Why I run

People ask me why I run and I never have a clean answer. The honest one is uncomfortable: I don't fully know.

It started practically enough. I needed to lose weight, clear my head, do something with the anxiety that had nowhere to go. Running was free and required nothing but shoes and willingness. So I ran. Badly, slowly, two miles at a time until two became four became ten became something I can't imagine not doing.

But that's the origin story, not the reason.

The real answer

The real answer lives somewhere in mile eight of a long run, when the body has stopped complaining and the mind goes quiet in a way it won't do anywhere else. Not silent — you're still thinking — but the thoughts lose their edges. Problems that feel structural at a desk feel solvable on a trail. I don't know the neuroscience well enough to explain it, but I trust it completely.

Running is also the only place where effort and reward are perfectly honest with each other. You can't fake a long run. You either did the miles or you didn't. The finish line doesn't care about your excuses or your intentions. There's something clarifying about that kind of accountability, especially when so much of ordinary life is ambiguous.

And then there's the slowness of it. In a world built for speed, running makes you move through things instead of past them. You notice the way light changes in the canyon at 6am. You know which stretches of road smell like eucalyptus after rain. You earn a kind of intimacy with a place that you can't get any other way.

That's why I run. Not for the PRs. Not for the Strava segments. For the quiet, and the honesty, and the slow accumulation of places I've moved through with my own legs.

I'm still working on the shorter version.