Since the work of Kolpakov and Kucherov in [5, 6], it is known that ρ(n), the maximal number of runs in a string, is linear in the length n of the string. A lower bound of 3/(1 + √ 5)n ∼ 0.927n has been given by Franek and al. [3, 4], and upper bounds have been recently provided by Rytter, Puglisi and al., and Crochemore and Ilie (1.6n) [8, 7, 1]. However, very few properties are known for the ...