What’s the deal with micro runs?

The run that isn’t actually a run, but is still a run, can be called a micro run.

“Sir! Sir! What’s your rush?” The street charity fundraising woman in the blue vest has no hope. Coffee in hand, I pick up the pace and zip past her, dodging two men in business suits and veering around a woman walking a small dog. My free arm pumps back and forth as I focus on maintaining my running form without spilling my drink. My chest heaving from the effort, I slow to a quick walk and duck into the arcade that leads to my office.

I’m not actually in a hurry. Years ago, I developed an odd habit of pretending I was in a rush, as an excuse to run everywhere. I run if I’m early, I run if I’m on time and I definitely run if I’m late.

I sprint the three minutes it takes me to get from my house to the subway. I run the one block from the subway to my office. I race for coffee and boot it at high speed to run lunchtime errands. Some days after work, I run to my run at a track club. I run from the run to meet friends at a bar for a drink, and then I run from the bar after a couple of beers back to the subway.

Every few months I go to a hospital for eczema treatments. Hospital parking is stupidly expensive, so I park about a kilometre away for free and do a time trial to my appointment.

When I’m sprinting these micro runs, I’m often wearing business attire, or at least a nice shirt, pants and dress shoes. I choose my work shoes based on how good they are for running. They must be light, flexible and have good traction. No fancy wood-soled clunkers allowed.

I’ve been doing this for at least 15 years, but have never tracked the mileage. You could call them junk miles, or maybe garbage metres. If I tried to log them, they would look something like this:

Tuesday: 806m, 365m, 240m, 240m, 1,023m, 102m, 57m, 105m, 75m, 424m, 365m, 806m, 259m, 259m, 1,015m, 1,018m, 378m, 368m, 123m, 290m. The thing is, if you do think about the sum of all these garbage metres, they start to add up in a big way and seem a lot less junky. By my rough calculations, some days my micro runs cover a full 20k and add up to about 50,000 kilometres over the years, almost all of it at a fast pace.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to throw away my garbage metres and, instead, treasure them as little gems of fitness?

So if you see a guy flying down the road in business casual clothes, looking like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible (without the good looks and creepy intensity), that’s probably just me, on my way to being 10 minutes early for a meeting.