The first mile is the one nobody sees.

The Riverside Loop · New York · Edition №001

Five-point-two miles on the Hudson River Greenway, started at quarter to six, before the ferries and before the light.

The greenway at 5:45 is a corridor of held breath. You come down off the avenue and the city falls away behind a hedge, and then it is only the river on your right, flat and pewter, and the path running north under the plane trees. The lamps are still on. Across the water New Jersey is a low grey shelf with two or three lit windows in it, people who are also awake, for reasons of their own. You start slow. The first mile is always slow. The legs do not believe you yet.

By the second mile they believe you. The path is empty enough that you can run the center line, and the only sound is your own cadence and, somewhere out past the rail, a tug working a barge downriver against the tide. The pace settles around 7:50 without your asking it to. This is the stretch the loop is built for — the half-mile north of the basin where the trees close over and the river opens out, and for a few hundred strides the morning is a thing you are inside of rather than a thing you are crossing.

The turn comes at the 2.6 marker, a bollard with a chip out of one corner. You touch it, or you don't, and you come back south. The return runs into the breath of wind that comes up off the water at first light, and it is here, in the fourth mile, that the effort shows — not as pain but as honesty. The legs report in. The river is brightening now, a seam of copper laid along the Jersey shore, and the lamps begin, one by one, to give up.

You finish where you started, at the gap in the hedge, and you do not stop at the gap. You walk the block back up to the avenue with your hands on your head and the cold drying on your collarbone, and the city is just beginning to make its first noises — a shutter going up, a delivery, a dog. The long walk home is part of the run. It always was.

Five-point-two miles. Quarter to six. The route you will run forty-eight more times this year, and never the same way twice.