gone running on four consecutive evenings. I'm pretty proud of myself, but I'll never catch up to my P-B colleague Paul Christian.
Paul, one of our sports writers, had nearly reached a streak of 25 when he was forced to take three weeks off about two years ago after he threw his back out while on a humanitarian trip to Tanzania. That would be 25 YEARS, not days! Even while suffering immense pain from a slipped disc, Paul kept running. In fact, he even ran the morning before his surgery. But he had to end the streak and start a new one after the operation. He's nearing the two-year mark.
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Still, 25 years, pales in comparison to the streak being maintained by Steve DeBoer, a Mayo dietitian who has not missed a day of running in more than 40 years.
Paul did a column on Steve last July. At that point, Steve, at age 55, had the fifth longest running streak in the country. He hasn't missed a day running at least one mile, since July 20, 1970. And only three times has he run the minimum mile. Once, it was because he suffered an evulsion fracture that forced him to wear a walking boot, and another time when he had kidney stone surgery.
In addition to keeping his streak alive as long as possible, Steve told Paul last summer, he's pursuing an even loftier goal. He wants to run the distance to the moon, estimated at 240,000 miles. As of July, he'd run 131,000 miles.
Day Five here I come!
