On January 1, 2025, Scott Towle, 48, an IT tech salesperson, saw a couple of dimes on the ground while running around his neighborhood. While, typically, he would run right past any loose change, this year he said to himself: “I wonder how much money I would collect if I just picked up every single coin that I find on the ground while running for a year.”

With that, a random experiment was born. Towle, an RCAA-certified running coach, who has been consistently running since he was about 10 years old, realized collecting this money was akin to each regular training run. Each time he completed a workout, it was like making a deposit.

He also found that picking up change (or dollars) reenergized his runs and even pushed him to go longer. “There were definitely times where I hadn’t found anything in a while and needed to run a little bit farther to get out of my neighborhood, just to see if maybe I could break the streak of not finding anything,” Towle says.…