The line is chalk, white, with fading edges that disintegrate into dust, and it floats upward as it approaches the edge of the paved path. Just below it, there’s a large uneven “0.” As I pass over the line and run on, I wonder where the next one will be.
When it comes, it announces itself as the line for “400,” confirming that these are markers for workout intervals. Now I’m curious to see how many quarters are marked or if the maker, like me, enjoys reaching a line in the distance and turning around to go back to “0” again and again, not really going anywhere, but covering a distance within a confined space.
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I imagine a runner, bent at the waist, pouring weight into one hand. Under the chalk, gravel loosens, the bumpy surface disrupts the drawing. Road marks are not perfect, not aesthetically pleasing, but beautiful in their own right—a symbol of work, of tenacity, dedication.
A coach draws a line, a symbol to the athletes. It says: I believe in your ability to hit your paces, to run at threshold. I believe that this will make you better.
And God, they’re everywhere. In every city and small town. We’ve all seen them, stomped over them, knowing what they were, but rarely thinking much about them. I remember reading about the legendary Lake Mary Road in Flagstaff, Arizona, where so many elites train. The road is a thing of beauty: a wide shoulder, the lake with mountains rising from it on either side. I’ve never been there. I know from a friend who lives and trains there that it is marked each quarter mile for 16 miles and that it’s been chalked and spray-painted, in meters and kilometers and fractions of miles, for years.
Here on this flat, lonely trail in Texas, there are no more markings. When I’ve turned around and again encounter the (now upside-down) 400, I figure, why not? I pick it up into my mile pace. Drive my knees, pump my arms, breathe in rapid and rhythmic beats all the way back to zero. A single rep is nothing, but the chalk was like a love letter from another runner, a whisper for me to fly, and so I did.
Later, I talk with my friend in Flagstaff, who tells me that most recently it’s Ben Rosario, famed coach of the NAZ team, who has marked Lake Mary Road. I call him to talk about marking roads. And it turns out he doesn’t think my interest is so bizarre. He wonders about them, too. “You don’t know who made them or what year,” he says. “But you use them. Someone has taken the time and put in the effort—they think highly enough of that road to mark it.”
Weeks later, running in Hochatown, Oklahoma, population 4,120, deep in the woods in the foothills of the Ouchita Mountains, I turn onto an uphill, and I see an orange line over a 200. Uphill! In 1/8’s! I cross the 400, which is drawn so the “4” resembles a capital “A” and the zeros are small dots, then the 600. The four blobs of the 800 at the top have a rounded arrow above, telling me to turn around. Someone in this small town cared enough about their training—or someone else’s—to take the time to measure, to lean over, to leave a code in the runners’ language. And I listen: Even though it’s not the route I’d planned, I turn around.
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VISUALIZE: Watches have a lap function, but with a line, “You know when to push and how much effort to put in without looking at your wrist,” says Rosario. “A line also gives you a destination—something tangible to get to.”
