The same five miles as New York, run in a warmer dark.

The Causeway · Miami · Edition №007

Five-point-two miles across the Venetian Causeway, started at six, when the bay is glass and the heat has not yet found you.

Miami at six in the morning is the city's only cool hour, and the Venetian is its quietest road. You start from the western end while the streetlamps still outnumber the daylight, and the causeway runs ahead of you in low concrete spans, island to island, with Biscayne Bay laid flat and black on both sides. The air is already soft and close — not yet hot, but thinking about it — and the first bridge lifts you just high enough to see the skyline catch its first pink along the tops of the towers.

The pace comes easy here, easier than it has any right to be. The road is closed enough at this hour that you run the crown of it, and the spans rise and fall in a gentle rhythm that the legs learn quickly and settle into around 7:40. Between the third and fourth bridge there is a stretch where the islands sit low and green on either hand and a heron stands in the shallows without moving, and you and the heron regard each other for the length of one bridge, two professionals keeping the same hours.

The turn is at the far drawbridge, a steel grate you feel through your soles, and you come back west into the brightening. This is where Miami collects its toll. The return half warms by the minute; the cool that carried you out is burning off the bay, and the humidity wraps the chest, and the last mile is run in the first real heat of the day. The skyline is fully lit now, glass going gold, and the city behind you is waking up loud — boats, a generator, a gull working the rail.

You finish at the western gate and you keep walking, down to the seawall, where the bay has gone from black to a hard bright blue in the time it took to run five miles. The shirt is through. The walk home is short and slow and entirely earned.

Five-point-two miles — the New York distance, run under a different sky. The loop travels. The hour does not change.