The 85th Edition

Sometimes the hardest part of running isn’t the training, it’s remembering why you loved it in the first place.

Something to Think About

You don’t fall out of love with running because it fails you, you fall out of love because you stop nurturing the parts of it that once gave you life.

Something to Ask Yourself

What parts of running actually make me feel most like myself?

Personal Lesson

This weekend I ran Vietnam Trail Marathon 70K, and on paper it was a bit of a shit show. It was tough, it didn’t go particularly well, and from start to finish it felt like one long sufferfest.

But strangely, I loved every part of it. Not in a romanticised, Instagram-caption way. In a very real, grounded, honest way.

I loved being out on the trails. I loved the chaos of it. I loved the atmosphere, the people, the shared suffering, the sense of adventure. I felt deeply grateful, not for a result, but for what running has given me over the years.

Experiences like that remind me that running isn’t something I do to get something else. It’s something that has shaped my life.

I also know this isn’t always how it feels. There have been periods where running has felt heavy, forced, transactional. Where discipline stayed but love faded. That ebb and flow is normal. Running has never left me in those moments. It’s always just waited, patiently, until I was ready to meet it again in the right way.

Running – Life’s Metaphor

Running mirrors life because love isn’t constant, but commitment is. The relationship changes, deepens, fades, returns. What matters is learning how to listen, adjust, and reconnect rather than forcing yourself to feel something you don’t.

Final Thoughts

You’re not supposed to love running all the time. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, selling something, or hasn’t been doing it long enough. Love comes and goes. Discipline carries you through the quieter periods, but discipline alone won’t sustain you forever.

What will sustain you is understanding what you actually love about running. For some it’s racing. For some it’s community. For some it’s structure, fitness, or mental clarity. For me, it’s the trails. It’s movement through wild places. It’s feeling small, capable, alive.

If running feels flat right now, don’t panic. Don’t throw it away. Don’t label yourself as lazy or broken. Step back. Strip it down. Remove the noise. Go towards the parts that light you up, even if that means doing less, racing less, or caring less about numbers for a while.

Running isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t demand constant passion. It doesn’t punish you for drifting. It will be there when you’re ready to love it again. Your job isn’t to force that love. Your job is to create the conditions where it can return.

And when it does, you’ll realise something important: you never really fell out of love with running at all. You just needed to remember why you started.