My friend Ben just sent me an interesting article from Wired Magazine about mileage running. The author, Dave Demerijan, is given $500 and tasked with squeezing as many miles as possible out of it. While I wasn't terribly impressed with the itinerary he cobbled together, he is good writer.

“Mileage runners are the high-tech nomadic wanderers of the air. Predominantly male, generally obsessed with flying and miles, and typically employed in white-collar careers that involve significant business travel, they scour the web for cheap flights, phoning in sick or using vacation days to fly the longest itineraries they can string together.

A mileage runner might extend his New York to Seattle trip by adding a connection in, say, Miami. Or he might spend 16 hours flying to London, grab a pint at Heathrow, and then immediately board a flight back home. If the price is right, she might fly back and forth between two cities four times in a single day. For mileage runners, getting there isn't half the fun -- it's the whole point.”

You can read "We Love to Fly and It Shows: Inside the World of Mileage Running" at Wired.com.