sashayed:

I started thinking absently about Steve Rogers’ jogging route during my run today and then i couldn’t STOP thinking about it because there’s literally NO WAY it makes sense unless you accept that he is specifically fucking up his entire morning routine to get another look at the cute boy he clocked on his run. I got home and started to make a post about it but it was like so you’re just going to have to trust me

Enough people asked me to Get Into This that, you know what, fine. Let’s get into it. Under the cut please enjoy my doctoral dissertation, There Is No Carol In HR, or Captain America Is a Big Ol’ Creep and I Can Prove It with Maps.

In the 2014 superhero movie “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” we see the characters of Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers encounter each other at four locations on Washington D.C.’s National Mall. Steve Rogers passes known love interest Sam Wilson, FIRST, running southeast on the inlet bridge at the lower edge of the Tidal Basin:

SECOND, running east in front of the Jefferson Memorial:

THIRD, running north and then east along the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial:

And FOURTHMOST, at about 3rd and Jefferson, in front of the U.S. Capitol Building.

So like, first of all, just as a running route, it kind of makes no sense.

It even suggests that Sam – if he’s starting his run west of the Potomac – maybe lives in Virginia, a horrifying piece of character assassination that I refuse even to consider, although it would explain why at the end of the movie he drops everything and leaps at the chance to go on Steve’s Road Trip Searchstravaganza. “SURE, HAPPY TO HELP YOU HUNT DOWN UR BRAINWASHED ASSASSIN PAL WHO REPEATEDLY TRIED TO KILL ME, WHATEVER GETS ME OUT OF THIS SOULLESS GARBAGE PILE!” –Sam Wilson if he lives in fucking Arlington. But whatever, let’s call that “the exigencies of fiction” and move on.

OK. So the distance between the first time Steve passes Sam and the first time he “laps” him is AT MOST about .3 miles:

Let’s say Sam’s jogging in a leisurely enjoying-the-sunrise way and not trying to make a regulation 8-minute mile. I guess it’s possible he could take as much as an absolute maximum of 3 minutes to stroll that far, especially if he has to pause to swat gnats out of his eyes and teeth, which he does. OK. Well, THERE’S NO WAY STEVE RUNS THE ENTIRE 4+ MILE LOOP OF THE MALL IN THREE MINUTES.

Steve’s fast, but he’s not fucking Pietro Maximoff (olav hasholem), over here. He doesn’t run a <1-minute mile. At MOST, I guess, since he’s a superhero, he could be running a 3-minute mile on his morning jog. But you know what makes 900 times more sense? He passes a dude running, dude glances back to let him pass, sunrise hits The Face:

Steve is like ohHH god and, because his life is a mess, ends up circling the Jefferson as many times as necessary until the dude comes by again.

On this pass Mr. Handsome Face exhibits a gratifying reactiveness to being trolled, which probably reminds Steve of the last time he had friends, 70 years ago. AND YET Steve doesn’t get him again for another mile and a half:

This is possibly because there are no more good places for Steve to hover around like a big creep, though I guess if there wasn’t too much traffic he could have circled around Independence Ave and the Kutz Bridge a couple of times.

But you know what’s even more fun to imagine? Steve grimly jogging away telling himself NO. LEAVE THIS MAN ALONE. YOUR LIFE IS A MESS, PLEASE DON’T MAKE IT WORSE BY STALKING ANY STRANGERS. JUST FINISH YOUR RUN AND GO HOME AND MAKE YOUR PROTEIN SHAKE AND GET THROUGH THE REST OF YOUR TRAGIC, LONELY DAY. So he keeps running his regular loop around the mall, feeling like an idiot, while Sam gets a peaceful 12 minutes or so on his weird (but pleasant! I’m not criticizing!) route. So by the time Steve comes around the Lincoln for his second lap, from the north, he might re-encounter Sam approaching from the south, as below:

This would require him to run about 3.5 miles in 12 minutes, or about a 3.5 minute mile, which seems plausible enough for a superhero. (He might also not go down as far as 3rd, given his state of mental disorder over Mr Handsome Face, in which case he’d have a shorter loop to complete.)

Now ok look. Steve is clearly a creature of mournful habit. It seems like he takes a certain amount of drab comfort in routine. (Speaking for myself, sometimes runners do.) BUT INSTEAD of doing a normal second loop south around the tidal basin, he basically changes directions and comes BACK up north to run along THE SAME SIDE OF THE REFLECTING POOL HE JUST CAME FROM, as below:

This is a weird enough thing to do, but it is extra weird if you believe, as I do, that Steve would hate the WWII memorial. Like, he might get some kind of solace running past a monument that felt ~true to the friends he misses, but this! Those weird fascist columns! The gold eagles!!! Awful! He probably appreciates the grim irony of erecting such a triumphalist monument to a war that terminated in nuclear genocide, but I can’t imagine he would voluntarily want to run past it, except maybe in the summer when families are splashing around in the pool part. But if he’s running east along the Reflecting Pool, he’s staring STRAIGHT AT that Albert Speer-looking monstrosity, cf. Google Street View:

So why does he do it? You know why. BECAUSE HE SPOTS MR HANDSOME FACE COMING UP FROM THE SOUTH, THAT’S WHY.

I can’t PROVE that he hurled himself behind the ranger station right at the southeast corner of the Lincoln to surreptitiously watch which way Trollable Handsome Face was going to go, but YOU can’t prove he DIDN’T, and we both know that two seconds later he’s doing this:

so I think we should just agree that I’m right and Steve Rogers spent like a minute and a half lurking around an empty ranger station looking like he was going to try to steal something from the bike share. “OK, I’m not being a creep, this is clearly fate, because why else would Handsome Face take this deeply weird route???” would be a reasonable question he might ask himself, as I have asked my own self.

That’s the last time he passes Sam until they meet way down at the Capitol, a little less than 2 miles later.

If we stick the idea that Steve does about a 4-minute superhero mile – and Sam probably speeds up to at least an 8-minute, minimum, out of pure frustration after that last pass – we can assume that Steve’s been lurking down there for almost 10 minutes. WAITING. ARGUING WITH HIMSELF. “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to be a huge embarrassing weirdo about this, I thought we were just going to move on and go get our sad protein shake.” “BUT WHAT IF IT’S FATE!!” In conclusion, Steve Rogers has a huge crush on Sam Wilson and goes to an ENORMOUS amount of effort to get a reaction out of him, perhaps almost as enormous as the effort I went to in finishing this post.

Q.E.D.