They Can't Wreck Running

Don't Confuse the Culture With the Practice

Running is becoming too commercial.

Brands are ruining trail and ultra.

Those runfluencers didn’t pay their dues.

The sport is losing its soul.

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It’s a regular thing for The Internet to declare running is changing for the worse. Too performative. Too online. Too late-stage capitalism. A race sells out to a big-money sponsor. A brand hosts a weird activation. Someone puts tone-deaf copy on a window cling. Out come the pitchforks.

Maybe we’re assigning too much significance to Run Culture. We weave these disparate external moments into a story, then let it shape our relationship with the sport. In the process, we forget that Run Culture isn’t where running happens. We run when nobody’s watching. On tracks and trails. Dusty gravel roads. Empty city streets before sunrise.

Oliver Burkeman says that when everything has to mean something bigger, it creates the appearance of ideological differences where they don’t need to exist. In other words, when we become preoccupied with what Run Culture says about running, we lose touch with the experience itself.

A simple prescription:

Go for a self-centered run.

Leave the discourse at home. Forget the brands, the runfluencers, and the “state of the sport.” Spend an hour paying absurdly close attention to your own experience. Running has always happened there.

Take a familiar route. Feel what you loved about it the first time. Curiosity, wonder, anxiety. Pull it all up from the well of your stomach. Running is beautiful. Not much has changed, but everything has. Again and still, here you are. Each step roots an ethereal, slow-dissolving footprint to the ground. You will always be here. Running is yours again.

They can’t wreck it, because it’s yours.

Run Culture is real and important: work, art, media, commerce, memes, clubs, races. I love Run Culture. I am Run Culture (and so are you).

But running is a practice.

This practice requires nothing from the culture. It’s personal. It asks only that you show up and pay attention and remember.

Run lightly,
-mike

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