Amid a surge in running’s popularity-with over 27,000 participants in this year’s Medellín marathon alone-a new piece examines the complex motivations behind the trend. More than just a fitness craze, the author explores running as a means of confronting personal struggles, processing grief, and finding solace, while also acknowledging its increasingly commercialized and performative aspects.The essay delves into the physical and mental demands of the sport, questioning whether it’s a path to self-improvement or simply another modern-day ritual of endurance.
The first time I went for a jog – and I hesitate to use the word “run,” it feels like an exaggeration for something achieved with so much pain – it took me forty minutes to cover three kilometers. When I finished, I burst into tears like a child realizing they’re utterly alone, orphaned. Sometimes, a physical shock is what it takes to confront our own failings, the consequences of choices we’ve made. “There are blows in life so strong… I don’t know! / Blows like God’s hatred… / They are few, but they… open dark trenches / in the fiercest face and the strongest back.” I broke down and sat on the train platform, feeling utterly defeated, wearing an oversized sweatshirt I’d bought a decade ago, a soaked cotton t-shirt, and fogged-up glasses. It felt like a knot inside me finally came undone. The experience was revelatory, and the only response was to change direction, to make different decisions. Sometimes a blow propels you in a new direction, much like Walter White deciding to cook methamphetamine with Jesse Pinkman after his cancer diagnosis. There are blows in life that don’t clarify things, they confuse them. Jogging, or perhaps running, is a blow in itself.
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Days before, I’d been reading And If I Die in the War by Juan Diego Mejía, a novel about a father who decides to run a marathon in honor of his son, a soldier killed in a dangerous mining operation. The old man subjects himself to the sport his son loved, breaking his body to sublimate his grief. It’s not about exercise, it’s about giving your thoughts, your sorrows, a place to run. It was a November afternoon in 2024, and a deep anguish washed over me. Perhaps inspired by the book – perhaps my brain had finally understood its hidden meaning – I went for a run. I circled the UPB campus once, then again. I kept going, even though I felt like I was dying, but that distance became a benchmark.
I’ve never participated in a race. I’ve signed up twice and didn’t go, terrified by the idea of the crowds, the trendiness, the overly joyful photos on social media – maybe I even envy them. Though there’s a boomerang effect to posting, to making a spectacle of your routine; likes feel like a pat on the back. Someone undertaking a difficult sport wants to show – to prove – their ability. It’s different from those who post their gym photos, because that world is parallel to the nightclub scene: loud music, the dance of weights, steroids, protein shakes. The one who runs – the one who swims, the one who cycles – simulates flight. Hector fled Achilles around the walls of Troy, only to eventually face him; Oedipus fled to avoid the prophecy, but the prophecy was already fulfilled; Aeneas fled Troy, crossed the Mediterranean, and founded Rome. There are flights: flights from failure, flights towards peace.
Okay. Running isn’t just about sublimation, about diluting the self and its sorrows, it’s about the reflection of our own lives, of who we are. I’ve asked some friends why they run. One says he started after seeing himself in a photo, as round as a park sculpture. Another spent weeks drinking aguardiente to drown his heartbreak, started running, and realized the anxieties felt different in his head —the sorrows ran too. A friend always wanted to try, but never dared, thinking she didn’t have what it takes, until people around her started and she saw it as an excuse to get out of the house, out of the home office, away from the sterile white light of her desk: she discovered that running is the best rest for the mind.
At the Medellín marathon, more than twenty-seven thousand people ran this year. There are people running everywhere, especially on social media and in races, which have become the new trendy hangout, like running clubs that end their workouts in expensive cafes, sharing a brunch – what they now call a breakfast that looks like lunch. Are we so lonely that finishing a sweat session is an excuse to make friends? Perhaps the reason is obvious: when you finish running, you carry your heart in your hand.
In reality, as with any activity within capitalism, running has become a consumer machine: whether it’s sneakers costing a million, or two million pesos – with which, oh the irony, you can only run a hundred kilometers – or the four-million-peso Garmin watch, the pants, the shirt, and the inevitable question: did you see me on Strava, you’re doing great; didn’t see you on Strava, you’re falling behind. I insist: the people who run the most are on social media, in races, and not so much on the street day after day.
I’ve discovered, too, that most runners are over thirty, and I’ve come up with a theory: it’s a suffering that must be tamed, endured, withstood. Younger people can’t handle it, or they do for a short time: twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, with the exception of athletes, young people who train intensely for athletics or another sport. Jogging, or running, is an exercise in stoicism: the body asks you to stop, but only the mind achieves balance. You have to have a capacity for suffering. If you suffer running fifteen kilometers, I can’t imagine what it’s like to run the forty-two kilometers of a marathon. We know the myth that founded this via crucis: a messenger, Philippides, who traveled from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory in the war and, upon arrival, fell dead.
A couple of years ago, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami landed on my bookshelf, and waited until I started jogging myself, because the Japanese writer had never interested me and the title – a homage to Raymond Carver’s book – pushed me away rather than drawing me in. I’ll choose a paragraph that sums it all up:
“Sometimes people ask those of us who run every day if we’re trying to live longer. The truth is, I don’t think many people run in order to live longer. Rather, I think there are more who run thinking: ‘It doesn’t matter if I don’t live much longer, but while I’m alive, I want to make sure that life is full.’ Of course, it’s much better to live ten years of life with intensity and persevering in a firm goal, than to live those ten years in a vacuous and scattered way. And I think running helps me achieve that. To consume oneself, with a certain efficiency and within the limitations imposed on each of us, is the essence of running and, at the same time, a metaphor for living (and, for me, also for writing). Probably many runners share this opinion.”
Two months after starting to run, unbearable pain flared up in my ankles: a small tendon I use, without thinking about it, to avoid my flat feet became inflamed. Months later – not long ago – pain started in my left knee. One insists on wearing oneself out, is aware of it. Sometimes, while it hurts, one insists on that pain, and doesn’t stop.
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This year, it seemed like everyone went for a run; so many faces of happiness, so much serotonin – which rises after a few kilometers, accumulating into a joy beyond description – so much empowerment, so many people who discovered their sport. Sometimes I’d recite this poem by Robert Creeley while running: “What will be the truth / that makes men so unhappy? / The days of dying / are special: / life is unlivable separated / from what we must forgive.”
