The Year Between Selves (2025 Recap)
On injury, identity, and running when nothing is simple anymore
Some years move in clean arcs. You set big goals, build toward them, race, recover. Weekly volume climbs, fitness follows, the story makes sense.
2025 was not one of those years.
This was the in-between year. A year of numbers that didn’t add up, of mountains climbed that didn’t look like “progress”. A year where my body stayed half-functional, my mind hovered between hope and resignation, and my identity as a runner sat on trial.
If I had to pick one metaphor for it, it would be this: A staircase that never ends. Which is literally true regarding the fact that I currently spend a lot of time on a Stairmaster machine.
1. A body that wouldn’t pick a side
The injury shaping this year appeared to be not that dramatic. No crash, no cast, no particular incident. Just a stubborn knee that never fully broke, but never fully healed.
Glass half full : not that bad.
Glass half empty: a constant rewrite of what running was allowed to be.
I lived in a narrow corridor: uphill was okay, flat was a negotiation, downhill was a huge problem. Long was risky, fast was suspicious, spontaneous was off the table. Every session became one question: Too much? Too little? Again?
That kind of limbo is more corrosive than a clear break. When you’re properly injured, the rules are simple: stop, rest, rehab, rebuild. When you’re “kind of okay”, you can always do something — just never enough to feel like yourself.
Over the months became strangely specialized. Vertical meters went up while total distance dropped. I climbed the same mountain over and over until winter closed it off. Then I followed the injury indoors: treadmill at 15%, Powermill, floors climbed instead of kilometers. Nature on screens, recycled gym air, and a direct debit to keep the captivity running.
All of that just to protect and preserve a version of fitness my body hadn’t actually asked for. At some point the real question shifted from “How bad is my knee?” to:
“What am I actually trying to save here — the joint, or the life that used to sit on top of it?”
2. When running is the architecture, not the hobby
This was also the year I had to admit something uncomfortable: Running isn’t “just” a thing I do. It’s the structure my life hangs from.
In stable phases, that feels beautiful. Training plans, races, recovery cycles, they quietly decide your days for you. You don’t have to ask “what now?” because tomorrow’s workout already answered.
When that architecture collapsed, small things started to slide. Sleep slipped, focus scattered, energy came in strange waves. I wasn’t only missing mileage. I was missing the frame that told me who I was and what my days were for.
This year forced me to live in constant tension between rehabbing my knee and trying to resurrect a version of myself that belonged to an earlier chapter.
3. Mountains, myths, and the cost of going big
On a positive note: 2025 was my first full year living at the foot of a big mountain. I love everything about it. Not a day goes by when Lisa and I don’t stand at the window, stare at the mountains, and marvel at the particularly beautiful light, fresh snow, moonlight, or cloud cover.
In this new environment I witnessed the mountain world growing louder. Races sold out faster. Beloved events changed hands. Lotteries turned human longing into gamble. Trail and Ultrarunning were growing and the whole myth factory kept running at full speed.
Part of me was fascinated. Another part stayed skeptical. I’ve seen what these races ask from a body and a mind. I’ve watched what happens when money, branding, and ownership structures move into spaces that used to run on community and stubborn love.
The mountains don’t care who owns the logo. They just keep asking:
What are you willing to give — and what do you want to keep?
Both giving and keeping are sacred. I’m desperately longing for balance between the two.
4. Numbers, devices, and the war for your “why”
If this year had a background noise, it was the soft click of buttons. And even though I have taken important steps by canceling various premium memberships on popular running platforms and deleting Instagram from my smartphone, kudos, likes, scores, recaps and Year-in-review animations keep on dominating this sport.
I wrote about Strava recaps that dress comparison up as celebration. About how easy it is to start running for the reels instead of for yourself. About devices that help you listen to your body, until you start trusting them more than your own perception.
I’m not anti-data. I love structure. But 2025 showed me how quickly tools become masters and users become slaves.
It’s one thing to glance at a recovery score. It’s another to decide if you’re allowed to feel tired based on it. It’s one thing to log a run. It’s another to feel like it didn’t really happen until it’s online.
A quiet rule emerged from all of this:
Let numbers support the life you want.
Don’t let numbers decide which life you’re allowed to have.
The recaps, graphs, streaks and badges will never show what actually carried you: the tiny comebacks, the runs you ended early on purpose, the boring days you did the right thing and nobody saw it. If you want that story, you have to write it yourself.
5. Pain, vows, and the long game
Another thread through this year was pain — and what we do with it.
I wrote about painkillers and races, about how normal it has become to mute the body so we can tick boxes. I wrote about Straight Edge, about not drinking or using drugs for decades, not as a performance hack but as a vow to stay awake in my own life.
Running and Straight Edge overlap in ways I only fully named this year:
Both start as decisions.
Then they become routines.
Then they become identity.
“Run Till Death” — the loudest phrase from my brand — sat right in the middle of that. For years, it meant commitment. In 2025, it also became a question:
Do I want to run till death — as in still moving, carefully, when I’m old? Or did I just want to run like there’s no tomorrow and hope the bill never comes?
The injury answered that for me. Not in a poetic way, but in a very practical one.
If I care about the long game, “more” can’t be my only direction. Sometimes the punk in me has to step aside so I can still be running in ten, twenty, thirty years. More often than hot the bravest thing you can do is not prove how much pain you can override.
6. Looking ahead from the in-between
I’d love to say this year ends with a clean resolution: The knee healed, balance restored, lessons learned, story complete.
It didn’t.
I’m still managing this injury.
I’m still renegotiating how central running is allowed to be.
I’m still catching myself grieving the runner I was, even while I try to meet the runner I am.
But 2025 did strip a few things down to the essentials:
Running is not a hobby I can casually swap. It’s part of my architecture, of who I am and want to become even more. And that means I have to protect it, not just exploit it.
Ambition and being “average” can live in the same body. The fact that nothing depends on my results is not a reason to be careless with my health. It’s a reason to be smarter.
The long game matters more than any single finish line, lottery slot, or annual running volume. “Run Till Death” only works if “till death” is measured in decades, not in seasons.
So no, this wasn’t a clean arc of a year. Especially the second half was a messy, frustrating, oddly important one. A year between selves: the runner I used to be, the runner I couldn’t be, and the runner I might still become.
If you’re in your own in-between right now — injured, stuck, bored, burned out, confused — maybe that’s the real common ground:
We’re all just trying to keep moving in a way that still feels honest.
Thanks for reading, thinking, feeling and commenting along this year. See you somewhere between floors climbed and trails regained.
Everything Not Running
If you’re in a festive mood at the end of the year and want to spread some love and appreciation, why not consider subscribing to Das Z [+] Letter? It costs less than a cup of coffee but shows me that my writing and Sprachnachrichten mean something to you. Thank you 🖤
On Repeat
As a year in review, I’m reposting the playlist that includes all previous On Repeat recommendations. Thank you, Philip for compiling it.
Great summup. Will have to bookmark and check back for various aspects now and then. As mentioned I am in a similar process, but not yet as structured as this posting 😉
Really powerful reflection on teh cost of treating fitness as identity. The line about being "half-functional" captures something most training logs never show, that gray zone where you're technically not injured but also not actually yourself. I've been in that same spot with pushing through stuff that never quite healed, and realizing the question isn't "how much can I tolerate" but "what kind of relationship with my body do I want in 20 years." Appreciate the honesty here.