The Prudential Building is there. It’s waiting. I take off down a hill and see a car abruptly stopped in the road in the cemetery, abandoned. I keep moving along and notice a stationary cop car to my right. I smile at this, a big beaming hello to someone else out in this storm.

“Hey, guys!” I say.

“Seriously?” the cop replies from his seat, his window down.

“Yeah,” I say as I head up another hill.

I noticed a slight humorous inflection in his voice. Perhaps a jogger himself, he is wondering why I am outside on this day of all days. Or maybe he thinks I’m trying to be tough, or crazy, or stupid. It doesn’t matter because I’m here for one reason: Boston.

Twenty-three minutes have gone by, an eternity on these merciless hills with this footing. “Impossible to walk in this muck, no footing at all,” I utter as I come down a hill, a reference to the late Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I hit a semiplowed stretch and pick it up for a fast 200. I’ll do a few of these before I move on. Clear pavement is a rare gift right now.

With every stride I take, I imagine gaunt, booming beasts rolling along the hills of Newton, sometime when the sun is away. The taste of longing for freedom is bitter as we sweep along, the feelings and dreams that inspired this run unbeknown to us, this saunter into the unknown. It’s a mass of humanity, a sea of ambition and dreams. I see the last hill and fly up it, relentless in my approach. I crest the hill and continue passing runners toward Boston.

A large snowdrift stops my imagination; it’s hard to move in its density. I shift my thoughts again to the lights of Boston on the horizon, the silhouette of my foe,

my old friend. Back when Jock Semple coached the B.A.A., he had his runners run barefoot on the coast of Nahant Beach in the winter to strengthen them mentally and morally. Boston was in their sights, to the other side of the narrow strip of land across the bay. These men most likely shadowboxed with the city as they ran, sprinting and surging and coasting, completing their workouts and pointing at the buildings, promising this year will be the year they will conquer.

This run is exhausting, not in its feeling like a protracted sprint but in the simple fact that I am driving up every hill I can find. I’m not quite sure why I do this as I lunge upward toward tree-spotted rims of rock and asphalt. The city is a hazy creature, seeming alien with the lack of people. My time here has become a long, swift trudge up endless hills, my feet the only prints in the snow, seeming like those of a beast as I pass them going down. Only the fronts of my feet are evident in the prints, a result of the steep grade. The pitch-black asphalt is stark against the pure, white snow.

Forty minutes have gone by on this easy run of mine, which I keep making harder. It was created the second I left the door, an easy recovery six miles, and has somehow transformed into hill repeats, 200s, and wind sprints through snowdrifts. Somewhere along the line, these things crept into my normal run, transforming today’s jaunt. This has happened before. I head for home; today, I did not see another runner, but I know that we are out there, comrades in our singular goal. Just because I did not see another runner on this day means nothing. Many people are training harder than I am today, and they will beat me come April. Hundreds will, maybe a thousand, but that’s OK.

It’s not the competition I strive to best; I’m suffering for you, Boston.