Everything worth having in this sport is free, and most of it happens on an ordinary Tuesday.
Running is the cheapest sport there is, which is an odd thing to say about something with an entire shoe industry attached. But the shoes are the only bill. Everything that actually makes it worth doing costs nothing.
Somebody in the group shared a list of runner’s luxuries — it came from an account called Run Mastery — and it is worth borrowing, because almost every item on it happens here in an ordinary week.
The ones you get by turning up
Running with other people. This is the big one, and it is the one that is hardest to buy. You cannot subscribe to twenty people waiting for you on Saryan at ten at night. Half of what keeps anyone running is that somebody noticed they were not there last week.
The rhythm of footsteps. A group finds a cadence and holds it. You stop counting, you stop checking the watch, and your legs get on with it while you listen to everyone else breathing. There is nothing else in the week that does that.
Finishing with coffee. The Saturday long run ends at a table. That table is not a detail of the run; for a lot of us it is most of the reason the run happened.
The ones that only arrive if you are out in it
Sunrise. The Thursday run starts at 07:45 and gets the light coming up over the city thrown in for nothing. You cannot be given this one. You have to be awake.
Weather. On 8 March it snowed on us, and somebody asked — very politely — whether we might call it off. We did not, and that run is in the diary because of the snow rather than despite it. Rain is the same. Nobody has ever regretted a wet run once they were dry again.
Quiet. Not on a Tuesday. Yerevan at ten at night is wide awake and busy, and the night run goes straight through the middle of that — which is its own kind of good, but nobody would call it peaceful. The quiet one is Saturday. At half past six the path by the river has nobody on it, and for an hour the loudest thing out there is us.
The ones that come afterwards
The meal. Real hunger, earned, and nothing to feel awkward about. There is more on that in eating around running.
The sleep. Deeper than usual, and the night after a long run is the best of the week. It is also where you actually get fitter — see rest.
A clear head. An hour where the only decisions are left or right. Most people start running for their legs and stay for this.
The point
Every one of these is free, and none of them is rare. They are not waiting at the end of a marathon — they are on the corner of Saryan on a Tuesday, with whoever came.
Which is more or less the only thing this club has ever asked of anybody: just show up.