Chasing the One

Obsession log^#

In pursuit of an average (GPT)

For the last thirty-odd years, I've been running. Through cities, forests, beaches, and mountains. Sometimes to clear my head, sometimes to provoke thought. Always to feel alive.

Running is the only activity that makes me feel both timeless and painfully aware of every second. And, being me, I've been meticulously recording it. Every distance, every time, every route. My archive stretches back to the early 1990s — a timeline traced in sweat and kilometres.

As with any dataset, patterns emerge. For example, I now run longer distances per year than ever before. I also generally run slower than in the past. The enthusiasm and willpower are still there, but age insists on setting the tempo.

The metric of a lifetime^#

Among the charts, one in particular fascinates me. I call it "Life Velocity". It plots the total distance I've ever run, divided by the number of days since I was born.

Essentially, the average number of kilometres per day over my whole life. In a strict mathematical sense, it’s speed — expressed not in metres per second, but in kilometres per day. My personal velocity through life itself.

It looks like this:

Since I have no measured records of the first twenty years of my life, every run now compensates for that untracked period. I run for every day I’ve lived — for my teenage years, my time at grammar school, even for the months when crawling counted as progress. What doesn't qualify is walking, hiking, or steps. The focus, if arbitrary, has always been on running.

The script that computes this chart takes the cumulative distance I have run for each day of my life, and divides it by my actual age in days. The result is a long decimal number, changing daily. Imperceptibly in the short term, but clearly over the years. So for example around the year 2000, only a decade into my (recorded) running period, the average run distance was about 0.049 km (mere 49 metres) per day of my life. In the year 2010 it was some 0.176 km, and then 0.624 km in 2020.

Every day I don't run, the number shrinks. Every run pushes it back up again. It's a cat and mouse game between effort and time. A rebellion against entropy. A lifelong competition with myself.

Before plotting it, I imagined a series of heroic little peaks and anxious troughs. Local maxima when I outdid myself and reached a high number of kilometres per day of life, but then I lagged behind in temporary exasperation.

Instead, the line barely trembles. Its primary characteristic is a steady growth over time.

Chasing the 1^#

The symbolic threshold of 1 km per day of life is irresistible. But it is an elusive target. Despite my efforts, with time ticking, the average distance climbs only sluggishly and the curve seems intent on turning asymptotic. It makes me think of Zeno's paradox — a greying Achilles chasing a tortoise, closing in but never meant to catch up. The challenge is to break that fate, if only for a heartbeat.

Absurd as it may be, the goal is realistic. There exists a finish line with a large, defiant "1 km" at its centre. While the world of athletes is obsessed with speed and glory, I’m after a fleeting average. As long as my legs and lungs obey, there’s a chance to reach it.

So I keep on running. My life is many things. One of them is the pursuit of the One.

The line and the life^#

On the surface, it's just a vanity project tracking an exotic metric born of a runner's obsession.

But this number, the visualization, and the story they tell are, in fact, inherently autobiographical. Some people compose symphonies, paint pictures, or raise statues. Some build empires, others destroy them. I choose to run — to draw a humble line winding through time itself, my own little chronicle of persistence in the face of chaos.

It is also a witness to life, one dot at a time. The pace slows, but the will endures. And after a few more revolutions around this indifferent star, once I stop running for good, the curve will reveal it. It will crest one last time — and then slowly fall, forever. An echo of footsteps long gone, sweat dried, footprints washed away with the rain — but perhaps survived by an obituary in the form of a chart. A simple line telling the story of a race that never needed to be won. But one that was absolutely meant to be run.

Tomáš Fülöpp

Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Belgium

December 4, 2021 ~ November 23, 2025

• https://www.vacilando.org/runs/statistics
• https://www.vacilando.org/runs/life-velocity