1,100 Miles Later, D.C. Man Rests

Runner Michael Bryant, 41, charts his mileage and plans his next path using an oversize map and log book. (By Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)

"Burnt out car with toilet on engine" he wrote after running past the rubble on New York Avenue, near Bladensburg Road.

Aside from a stray comment here and there, and a "flying chunk of something" that landed nearby, Bryant said he traversed the city without incident. There were moments of unexpected kindness, he said, such as when a drunken woman lumbered into the middle of the street to embrace him as he passed.

At times, particularly as he ran through African American neighborhoods, he said, people asked what he believed to have been a perfectly reasonable question:

What are you doing here?

Depending on his mood, he'd sometimes stop to answer or he kept moving, always explaining that he was "exploring" or "trying to run every street of Washington, D.C."

"Some people would just say, 'Wow,' " he recalled. "And some would look at me like I was crazy."

His passion for unusual diversions is nothing new, as far as his mother is concerned. "Our Michael," Dorothy Bryant half-chuckled and half-sighed into the telephone. "He's one of a kind."

As a kid in West Virginia, she recalled, her son liked to count everything -- his hiccups or the telephone poles as the family traveled a highway.

"He'd say, 'That was our 322nd telephone pole,' " she recalled.

When he told her of his running project, she thought, "That's Michael."

"It's about persistence," Dorothy Bryant said. "You say you want to do something and, by golly, you do it."

Bryant acknowledged that he has not been that way about everything, including various household projects. But with running, he kept at it, even as he skipped weeks and even months without hitting the streets, either because of the cold weather or when he broke his arm playing soccer.