By the time I crossed the lobby to the elevator, the woman had already pressed the call button. I can't recall what hotel in what city. It must have been warm outside, because sweat from my morning run soaked my shorts and t-shirt.

The woman ignored me as we waited for the elevator doors to open, adopted an air of injury as I boarded, jabbed the control in restrained disgust as we rose, and left with a flounce as soon as the door heaved open.

I'm not sure I should assume it was even her floor.

Riding elevators in sodden clothing in close quarters with captive people is one of my less-favorite things to do. Except for one time, which I'll mention later, I can't recall ever speaking with anyone in such circumstances in any city where I've run.

Maybe it's me. Maybe when tired and sweaty, I give off a defensive, untouchable message to strangers in close quarters. Maybe that's why I'm no more likely to strike up a conversation on foot than in a lobby.

Meetings that didn't take place before, during or after workouts in distant cities come as readily to mind as meetings that did. Such is the nature of Close Running Encounters of the Second Kind - the urban kind - for me.

New York City

"Just follow the street out to the Roosevelt," said the hotel clerk. On a leaflet-sized map of Manhattan he traced an apparent footpath beside the eastside highway to which he referred. "You won't have any trouble finding it."

Famous last words.

I emerged from the hotel, bore right and jogged down Lexington Avenue to 42nd Street. Bearing right again, I wound my way along the sidewalks among late-afternoon crowds, dodging people rushing to hail cabs or collecting in sociable after-work knots, stepping into the street when the press of bodies became too dense.

My arrival at Penn Station three hours earlier marked my first time in the hurly-burly of New York City. Now each footfall converted from conceptual to actual the island about which I'd read and heard so much.

Forty-Second Street, for heaven's sake!

Bearing left at First Avenue and skirting the U.N. complex, I cast my eye out for the footpath. One street curled back to the next at a fence blocking off the Roosevelt. Another led to the Beeckman Place enclosure, where, from behind a wall I saw below, almost close enough to reach with a leap, a walkway crossing over the highway.

I got down to the cityward side of the Roosevelt, only to find no footpath nor space to run. Traffic lanes shouldered up against crumbling retaining walls. The chaos of cars spinning by drove me back to the elevated walkway after a few steps.

On the far side of the Roosevelt I descended by stairs to a concrete shelf above the East River. My thoughts flashed on TV and movie scenes about characters, usually lovers, gazing from park benches over the waters around Manhattan.

I found nowhere to sit and nothing to nurture romance. Garbage collected at bases of barriers, denying the ways north and south, and even to running on a nearby strip of concrete 20 yards long. Below the shelf, the river looked cold, dark and forbidding, even on a sunny afternoon.

If one fell from this place, with no handholds for crawling out, one might never leave the Big Apple alive. One might float away unremarked and unmourned into the Atlantic Ocean. Abandon hope, all ye who seek a footpath here.

Retracing my steps, anxious to reach the sanctuary of a hotel room, I wove among thickening crowds along 42nd Street for block after block. My growing disquiet about the distance I'd covered became a certainty when the western end of the street materialized ahead. I had indeed missed my turn at Lexington.

Stopping, looking west, then east, I asked a young man for directions. To other people squeezing past, his lost expression must have mimicked mine.

"That's the west side," he said in a doubtful tone, pointing in the direction which I'd been running. Then he pointed in the direction from which I'd come. "I think you need to go that way."

Back at my hotel, I boarded an elevator in a heavy sweat from a longer, more-breathtaking run than I'd intended. If my two fellow passengers noticed my disreputable appearance, they gave no sign, being immersed in bragging about the Yankees' chances against the Red Sox in a playoff game that night.

At least someone felt at home.

Spinning in Traffic

The Warrenton Turnpike in Virginia dates back to the 18th century. Like a westbound spear aimed from Washington, D.C., toward the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains, the highway pierces the heart of Manassas National Battlefield, a historic ground twice drenched in blood during the Civil War.

Armies of commuting motorists march along the highway at rush hour these days. Battlefield visitors face a fight getting back into traffic from parking lots at landmarks.

Arriving from the east at the city of Warrenton - a suburban warren more true to its name than its colonial founders could have imagined - the highway flowers into eight lanes before linking with a system of freeways looped around the town like a noose. My hotel overlooked the eight lanes from beside a private road branching to one side. The private road bent around the hotel and ran straight to a restricted utility compound a few hundred yards to the rear.

My running route, pinched between spinning traffic at one end and a padlocked gate at the other, lacked scenery as well. I covered the circuit five times for a 6.5-mile workout.

Faces in the hotel breakfast lounge wore quizzical expressions, as if to say, "That guy came by here twice before. And he's still getting soaked in the rain. How can he see through the water beads on those glasses?"

No modern army marched along the turnpike, being too busy with terrorists and dictators overseas. No president sped along the route in a motorcade, being too busy in Texas with ducks and Democrats.

No one met me at the elevator because I took the stairs.

Puyallup, Wash., situated about an hour's drive south of Seattle, suffers traffic congestion that outdoes even the D.C. suburbs. Metropolitan Seattle-Tacoma crawls with motor vehicles.

Twice I ran a 3.5-mile rectangle, doubling the circuit each time for seven miles, along the busy streets of South Hill, a bedroom community south of Puyallup. Even before dawn the streaming traffic forced me to the streets' shoulders - piney loam littered with sharp-edged debris - where drooping evergreens slapped my face.

An hour's commute to Redmond for a workout with Bill Gates and his corporate athletes might have been a better option ... unless they'd gone to play at antitrust law rather than games in courts back east. Now I thought of it, Microsoft's army of lawyers might have been on the march near Warrenton.

Not a drop of the famous Seattle rain fell during either of my runs at South Hill, until I got back indoors.

A teenager waiting for a school bus gave me a quizzical look, as if to say, "How can he see through the streaks of sweat on those glasses?"

Kihei, Hawaii - an urban strip catering to the tourist trade on the west coast of Maui - has plenty of highway congestion too. Bumper-to- bumper traffic begins at dawn and ends after sundown. Driving proves surprisingly stress-free despite it, but roadside running poses even more of a problem there than in Waikiki.

My solution was to take to the empty streets in the wee morning hours, under a Hawaiian moon, amid cooling sea breezes and the influence of the volcano-god Haleakala.

My route took me past a golf course made famous by the Professional Golf Association's kickoff tour event, the Mercedes Championships, each January. TV coverage of the tournament reveals glimpses of the island panorama along with glimpses of Tiger Woods, motivating me to watch so as to feel smug.

Been there. Seen that.

My Maui visit came too late in January for glimpses of golfing icons. I saw plenty of woods on the slopes of Haleakala, but the nearest thing to a tiger was the stripes on an orb-weaving spider on shrubbery outside my hotel.

Dizzied by History

Only once have I come within eyesight of a president. The occasion was neither in Warrenton nor Texas, but in Plainwell, Mich. Even then, while George W. Bush's voice rang in the air - and while buses, cars, vans and motorcycles whooshed past me - I saw not so much as a fuzzy figure of the president behind tinted glass, a figure spotted by others in the crowd.

I came closer to his immediate predecessor at two degrees of separation through my sister, who years ago worked with a woman who went on to serve in the Clinton Cabinet. I came even closer to a dead president at zero degrees of separation when walking on hallowed ground near where Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address.

Downtown Gettysburg, Pa., preserves history in its layout and architecture. But thoroughfares radiating from the town center have become ugly commercial zones. The locale of my hotel northeast of town - modern, shabby and overdeveloped with service stations, strip malls and tour offices - could not have been further in time from the Civil War, nor further in local geography from the main battlefield southwest of town.

May Honest Abe never turn over in his grave lest he get a gander at York Street.

Exhaustion caught up with me as I ran the street's wide shoulders, four times covering the distance between my hotel and town to log 4.5 miles, twice leaping the smeared remains of a deer blocking the narrow end of a sidewalk.

Lincoln's birthplace lies in hill country a few miles south of Elizabethtown, Ky., seat of Hardin County. Elizabethtown cultivates an anachronistic look for a city of more than 20,000 inhabitants in a county of almost 100,000 souls.

An eight-mile run took me down to an old part of the city. One complete orbit around a retrograde courthouse satisfied me for a turn-back point.

Elizabethtown's regression in time reminded me of Robert Penn Warren's novels of frontier Kentucky and book-length essay about his young life with his father in the southern part of the state. But Penn Warren remained hidden from my sight because, like Honest Abe, he departed hilly Kentucky long before I toured his old stomping grounds in running shoes.

On a secluded part of my circuit beyond the city's edge, I spotted through raindrops on my glasses a policeman reading a newspaper in a parked patrol car. Thinking of a daylong drive ahead of me, assuming the pages would contain information I wanted, I stopped to ask for a weather forecast. The policeman, who spoke with an accent of the hollers, stuck a hand out the window to test the air.

"Looks like rain."

Whirling Around the West

Finally the relief of a city park rather than streets in which to run. In fact, the park and university town of Ellensburg, Wash., in the picturesque Kittitas Valley, have so many degrees of separation that people drive from the latter past a freeway into the country to enjoy the former.

My two circuits of a woodsy, linear park on the Yakima River drew me into a wrestling match with a bellicose Kittitas wind. Suspecting mountains to the northwest and Columbia River Gorge to the east explained the air currents, I asked a fellow runner about the frequency of the winds.

"This valley is known for it. They come down from Canada. In the winter it gets colder than an icebox here. I had no idea until I moved from the coast," he said.

A chance meeting far from home - even with a runner - rarely results in much conversation. I'm too reticent, even if I play the opening gambit. But this fellow chatted about his daughter at college in Wisconsin once he learned I knew about weather colder than an icebox from my home in Michigan. He chatted about living in Chicago once he learned one of my sisters lives there.

We parted the best of friends who would never see each other again. Such conversations may be easier to stumble on west of the Mississippi River. Cities from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast seem to specialize in riverside trails, directing runners away from streets toward more-friendly venues with other runners.

Astoria, Ore. - laid out like fancy stitching between a line of bluffs and the multi-hued Columbia estuary, has a long, paved footpath stretching east out of town alongside the water. Stepping through a gate behind my hotel to begin a five-mile run, I turned away from the city to follow a footpath past a marina where sea lions hooted and sparred on docks.

I asked a walker, who looked like a coed in a city without a college, how far the footpath extended toward Tongue Point Village.

"I don't know. I never go that way."

The pavement's end after a half-mile forced me to retrace my steps past my hotel and the ersatz coed. Eventually, nearer downtown, the footpath merged with the boards of wharves dotted with charter offices and other maritime ventures, at last bringing me out on a deck above lapping waves.

The tidal waters reminded me not of the dark, dirty East River in Manhattan, but of a nervous pre-dawn run beside Waikiki's Ala Wai Canal, clear and still the day before, abruptly swollen from heavy rains and coming into sluggish, irresistible motion like a mudslide. Standing above the Columbia gave me none of the sense of a threat of inundation as standing beside the glutted canal.

The peace of the estuarine scene made it a letdown to finish the run and let myself back into the hotel.

Was Astoria where I offended the woman at the elevator? I almost think it was. Evidently no city, even pleasant Astoria, is perfection.

A river confluence forms a wide pool among steep, brownish mountain slopes at Lewiston, Idaho. Miles of paved walkways run along levees lining the Snake River flowing up from the south and the Clearwater River flowing down from the wild mountains to the east.

Checking a clock in my rental car, zipping up against 43-degree air, I ran across a footbridge over a highway and along the walkways hoping to log seven miles.

Speaking even in passing, even in greeting, to the only two Snake walkers abroad at the vulnerable hour of dawn seemed unwise. Taking spottings ahead and behind as I passed under each highway bridge along the way to gauge my progress, I noted how distant streetlights haloed like stars behind thin clouds or floodlights in a tank of water.

I guesstimated a turnaround point and retraced my steps. The elapsed time on the clock back at the car gave me a rude surprise: I could not have covered more than 5.5 miles.

Two mornings later in Great Falls, Mont., an odometer reading taken the night before left no doubt about the seven-mile length of my run along paved walkways on an inside arc of the Missouri River.

Again I set out from the parked car before dawn. Tendrils of fog rose on 41-degree air over the water. In places the walkways branched in directions that left me confused about which way to turn. Painted numbers on the pavement, marking off kilometers, made me think of racing splits.

Meeting a runner on my return, the only other person about on foot at such an early hour, I asked her whether Great Falls hosted a race sometime during the year.

"Sure there's races. There's the Autumn Run every year about this time. Of course it's only three miles and it's on Central Avenue downtown. But there's the Ice Breaker Road Race every April. It starts on a city street but it might come this way. I'm not sure; I'm new around here. But I'm thinking about training for the races. What about you? Maybe we could train together sometime."

Oh, all right, you caught me. The young woman said nothing to me because I said nothing to her. Our ships passed in the night without so much as a foghorn toot.

With cold creeping in, one that penetrated deeper than 41 degrees, I felt frozen enough to float like an ice block on the Missouri.

Orbiting Cultures

Nobody I met in Fargo, N.D., spoke with the slightest hint of the sub- Canadian accent made famous by the movie named after the city. The nearest thing to the film's wintry landscape during my visit was an evening squall packing winds devilish enough to yank doors out of hands.

Otherwise an unseasonably-summery, sultry spell heated the northern- spring climate to a counterfeit of the tropics. People wore shorts to a mall where no one but me paid attention to a hallway museum devoted to Roger Maris, a damned Yankee slugger who departed this city and life long before I toured Fargo in running shoes. Given the weather, even early in the morning, I took to the streets for a four-mile run in shirtsleeves.

A woman rushing to make a turn into heavy traffic took fright, then looked sheepish when she almost bumped me in a crosswalk. Teenagers ambling to school gave me funny looks when they saw me come around the same block a second time.

Nobody I met in Montreal spoke just one language, except Americans touring the venerable city in an excursion bus. The driver-guide, having lived for years in the states, spoke English as well as his native Quebecois.

One of my two cab drivers, having immigrated from the Midwest, spoke Quebecois with an American drawl. The other, having immigrated from Moscow, spoke both Quebecois and English with a weighty Russian tongue. A Quebecois clerk in a pharmacy feigned monolingualism until my true monolingualism forced her to give up her ruse.

"Card? You have a card?"

My only recourse was to plead, as much through gesture as through words, ignorance of the pharmacy's discount policies.

My map searches today of Montreal's layout do little to improve my memory of its streets and locations, despite my sightseeing tours both on bus and foot.

Setting out from my hotel for a six-mile jaunt on my first morning in the city, I ran steeply uphill along a street to a dead end, came part way back down, followed a crossing rue for a mile or so, labored again steeply uphill to a dead end at a medical center connected with McGill University, retraced my steps almost to my hotel, and repeated the first climb for good measure.

All the way I tuned my ears to the speech of delivery men, college women, businessmen and nurses crossing my path. My impression was that more people spoke English than Quebecois.

Not a few spoke Asian languages.

New York City

Forty-Second Street, for heaven's sake!

Midtown Manhattan, devoid of life except for a few early runners and sleepy strollers, brooded on a Sunday morning like a scene from an old science-fiction movie about the first days after a nuclear holocaust. Hanging a right at Fifth Avenue, I ran freely along deserted sidewalks among skyscrapers, as if at the bottom of a deep canyon, passing landmarks known around the world - New York Library, Rockafeller Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Trump Tower, Plaza Hotel.

My steps led to Central Park, where runners represented the bulk of sparse traffic along East Drive. The Dairy, the Lake and the Boat House slipped by on my port side before - hanging two lefts, passing the Belvedere Castle in between - I headed back south along West Drive, passing Strawberry Fields forever on my port side.

John Lennon long ago abandoned Central Park for the grave, and none of its other famous denizens - not Woody Allen, nor Kim Basinger, nor Pale Male, Manhattan's first-ever resident hawk - appeared. Realizing I'd turned back too soon to log my desired mileage, I went around on a second tour of the park's south end.

Something happened on the way to the Delacorte Theatre.

Teens in matching yellow T-shirts of volunteers took up posts at every park entrance. Almost all were girls. They deployed tables and displayed fruit drinks in squeeze packages. Some sported bullhorns to broadcast cheery welcomes to visitors.

As if some civic authority had unbarred the doors of Manhattan, releasing a human flood, people dressed for hiking or for playing poured into the park. So abrupt was the influx that at one moment a runner enjoyed elbow room, at the next he risked slamming into skaters or trampling toddlers. The sidewalk outside Central Park West afforded freedom of movement compared to the streets and walkways inside the walls.

At Columbus Circle I angled down Broadway through the Theater District. Broadway, for heaven's sake! When moderate traffic stopped me for a moment at a cross street, a beautiful young woman in T-shirt and jogging shorts stepped up to wait on my right.

Once traffic cleared I stuck to the sidewalk while she ran in the bike lane. She forged ahead as we passed the Sullivan Theater, its marquee emblazoned with the name of David Letterman, who, unlike the teen volunteers, failed to appear with a bullhorn to welcome me to the city.

The back of the young woman's T-shirt declared REAL MEN MARRY DOCTORS. At every cross street, right down to Times Square, she lost her lead for having to wait for cross traffic. Forty-Second Street gave me a long enough breather to ask about the assertion on her T-shirt.

"It's only a theory. One day maybe I'll test it."

She wanted to know, assuming the race promoted on my T-shirt lived up to its name, where and when she might undertake the Mt. Baldhead Challenge. I told her the race's date and location.

"I'm coming to Michigan for a medical conference about then. Maybe I'll meet a real man at the race. You could find me there, or you could write down your phone number and e-mail right here."

Oh, all right, you caught me. She reached Times Square well ahead of me, hung a right just before I hung a left at 42nd Street, and vanished, gone like Strawberry Fields forever.

Images of the young woman lingered in my head as I boarded an elevator in the lobby of my hotel. Two women of advanced years, possessed nonetheless of a regal New York chic, as if they came from oil or steel or publishing money, boarded ahead of me.

In spite of my disreputable condition, dripping sweat at their feet, one of them favored me with a look full of blessing.

"What a glorious morning for a run." MR