(L-R): Mt. Sutro, North Peak, and South Peak; as seen from our kitchen window on a lucky St. Patrick’s Day, 2025.Yesterday, I headed out for a regular training run. It’s my Twin Peaks Mt. Sutro loop that I crafted a few years ago and quite enjoy but don’t do very often: South Peak, North Peak, over to the UCSF trails on Mt. Sutro, down through the Parnassus Campus, and up Eighth Avenue toward home.
As I ascend the steps to the parking lot level of Twin Peaks, I meet two older women who ask a breathless me for directions. We chat briefly, they thank me for stopping—I didn’t have much of a choice given my aerobic condition—and then we go on our separate merry ways, them taking their time on the ascent of South Peak and me trying to get after it to train for the Dipsea Race.
(L-R): Mt. Sutro, North Peak, and South Peak; as seen from our kitchen window on a lucky St. Patrick’s Day, 2025.
I’m heading up Eighth, some forty or forty-five minutes after the staircase encounter, rounding one of the last few blocks before home, and I take a second glance at a woman getting out of a car.
Did you just happen to be on Twin Peaks? I ask.
You’re the same guy! Where do you live, she inquires.
Less than a quarter mile away, it turns out. And I assert that it was God’s Providence that we met not once but twice this day, because what are the odds?
Indeed. What are they:
Well, we can safely assume Carol visits Twin Peaks infrequently since she and her friend were asking for directions, so visiting once per year or probably more like less frequently? The timing window of her arriving at her home and getting out of the car was perhaps thirty seconds wide since I was running and not walking by, against a plausible overlap window of twenty or thirty minutes, I’d guess: call it one in fifty odds.
| Factor | Assumption | Odds |
|---|---|---|
| I run this route | ~10x/year | 1 in 36 days |
| Carol visits Twin Peaks | ~1x/year | 1 in 365 days |
| We overlap on the mountain | My ~1hr window out of 10 daylight hrs | 1 in 10 |
| We are both there at the same time | Combined above | 1 in 131,400 |
| I pass her house as she exits her car | ~30 sec overlap out of ~25 min plausible window | 1 in 50 |
| Combined probability | 1 in 6,500,000 |
But there’s another fun wrinkle: somewhere on the trail running along Twin Peaks Boulevard, a man had stopped me to confirm his route—a twenty-second exchange that may have been exactly the delay required to place me at the top of those stairs at the same time Carol and friend arrived. Pull that thread and you find another beneath it. The causality does not bottom out.
The tiny odds are amusing but it’s also the texture of it—just think of how many frictionless near-misses must precede the one that lands.
Happy Global Running Day.
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.