Why I Run

People sometimes ask why I run so hard.

There are the obvious answers. I like racing. I like getting faster. I like finding out what happens when the body starts negotiating and you decide not to listen.

But there are other reasons.

Running has always provided a peculiar kind of escape. Not necessarily from a place, or even from a person. Sometimes you just want to put some distance between yourself and whatever happens to be occupying your head.

I’ve had periods when I’ve felt remarkably invisible. You can be surrounded by people and still somehow feel like a ghost among them. You talk. You make jokes. You show up. Yet occasionally you leave wondering whether you were really there at all.

Rejection is strange that way. After enough of it, the individual instances aren’t necessarily what bother you anymore. You start looking for a pattern.

And patterns are dangerous things to look for when you’re unhappy.

The mind is exceptionally good at turning this happened again into this will always happen. A bad afternoon becomes evidence about your entire life. Someone’s indifference becomes a referendum on your worth. Eventually you’re prosecuting yourself with evidence you collected yourself, before a jury consisting entirely of yourself.

So I run.

There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about physical exhaustion. The road doesn’t care who likes you. A stopwatch doesn’t ghost you. A hill doesn’t reject you. There is only the next mile, the increasingly unreasonable demands from your legs, and the little voice suggesting that perhaps this would be an excellent time to stop.

Sometimes I listen.

Often I don’t.

That’s the contradiction.

My legs have carried me away from some of the worst places my mind has taken me. They stand me up, quite literally. And my way of thanking them has frequently been to ask for another mile.

And another.

And another.

There is probably a lesson in there somewhere.

I thought about this after watching The Iron Claw. It’s a film about wrestling, ostensibly, but what stayed with me was something broader: what happens when identity, suffering, love and self-destruction become tangled together. What happens when the thing that makes you feel alive is also capable of consuming you?

Running isn’t wrestling, obviously. My life isn’t that movie. But good stories don’t need to resemble your life exactly to make you recognize something in yourself.

I don’t want running merely to be an escape hatch.

I want to run because I love running. Because a fast mile is exhilarating. Because there’s another road I haven’t seen, another race I haven’t run, another absurd number on a clock that I’d like to make slightly smaller.

Maybe that’s part of getting older: realizing that the things which carried you through difficult periods don’t have to remain attached to those periods forever.

I still run hard.

Probably too hard sometimes.

But these days, I’d rather be running toward something.