When Running Can’t Help
And Love Turns Out To Be Dependence
It has been a week since our family became three instead of four.
Where I would usually run
What I feel most right now is not just sadness, but the lack of my usual way of dealing with it. For years, whenever something felt too heavy, too noisy, too hard to deal with, I ran. I always knew it wouldn’t fix anything. But it gave that feeling somewhere to go. It broke things open. It made life feel more bearable again.
Right now, I do not have that.
Because of my knee, running still comes wrapped in rules, caution, and the constant low-grade fear of doing too much. A Stairmaster session helps a little. A short run-walk helps a little, too. But that is not the same as leaving the house and running until things inside me finally start to loosen. It is not the same as getting far enough away from myself (by running far enough away) for the pressure to drop. It is not the freedom I was used to. It is rehab wearing running clothes.
And that difference feels enormous when you actually need the real thing.
What has been unsettling me this week is not only that I cannot run the way I want to. It is how quickly and automatically my mind still reaches for it. As if every difficult feeling still has the same answer.
Grief? Run.
Restlessness? Run.
Stressed out? Run.
Unsatisfied? Run.
Emptiness? Run longer.
That reflex tells me more about myself than I would like.
What running has been holding
Because of course I love running.
But love is rarely the whole story. There is relief in it. Control. Reassurance. The feeling of being inside my body instead of trapped inside my head. The sense that I am still moving, still becoming, still not entirely stuck. Maybe even a way of avoiding certain things by turning them into motion before they can fully settle.
That is the part that feels hard to admit.
Running does not just express something about me. At times, it clearly stabilizes me. It organizes my inner life more than I like to think. And when that falls away, I do not suddenly become wiser or calmer or more evolved. I just feel more exposed. More cornered by my own thoughts. More aware of how much weight I had quietly handed over to this one thing.
Part of me would like to turn that into a clean lesson. Something about stillness, acceptance, perspective. Something tidy and mature. But that is not where I am. I don’t have the strength for that. Or the patience.
What carries can also wound
What this moment leaves me with is a harder question: when does love turn into dependence?
Not in a dramatic or clinical sense. I mean it in a far more ordinary one. If something becomes your most reliable way of getting back to yourself, its absence does not feel small. It does not feel minor. It feels existential.
I don’t think this is a flaw. It may simply be part of loving something enough to let it shape your inner life. At some point it stops being just something you do. It becomes something you lean on.
Running giveth and running taketh away.
That is the danger in loving anything for real: once it has learned how to carry you, it also learns how to destroy you.
Everything Not Running
Three years of writing adds up.
What used to be “just the archive” had quietly turned into an unmanageable treasure trove of articles. So I finally gave it some structure.
You can now browse the archive from the navigation at the top of my Das Z Letter landing page. The writing is grouped into a few recurring threads: Running Culture, Injury & Comeback, The Marathon, Trail & Ultra, and Western States 100.
Less digging. Better entry points. More to discover.
You are welcome.
On Repeat
This is protest music with real force behind it. “Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k)” sounds urgent, furious, and fully committed. That is what makes it work. Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against The Machine adds extra charge, but the real power of the song is how focused it feels. A hundred percent locked in.
The video is exceptional too. Brutal, simple, powerful.
The part where you wrote Grief, stressed out, restlessness and all kind of other things- the immediate and quick fix is to RUN. It is totally relatable brother. I have been doing it now a days as well just to keep me afloat as I have to make some tough decisions in life and they are some sort of soul sucking and feels quite heavy as well.
Whenever I go out for a run- every thing which is being ruminated in my mind, intrusive thoughts and all kind of things just vanish for that time and it even feels was it even present there ever. So, running does a lot good to me even though I have been running SOLO for the last5.5 years(20000 KM).
Hach Chris, I feel you. Für mich fühlt sich das Laufen nahezu wie eine evolutionsbiologische Notwendigkeit an - in einer Welt, in der ein Großteil der menschlichen Schwierigkeiten daraus resultiert, dass unser Gehirn evolutionär betrachtet nicht an unsere heutige Umwelt angepasst ist, da die kulturelle Entwicklung viel schneller voranschreitet als die biologische. Wenn (in eigentlich nicht mehr lebensbedrohlichen Situationen) Stress entsteht, der sich aus biologischen Gründen aber existenziell anfühlt, ist Laufen in der Natur doch eigentlich die naheliegendste Antwort.