Chasing sunrises

My phone alarm goes off at 4:30 on a Wednesday morning.

The sky is still dark, I don’t have to be at work for another four and a half hours, and the city is — for once — relatively quiet. There are no sirens going off in the distance, no car alarms going off, no drunks wailing outside on their way to somewhere hopefully safer.

There’s no real reason for me to get out of bed other than the fact that the schedule says I need to run six miles and with my obsessive personality, I live and die by my running schedule.

The faintest hints of light start peeking through, mustering up the energy to scale the celestial mountain that is the horizon. That’s my cue to get going. I lace up my shoes, head out the door and into the solitude that is a major city first thing in the morning.

The light is faint but just enough to illuminate the path. That’s all I need. Chicago’s a city of around 2.7 million people but only a handful of us are crazy enough to be up and exercising as the sun is just waking up. Maybe we’re getting it in because we’ve got plans after work or maybe it’s because we just know we won’t have the energy to, or maybe it’s because there’s a certain comfort in adhering to a predictable routine.

We’re all just chasing sunrises, regardless of how old or how fast we are, how much money we make, or what kind of difference we’re going to make in the world around us that day.

The first steps become the first mile. The dark of night gives way to the bright colors of the early morning, an empty beach and a seemingly endless lake laid out before us as we go about our otherwise mundane Wednesday morning jogs.

At some point, nearly every jogger stops their run and takes out their camera phone to snap a picture. It’s just a mundane Wednesday morning training run, sure, and living in this city we can see the lakefront just about any time we wish.

But there’s something special about chasing a sunrise and catching it when it’s at it’s most beautiful point, when you feel like it’s a secret being shared with you and a handful of others who were crazy enough and smart enough to get up before everyone else to see it.

I’m running the 2019 Chicago Marathon and New York City Marathon to raise money for the American Heart Association to honor my late mother. To donate, please click here.