break stride

English

Verb

break stride (third-person singular simple present breaks stride, present participle breaking stride, simple past broke stride, past participle broken stride)

1. To cease walking or running at the same gait, especially with the result of interrupting one's forward momentum.
   • 1983, Matthew Wilder, Greg Prestopino (lyrics and music), “Break My Stride”, in I Don't Speak the Language:

     Ain't nothin' gonna break my stride / Nobody gonna slow me down / Oh no, I got to keep on moving

   • 2011 January 22, Ian Hughes, “Arsenal 3 - 0 Wigan”, in BBC‎^[1]:

     When the second goal came, it was a belter - Fabregas launching an inch-perfect ball over the top for Van Persie to volley in without breaking stride.

   • 2023 November 8, Paul Salopek, “River Blues”, in National Geographic‎^[2]:

     “So many wars here,” says Luo Xin, my walking partner and a brilliant writer and professor of history from Peking University.
     I ask Luo to name them.
     Not breaking stride, he ticks off the wars between the Three Kingdoms more than 2,200 years ago. And then the Han-Xiongnu war of the second century B.C. And Liu Bobo’s later campaigns against the Qin empire. And the Tang versus Northern Song dynasty. And the Ming frontier wars. More recently, there was the Chinese civil war and the war against Japanese aggression. The Yellow River’s silted waters sucked away casualties from them all.