Alone, By Design

On running as a sport with only one real participant

I have a habit of romanticizing running alone.

Not the heroic version with misty mountains and dramatic self-reliance among the forces of nature. Just the simple fact that this is a sport with only one participant at a time. No matter how crowded the race, no matter how many people train “with” you, when it comes down to it, there is exactly one person doing the work.

Nobody can run my miles.
Nobody can decide for me where to go.
Nobody can adjust my effort.

That basic solitude is baked into running. And I’m very much drawn to it.

(Photo by Stephan Wieser)

Outer & inner loneliness

There is the outer loneliness: the long stretch of road where there’s simply no one else around. In races, those have always been some of my most intense moments. Not the finish, not the start, but the rather unspectacular middle sections where the pack has thinned out, the tumult has faded, and you suddenly realize you are in a silent corridor between two parts of your life.

Then there is the inner loneliness: the way your own mind sounds when there is nothing else to reflect or react to. No conversation, no music, no scrolling, no “How are you doing?” to answer politely. Instead, there is the uncensored version of whatever is going on in there.

Those moments are not always pleasant. Sometimes they are calm. Sometimes they feel raw and strangely exposed. But they always feel honest. There is no audience to perform for. There is no one to impress with how tough or how relaxed you supposedly are. If you are scared, you feel scared. If you are proud, you feel proud. If you are empty, you feel empty.

Running alone has a way of turning down the volume on everything that isn’t real enough to survive effort.

Why nothing else quite hits the same

I’ve tried to find that in other things.

Walking is too gentle. It lets me stay blurry. I can keep my thoughts half-formed and still move forward. My body never has to fully commit, so my mind doesn’t either.

Writing has the opposite problem. It is almost all cognitive work and zero physical effort. My brain is busy, my body is still. The thoughts don’t thin out, they multiply. I can keep rearranging and polishing them instead of simply having to sit with them.

Cooking has its own rhythm too. The chopping, the heat, the timing, the small sequence of actions you repeat until it feels like a ritual. But there is always a task to manage, a result to produce, someone to feed. It never quite empties out in the same way.

Cycling pulls focus outward. Speed, cars, corners, gradients, equipment. There is always something to manage. I am active, yes, but rarely stripped back.

Even hiking, as demanding and beautiful as it can be, feels different. The environment is loud. There is a lot to look at, plan for, respect. The mind is busy in a way that doesn’t quite let the unnecessary layers fall away.

Running – especially running alone – feels like a total reduction. Not a productivity booster (more), but a controlled subtraction (less).

You go out with a head full of tabs, and the body quietly starts closing them. Some thoughts lose importance simply because your heart rate is up and oxygen is needed elsewhere. Others stay and prove that they actually matter. The more the body works, the less room there is for decoration.

What remains after that filtering process might still hurt. It might still be confusing or unresolved. But it is real.

(Photo by Stephan Wieser)

Escaping the world, meeting yourself

I catch myself longing for exactly that: being out there with nothing but my own company, feeling things fall away step by step. Responsibilities, social irritations, doomsday angst, comparisons, whatever everyone else is doing.

From the outside it might look like escapism. And maybe there is an element of that. Going out the door to get away from everything. But it also feels like the opposite: going out there to finally not get away from myself.

The stories I tell about who I am, what I want, how strong or fragile I’m supposed to be… they all get tested against whatever is actually happening in my chest and legs.

Some days the verdict is harsh. Other days it’s unexpectedly kind. Either way, it tends to be clearer than anything I come up with sitting still.

Running, nothing compares to you

Something about running calms and deletes things in me that nothing else touches in the same way.

I don’t need it to solve my life. I don’t need it to carry a big metaphor every time I step outside. It is enough that this practice exists: a repeated act where I meet the uncurated version of myself, with no one else in the room.

I’m glad I found that. Or that it found me.

So I return, over and over. Because out there it is just me, the road, and a truth I can’t talk my way around.

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Everything Not Running

Do you remember Lisa’s and my experiment to eat as inflammation-free as possible for a few weeks? Well, the experiment officially ended a week ago, but we saw no reason to stop. Here’s what we did:

We completely avoided processed foods. We also avoided sugar and sugar additives in food (fruit sugar in fruit, coconut milk, and dates were allowed, but in moderation). The most far-reaching change, however, was avoiding flour of any kind, including whole grain. So no bread, no wraps, no pastries, even if the other ingredients were okay. Seed bread and oatmeal were allowed.

This new diet wasn’t particularly difficult for us. We’re not too far removed from this type of eating habits and didn’t have to give up stuff like drinking cola and eating fried food to begin with. And yet the change was enormously insightful.

Many of the things that make food “really awesome” were gone. Vegan cheese, naan bread, meatless chicken, oat milk with natural sweetness, pretzels with vegan butter and jam... As a result, food was much less of a “reward”. Our meals were always delicious, but most of the time the main goal was simply to fill ourselves up, not to compensate for any emotion.

Our favorite dishes naturally included curries in all variations, especially a tomato-coconut-vegetable curry. Oven-roasted vegetables with hummus, African peanut pot, and potatoes, potatoes, potatoes in all shapes and variations. Favorite topping: Roasted cashews. We also went all out on the morning porridge front. And we ate several tubs of peanut butter.

Now you probably want to know what effect this had, and I would love to tell you that I feel like a new person, bursting with energy, running PBs, and able to work with intense focus for 17 hours without getting tired. But that’s not the case. And yet something inside me tells me that avoiding inflammatory foods is good for my body. That’s enough for me to make it worthwhile.

I don’t think I’ll stick to this diet forever, but for now it’s working great for me, so I’m just going to keep going.

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On Repeat

Ann Beretta has been with me for half my life, and for just as long I’ve been wondering if anyone else knows the band besides me. It’s paradoxical: They are one of the most played artists of all time in my Apple Music portfolio, but I’ve never looked into them more deeply. With my other favorite bands, I always know when a new album is coming out, when they’re going on tour, or when there are lineup changes. With Ann Beretta, I only know one thing: that they make incredibly captivating music. Somehow, that’s enough for me.

Their acoustic album “The Other Side of The Coin...” from the late 90s had a particularly profound effect on me. Every single song touches my heart immediately. Some of these tracks helped me through the most difficult times of my life. The song “Forget Today Forget Tomorrow” for example conveys so many emotions at once: sadness, hope, farewell, new beginnings… all in one song.

I am sure that Ann Beretta will continue to accompany me for many years to come.