Running and Stoicism

Lessons for every endeavour

Caleb

Dec 31, 2024

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🏛️ Theory

One of the key figures in ancient Stoicism, Chrysippus was a long distance runner. I can take some solidarity in the fact that running then is an activity I share with the ancient Stoics.

These days, I don’t run as often or as far as I used to. But it’s still an excellent time to think about philosophy. Running itself demonstrates many Stoic truths.

Pain is not in the thing itself, but in our opinion of it.

Physical activity makes this lesson obvious. Many sensations during exercise feel initially terrible. There’s no way around it. If I woke up and felt the tension, soreness, and fatigue in the middle of the night, I would rightly be alarmed. But these same sensations, when experienced during running, take on an entirely different character.

The anticipation of a thing is worse than the thing itself.

A related lesson. Many of us can relate to the sense that we don’t want to go on a run because we fear that it will be terribly uncomfortable. We’d rather do something else. But as soon as we get our shoes on and get out of the door, we’re energized. The anticipation of the thing was worse than the thing itself. Our fear of the future had no reality in it.

Pain is temporary.

Another related lesson: pain comes in waves, it builds up and then falls away. It doesn’t last.

Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.

In your interest, or in your nature.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.3

Breaking a habit is easier than forming it.

As Epictetus says in Discourses 2.18:

Every habit and faculty is maintained and increased by the corresponding actions: the habit of walking by walking, the habit of running by running. If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write. But when you shall not have read for thirty days in succession, but have done something else, you will know the consequence.

And reminds us:

For the habit at first begins to be weakened, and then is completely destroyed.

All it takes is an instant. If you want to run, do it again and again.

Pain is information.

Fitness culture often preaches the message that you must overcome pain. This is a skill. Some discomfort is par for the course. It should be defeated.

And yet other forms of pain are your body telling you to slow down, or worse, that it’s harmed. Learn to listen to that voice before you become injured.

In other words, Stoicism isn’t about overcoming pain, it’s about seeing reality as it is.

The world is beautiful.

If you’re lucky enough to run through nature, take your headphones out, listen, and look around. The world is a beautiful place.

We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.

Meditations, 3.2