At home in Millburn, my New Jersey town, my daily run  like many runners, I’m a creature of habit  takes me up to a broad, straight street with a parking lane wide enough for runners and cyclists to share. On Sunday mornings the police block off Brookside Drive, so I get a six-mile run into the South Mountain Reservation and back. I’ve seen its hills and trees in all four seasons, and run as snowflakes fell into my eyes.

While I run, I listen to the tiny iPod clipped to my shorts. There’s music, if I want to relax and think through the outline of a difficult article, or more often, audio books. I’ve trotted through “Middlemarch” and across the sea with Patrick O’Brian, along with works by Hilary Mantel and Neil Gaiman, Richard Russo and Neal Stephenson.

As I began writing about this, I looked up articles and scientific studies to figure out whether or not my, um, stately pace was a good idea, or if I was somehow doing it wrong. I soon gave up. They all said that running was good, but that too much of a good thing can hurt you. They suggest that I will naturally want to run farther and faster, but most seem to say that slow is fine too. My 45 minutes a day, they seem to agree, is enough to promote health.

When they start to get more specific than that, the experts seem to conflict, and I soon realized why I’d never done any research or bought any monitoring equipment. I don’t know whether I’m reaching 75 percent of my maximum heart rate, the target rate that many experts recommend, and really don’t care.

There seem to be a lot of people out there who want to tell me how to do this running thing right, and hope to profit by the telling. But I’m doing pretty well, apparently, without their advice. I have never had my gait analyzed at a high-end shoe store. I have no idea whether I pronate or supinate, and am still not really sure what those words mean. I buy shoes that feel right and change them when they wear out.