Ten years of footprints
A single run is a thin thread. Ten years of them, drawn over each other, become a portrait of a life — where it's anchored, where it wanders, and where it went dark.
11 June 2026
Every run I've recorded is, underneath, a list of points — latitude, longitude, a timestamp. On its own it's a thin thread: out the door, around the same few streets, home again. Beautiful to me, illegible to anyone else.
But I've done this most mornings for ten years. Lay that many threads over the same map and something happens no single run can show. The thread becomes fabric. The fabric has a shape. And the shape turns out to be a portrait — not of a place, but of a habit.
Tuesday. 7.2km before work. One run is a thin thread — beautiful to me, illegible to anyone else.
A hundred. A thousand. The threads start to overlap — and something appears that no single run could.
I never noticed until I drew them all together: every line begins at the same door. Mine.
This whole bright knot is my world. Three roads, run again and again. A life, it turns out, is geographically small.
And then — these. A race in another city. A week in the hills. The year I lived somewhere else. The faintest marks hold the biggest memories.
You can read the injury here: three months, dark. And here the whole map jumps north — the year we moved.
Ten years. Roughly 3,650 mornings of getting out the door. This is what it looks like.
What you're looking at
Nothing here is drawn or photographed. Every point is plotted with a little additive glow, so wherever runs overlap the density builds up and brightens. The quiet lanes stay dim; the loop I run without thinking burns white. It's the same idea behind tools like Datashader — don't draw the data, draw how much data is there.
Ten years of footprints comes to roughly 41,000km — about once around the Earth — almost all of it within three kilometres of one front door.
The brightest places on this map are not the best runs. They're the most repeated ones. That's the whole story, really: not the races or the views, but the ordinary, relentless habit of getting out the door.
A run is a sentence. Enough of them, and you can read a life.
Tomorrow is one more point.