The Feather and the Well

Sobriety gave me softness. Running reminds me I have fire.

Something I read on LinkedIn last week shook me and I’ve been unpacking it ever since. Alongside the usual marketing hot takes, ignorable corporate PR, and “humbled and honored” new job announcements was this:

“Nobody is desperate for more comfort. What we’re starving for is intensity, and that’s hard to admit because it means the ease we’re so precious about has also made us numb.”
—Jasmine Bina

It was like a horror movie, except instead of a knife, I was attacked from the dark with a mirror. For a person who writes about “running lightly,” the idea that ease might merely be a veil over what I really want was unsettling. To understand why, we have to go back to 2020, a year I’d rather forget.

Lost and Found

I was a mess. Well on my way to drunk by noon most days. If I didn’t run in the morning—before I got into the beer—it was not going to happen. For two decades, booze had ravaged my soft tissues and hardened my heart.

My running was tortured. I never wrote.

It didn’t begin that way, of course. Nobody sets out to hide in a bottle. It starts as a search. William James said intoxication is really a craving for the mystical. Jung called it a “thirst for wholeness.” Addicts are first seekers of universal secrets and explorers of what seems like an unlocked self.

But hey, I’m not trying to romanticize it. That I was losing my running was another in a long line of signs; I had to quit drinking or it was going to kill me. So, I quit. I asked for help and on December 3, 2020… I quit.

Last Chance

Meditation and Buddhist ways of seeing parted the haze of early sobriety. Zen helped me meet past guilts and future expectations with the lightest touch—the tip of a feather. Be with this moment, Zen said, and now this moment again. I read Lao Tzu and Natalie Goldberg and Alan Watts and found solace in stillness.

My running returned. I began to write.

In 2022, I launched Last Chance Running, an ode to the main street in my hometown, “Last Chance Gulch,” and a reminder to myself that sobriety had to to stick this time. I was out of do-overs.

As words spilled onto the page, I saw that booze hadn’t unlocked my true self at all, but rather had constructed a kind of parallel me, built on the foundation of largely fictional stories. To stay clean—upon which my life depended—I would spend the rest of my days spotting, processing, and letting go of those stories.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

—Mary Oliver, “The Journey”

Lightly Child, Lightly

I read Yung Pueblo and Pema Chödrön and Mary Karr and learned language for what sobriety was offering: a growing self-awareness and comfort with change that made life less heavy. Getting free from alcohol was helping me feel at home in my skin and accepting of each new moment. I was moving with more ease.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

—Aldous Huxley, “Island”

My running blossomed. My writing expanded.

As sobriety became less effortful and more a way of being, Last Chance started to feel constrictive. In 2023, I set it aside in the land of forgotten blogs and turned to the project you’re reading now. Running Lightly is many things, but at its heart it’s a search for joy in movement and a connection to the wisdom of body and mind.

It is about ease.

Understand, I fought for my inner peace. Returning to old stories about toughness and hustle and grinding oneself down—not an option. So, when I read that what people really crave is intensity, I resisted. But the more I reflect on my experience, the more I see, intensity doesn’t undermine ease… it sharpens it.

What I had thought of as opposing forces, are actually interdependent.

In Defense of Intensity

I just returned from a workout. Three minutes very fast, followed by two minutes jogging, repeated six times. On the last rep, I went to the well. It was hard, but I feel like a million bucks, and my watch says, “Productive.”

To run with this kind of vigor more than once every couple weeks would put me in the well. But efforts like today’s, stacked consistently over time, benefit both physical and mental strength and acuity.

Physiologically, intensity pushes the body to adapt. Hard efforts increase heart stroke volume, expand capillary networks, and train muscles to clear lactate more efficiently. They also sharpen neuromuscular coordination, making strides more economical. The result is simple: what once felt hard begins to feel easy. If we choose, we can continue gently pushing our ceiling up in this way, exploring what’s possible.

In my experience, we’re capable of more than we think.

Because our brains so often block joy and performance, the mental benefits of intensity are huge. First, it trains discomfort. Choosing hard things and staying with them teaches us to handle stress later. Second, it opens the door to our inner world. Deep in oxygen debt, muscles burning, everything external blurs and we accelerate inward, coming face-to-face with our own raw materials.

Uncomfortable? Yes. Necessary for growth? Also yes.

That’s not unlike sobriety. Continuing to drink would have been the easy, predictable thing. Quitting demanded intensity: sitting with cravings, withdrawals, shame, guilt, and the raw, imperfect edges of being human. Just like a hard workout, it left me stronger on the other side. Intensity is what keeps ease honest.

The Finish Line

From the Latin “intensus,” meaning “stretched,” the notion of intensity is rooted in transformation. Running hard is a deliberate stretching of the system to spur growth. Closely related—in fact deriving from the same linguistic origins—is “intention,” a kind of directed energy.

Taken together, we are called to practice stretching ourselves beyond comfort, but to do it with purpose and direction. Intentional intensity isn’t in conflict with ease… the two things rely on one another. Like the classic improv prompt, “yes, and” keeps the skit from screeching to a halt.

If you’ll allow me a fourth wall moment, writing this piece was cathartic. I didn’t think it would be so much about my sobriety journey, but the words kept coming and I thought, let them flow. In the process, I yes-anded my Running Lightly vocab. Free from the self-imposed box of “precious ease,” I’m excited to occasionally share some sweat and suffering.

Thanks for being here for all of it.

Run lightly,
-mike

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