Day 1,
September 18
I’ll be honest. This is the first day and I already messed up. I messed up because I didn’t actually have any ambitions for a month long streak when I set out. This was just a normal once-weekly run. I was going to Heping Park (Peace Park) to do a few loops in the dark, then head back to my dormitory to prepare some lecture notes about vector bundles. The path to Heping park is simple enough. I take a turn in the direction of Saizeriya, or Mcdonalds, but then I made a premature right onto Fuxin Road. On one side of Fuxin road there are big walls blocking one’s view of massive construction sites. On the other is a bunch of small stores. If you keep straight on it, you end up at Dalian road, a pretty major street, and on the other side of it is Heping park.
It’s all very routine. I’ve ran this road dozens of times.
Somehow I felt a stroke of inspiration though. At one of the red lights on Fuxin road, I noticed the sidestreet (which after coming home and consulting a map, I conclude must have been Sunjiatun Road), had a sort of rocky pavement, like what you might see used in an upper middle class person’s suburban patio back in America. I decided to take a left turn.
There trees canopying the sky, and light posts lost in their leaves. I passed a high school gym, where people had climbed up on the fence to look in through the open windows at a basketball game going on.
I got to the end of that road, and made a right. This was Jinxi road, but I didn’t know it. Then I made my mistake. At Duhushan road, I made a left for some reason, when I was supposed to make a right. The geometry beyond that is too confusing to record. I encountered a series of names, like Kongjiang, that I’d seen before but couldn’t place. It dawned on me I was lost, and once lost I figured there was no problem in getting even more lost. I turned down random alleyways, ran past trash cans, and ended up at what felt like a local Edge of the World.
The city of course has no end from the perspective of someone like me running on foot. I’d have to run three or more hours to get anywhere that no longer felt like the city, and it would still be pretty urban. It does, however, have local ends. A road takes you to a massive construction site, and suddenly you have a view unimpeded by skyscrapers. You can’t go into the construction site though. The walls have words on them promising a brighter future. Occasionally the gates open for giant trucks to come out, one by one. Mist rises from over the wall.
On coming to Shanghai, I acquired one of everything. I have a park near my dorm, and another one near my girlfriend’s house. They’re filled with old people, but I can still go there to run. I stopped seeking other parks. I didn’t quite stop exploring — I still take the subway somewhere I’ve never been to before and walk aimlessly pretty regularly. But running, which is perhaps the best way to explore, has become formulaic for me. It’s also become much less frequent.
So somewhere in that mess of roads whose names I vaguely recognized, but whose exact topology was a mystery to me, I thought maybe it would be nice to get back into running in a serious way. Somehow the best way of all seemed to be to run everyday. I figured maybe I could record the things I see, which might be useful in some way, to myself, or perhaps even others.
However, I only turned this into a coherent plan as I lied in bed, trying to fall asleep. That is why I have to confess that as I’m writing this, I’ve already done day 2’s run and written the log for it. One was a night time run, and the other was during the day. I’m only now realizing how different places can feel when you pass through them at night. I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to capture these feelings in words, but I hope at least some glimmer of the imaginations that are produced inside of me each time I see something new on one of these runs comes through to you.