Why I Run

I'm competing with myself. That's it. That's the whole thing.

If I don't show up, I don't improve. Nobody else suffers. Nobody notices. The road doesn't care. But I know. And that's worse than any coach yelling at me.

Running is the only honest feedback loop I've found. You can't fake a 10K time. You can't network your way to a faster marathon. You can't hire someone to run your long Sunday for you. It's just you, your lungs, and the pavement, and it tells you exactly where you are. No ambiguity. No "it depends." You're either faster than last month or you're not.

I overthink everything. It's the founder brain. I'll spiral on a pricing decision for three days, run twelve mental simulations, build a spreadsheet, talk to four people, and still not pull the trigger. My head is a browser with 47 tabs open and something is playing audio but I can't find which one.

Running forces me to close the tabs. My body takes over and my brain has to shut up. Around kilometer four, the noise stops. Not always, but often enough that I keep showing up for it. The thoughts don't disappear. They just get quieter, and the few that survive the run are usually the ones worth listening to. Some of my best decisions came somewhere between kilometer six and eight, drenched in sweat, not trying to think at all.

I signed up for the Lisbon marathon in October because I wanted to do something difficult. Something so far outside my comfort zone that I couldn't phone it in. I'd never run more than 5km. The marathon gave me 4.5 months to train. Every morning I woke up and the only question was: did you run today or didn't you? No nuance. No excuses. Just the simple binary of showing up.

Then I ran it. And the day after, I wanted more.

I saw an ad for La Corsa della Bora, a trail ultra in Trieste. 60km through the Karst. I'd done 42, so what's another 18? I'd walked the Camino de Santiago the year before. I knew my feet could handle distance. I signed up.

10 and a half hours. There's a point around kilometer 47 where your body starts sending messages that your brain doesn't want to hear. Everything says stop. Your knees, your hips, the blisters, the chafing, the voice in your head that's suddenly very reasonable about why walking is fine, why nobody would judge you, why you've already done enough. And you just keep going. You made a deal with yourself and you're not the kind of person who breaks that deal.

Sometimes I run with music. Heavy metal, loud enough to drown out whatever I'm carrying that day. Sometimes I don't. I just take it all in. The city at 6am before anyone's awake. The sound of my own breathing. The weird peace of being physically exhausted and mentally still. That's the good stuff. That's the version of meditation that actually works for people who can't sit still.

Then there are the races.

The energy at a race is different from anything I've experienced. Everyone there is trying to prove something, and the thing they're trying to prove is entirely to themselves. The person you're trying to beat is last month's version of yourself. Nobody's out there thinking "I need to beat that guy in the blue shirt." They're thinking "I said I'd do this, and I'm doing it, and holy shit this hurts but I'm not stopping."

I have an addictive personality. The obsessive, all-in, can't-stop-until-it's-done wiring that made me build a company from nothing is the same wiring that makes me run 60km in a day. It's not always a good trait. In business it makes me chase too many things at once. In relationships it makes me too intense. On the road it just makes me faster.

Running is the only place where that energy works in my favor.

So I run.