May 4th, 2025

Entry #1

Welcome to One Cent Per Mile!

I suppose you could say this started as something fun and minuscule, which became a joke, and gradually turned into a habit within a habit. I’m one of a couple thousand runner registered on runeveryday.com, with a daily run streak of at least one mile, everyday, for over one year. My Streak started in September 2016 and it’s hard to believe it’s now been eight years!.

We all love and find running for different reasons. Over the last eight plus years of running, I certainly have to call on new methods to stay motivated. I started running everyday as an adulthood pursuit of staying active, finding community, and ultimately chose to try qualifying for Boston. Although we’re certainly not there yet, it remains a dream and something to look towards. These days it’s moreso about maintaining a daily routine, something I can control, regardless of the environment or world around me, this is something I can do for myself.

February 2022, I lost a younger sibling to a medical condition, in a way that will forever change someone. Grief makes you reevaluate priorities, and perhaps, look for meaning in ways one may not have previously seen as purposeful. I can’t recall exactly when I started becoming more aware, but at some point in the year after my brother’s passing, I noticed I seemed to find loose change much more often. Call it Frequency Illusion, or something else, but I decided to start becoming intentional about keeping an eye out for loose change, as a sort of Mindfulness practice while I run. Perhaps the moment that solidified the most in my mind was later that spring. My birthday is in April, and I decided to run 30 miles on what was my 30th birthday. Something like six miles into that, I saw a leaf rustle in the wind, thought twice about it, and went out of my way to pick it up. Turns out, it was a $50 bill! To this day, it remains one of the most satisfying and goosebump inducing moments ever in my life.

After finding approximately $129 in 2023 (heavily influenced by a 10 and 100 dollar bill I found on consecutive days) I began tracking my monthly totals in 2024, and found around $57 in my first full year of tracking. Sure enough, now I find it everywhere, and helps make every mile logged feel that much more satisfying.

All the while, financial health and literacy has been another angle I have aimed to fold into this micropractice within my daily habit. I’m a firm believer in playing the long game, that little things add up, and will compound in time. With a long enough runway, the habits will speak for themselves. Being a social worker in today’s world, I know and see this in a financial, mental, and physical context.

That is my vision for One Cent Per Mile; that through small, daily, intentional habits, we may all better ourselves together. 

Thank you for reading, I look forward to this journey with you.

-Kyle-