One morning, in the spring of 2011, I was pool running in Berkeley, California. As I bobbed through the water, I watched the morning light creep over the hills. The predawn air was dank and chilly. Above the pool, fog rolled off San Francisco Bay, splashing against the hills like aerial sewage. When it’s especially foggy in the Bay Area, the sun doesn’t rise. Instead, it smudges into the sky in a monochrome blur.

At least, this was my grim perspective from the pool. I was groggy and uncomfortable. I felt ridiculous, pumping my legs in a maniacal facsimile of running, tepid water occasionally splashing into my mouth. The visceral urge to stay fit despite the injury was enough to get me into the pool. But I still wondered, “Why is cross-training so awful?”

Six weeks earlier, I had broken my foot while running on the Northern California trails. It happened suddenly: One moment, I was whipping through the woods, contemplating lunch. The next, I could barely walk. I limped the last three miles back to my car, pain shooting through my foot with every step. I had never broken a bone before; I figured it was just some bad tendonitis.

It was still painful a week later. Eventually, an X-ray revealed that I had completely broken my second metatarsal. The bone was displaced; the fractured ends skewed away from each other. And so I found myself cross-training.

Injuries are often heart-wrenching. The pain of physical trauma is often matched by the social and psychic toll that comes from losing your daily routine and training friends. And the effort to cling to your fitness through cross-training can feel like salt in the wound. Of all the ways to cross-train when injured, I truly loathe pool running. I dislike tinkering with flotation belts, goggles, and garishly colored Speedos. I hate the smell of chlorine and that initial shock of cold water engulfing your genitals.

Of course, there are other cross-training options for the injured runner. Most of these involve joining a gym filled with very different athletes than are found on running trails, tracks, and roads. Muscle-bound lifters moan over free weights. Instructors in bright spandex shout microphoned imperatives. There is a different vocabulary in gym: “cardio,” “Zercher squats,” and whatever the CrossFit people are saying these days. Above it all, fluorescent lights illuminate rows of exercise machines propping up sweaty bodies transfixed to their smartphones.

One can hardly blame folks for distracting themselves on exercise machines. Hopping onto a stationary bike or elliptical can be absolutely mind-numbing. Yet the static boredom of exercising indoors doesn’t fully explain, for me, why cross-training is so terrible. While many dislike the monotony of a treadmill, I don’t mind it that much. It’s not too different from running intervals around a track or jogging at night. I can achieve a meditative headspace. Even on a treadmill, the sport provides more than fitness. It offers a sense of direction, even when I’m running in place.

So while there are differences in scenery and company, the most unsettling part of cross-training is the deferred sense of purpose. Cross-training, especially when we’re injured, forces us to dramatically shift our reason for training. We must adopt a maintenance mindset. Injury usually necessitates that runners stop thinking about improvement or forward progress. Forced by circumstance into a position of preservation, the cross-training runner no longer works toward new goals or a better self. Training becomes mere exercise, a fight against our deteriorating fitness—a desperate struggle against entropy. Cross-training is about becoming less lesser; it’s about treading water, or breaking even.

People quip that the quickest way to the funeral home is . Take away a person’s sense of purpose, a reason to wake up in the morning, and eventually they stop waking up. Running is no different. Cut off progress toward an end, and activity becomes much more difficult.

One day, during the 2011 injury, I was overwhelmed by questions of purpose. I was again in the pool. It was another gray day, but this time the skies opened, and it began to rain. As cold drops of water clapped onto my head, I wondered aloud, “Why in the world am I doing this? How is this making me a better runner?” Beyond the pool, I noticed my shower towel was soaked. I’d be damp for the rest of the morning. “Fuck it.” I got out of the pool and limped to the locker room, wet towel in hand. It was a few days before I worked up the motivation to return to the gym.

Given the choice, I’ll always opt for a run. I’ve had many more injuries since 2011, and they remain frustrating. I’ve broken more bones, inflamed more tendons, and strained more muscles. But with experience comes perspective, and I’ve worked over the years to be less cynical about substitute activities. Movement is itself a privilege.

This past summer, I fractured a rib from a tumble in a trail race. After a couple weeks of total rest, I spent a few sessions on a spin bike to ease my legs back into activity. It wasn’t fun; I was bored after a single hour in the saddle. But as I spun my legs and even cranked up the resistance to dance on the pedals a bit, I had to admit that it was pleasant just to put my legs into motion.

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The most painful race I have ever experienced was my first attempt at an ultramarathon, in 2012. seemed like a soft transition into ultrarunning: The famous race is a 50K, only five miles farther than a marathon. And while the Way Too Cool course is all on trails of the Sierra Nevada foothills, the route is not especially brutal. Starting just east of Auburn, California, it winds down dirt fire roads to the banks of the American River, before rolling back toward the finish along forested ravines and canyons.

For the first couple hours, things seemed fine. I was running quickly, toward the front of the pack. But as fatigue mounted in my legs, I began to have catastrophic energy issues. It happened fast—as if a plug had been pulled and my strength bled out, like water draining from a sink. “Hold it together,” I told myself, as I vomited up my pre-race breakfast. Other runners started moving past me, some giving words of encouragement. But I hardly noticed. I blocked out the scenery and the other competitors, focusing on keeping my legs in motion. I had entered the pain cave.

Pain is perhaps the most common experience in competitive distance running. If you want to achieve your best performances, you must be willing to suffer. In trying to podium or snag a personal best, your own physiology will fight against you. Your muscles ache, the lactic acid builds, and you slip into oxygen debt. So why do it? Why do runners willingly enter the pain cave?

The phrase itself—“pain cave”—has proliferated among runners and ultramarathoners, hinting at how much the experience of suffering defines the sport. Jim Walmsley famously missed a turn at Western States last year because, in his own words, “I was very much in the pain cave.” Ensconced in physical distress, he ran miles off course, ending what might have been a record-setting day. But Walmsley didn’t invent the phrase. When Timothy Olson won Western States in 2012, professional ultrarunner and blew us all away.” Outdoor industry companies are now following suit. this spring, The North Face marketed its apparel as helping runners “weather the triumph and the pain cave.” to let you turn your basement into “the perfect pain cave for your budget.” Caverns of discomfort are seemingly everywhere.

Ultramarathoning does not hold a monopoly on pain—running’s subdisciplines are unified through deep descents into lactic agony. Racing a 5K is like taking a bath in discomfort. A well-paced half marathon feels like holding your hand in a campfire. The end of a marathon is particularly awful—the last 10 kilometers almost a deconstruction of the self.

This is why the metaphor of the cave is so very apt. When we hurt, the outside world becomes bounded and excluded, and we descend into a chasm of ourselves. And when things go especially pear-shaped because of a bonk or bad pacing, the contours of the pain cave turn jagged and sharp.

After years of subjecting myself to this masochism, my sense is that runners gravitate toward painful activities because they provide us with opportunities for knowledge. We think pain will reveal something, some evidence of value or commitment to self-improvement. We believe, for some reason, that arbitrary painful challenges will provide answers: Who’s the best? Have I improved? Am I tough enough? What am I doing with my life? In other words, we want to know the content of our character.

This is perhaps why the peculiar celebration of pain has always permeated distance running’s culture. We find something deep and metaphorical about the idea of running through pain, as if the endurance of discomfort contains meaning beyond angry nerve endings. We cherish stories like the iconic 1982 between Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley at the Boston Marathon, a pyrrhic experience between two athletes at their physical peak that neither came close to matching again in their lives. We fetishize the agonies of the fictional , who runs 60 quarter-mile intervals in and pisses blood afterward.

Pain forces us to confront disruptive, awful, and occasionally inspiring realities of the world around us. The pain cave is a place where we take stock of our courage and ask ourselves how much we are willing to give for the goals we’ve laid out. And that, I think, is why we willingly descend into it.

But such armchair philosophy was far from my mind on the trails of Way Too Cool in 2012. Over the last eight miles, I ran ragged in a state of physiological deterioration. As I lifted my body up the course’s steep climb near mile 26, the discomfort was so acute I could almost taste it. “Holy cow,” I thought as I staggered up the slope like a drunken bear. “This really hurts.” Friendly volunteers cheered along the trailside, but they seemed muted and muffled as I lurched by in my cavern of physical distress. My pace melted into a crawl. “What is it, exactly, that I am trying to accomplish here?” I mumbled to myself. “Something is totally off with my body. I really should stop.” I contemplated sitting down on the trailside. Maybe I could get a ride to the finish.

Then, amid the turmoil of the cave, some part of me quietly pointed out, “But if you stop, you will never know if you could have finished today. Aren’t you curious?” I knew this was circular reasoning: I would only know I could finish the race by finishing it. But I did want to know.

An agonizing hour later, I crossed the finish line, tottering through the corral like an overloaded boat about to capsize. I sat down and stared at the small bit of ground between my shoes. I felt fantastically awful. Somebody handed me a cupcake: “Way to tough it out, bro.” After a moment, I staggered off, cupcake in hand, to look for my car. I had learned in the pain cave that I could finish an ultra, and I knew I’d be back again soon.

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You really haven’t lived until you’ve picked vomit out of your own shoes. I learned this nearly a decade ago when I was training for my first marathon on the slopes of Paris Mountain in South Carolina. I had too much gin the night before, and the Carolina summer demanded penance, which I managed to deposit into my shoes. It didn’t help that I had decided to run up the longest and steepest hill in the area. The mountain was kicking my ass.

It was a very warm morning. When coupled with a steep uphill, Carolina humidity has an almost violent presence. Even the blueness of the sky hides from the heat behind a gray veil. The humidity sank upon the mountain’s slope and lent a pervasive heaviness to the air. It pulled down at me, the superheated moisture compounding gravity’s drag against my body. The mountain seemed complicit in a wide conspiracy to stop my ascent, as if the land itself felt unfavorably about my summit attempt.

Such hyperbole is appropriate. When I ran cross-country and track at , Paris Mountain enjoyed godlike status. The mountain sits at the edge of campus, just north of Greenville. Resting squat and low above the school, Paris looks like an old earthen castle looming over the countryside.

The mountain was the backdrop to my running experience for four years. It sat in full view of our track, and in the wheezing rest during interval sessions, my eyes would roll upward toward it. On Sunday long runs, Paris Mountain was a point of orientation—the landmark that indicated how far we had left go. When I studied in the evening after workouts, I could see its crest from the university library. The green trees around the summit would fade into oranges and browns as the sun set behind the library’s east-facing windows.

The mountain passively watched us in both work and play. Furman’s Baptist heritage meant the college campus was dry, but my teammates and I brazenly drank cheap beer on our apartment porches. We’d sit and drink, whining about sex, life, and workouts. The mountain was omnipresent—its slope a wall of trees before us.

While Paris loomed large over Furman, to call the rise of land to the east of the school a mountain is a generous description. Paris Mountain is really just a big hill, a peripheral outlier of the Appalachians. It’s a patch of firmer sediment that resisted erosion, now sculpted into a spine of land reclining southward toward downtown Greenville. It’s not particularly scenic. An unsightly gash of stone disrupts the growth of trees on the prominent western slope. Human construction has further scarred the mountainside. McMansion housing tracts have slashed through the woods. Radio and television towers rise in alien angles from the summit.

Nevertheless, a mythic aura surrounded Paris Mountain, one that was compounded by the rumor-mill exaggerations of a collegiate running team. “You gotta be careful running up Paris,” an upperclassman runner cautioned me during my first month at Furman. “It will tear up your calves on the climbs, and then ruin your quads on the descent.” Chastened, I avoided the mountain. On easy days, we’d jog past the aptly named Altamont Road, which led up to the summit. “We gonna race up Altamont today?” someone would always joke as we passed by. But we never did, and its mystique grew. We told stories about recent graduates of the team who were now training for marathons and were rumored to run up and down the mountain on a weekly basis. At the time, I thought such outlandishness was only hearsay. To run up that hill seemed the feat of giants.

But in reality, Paris is decidedly not an impossible run. Indeed, races up and over it every year. And compared with the extreme climbing that defines trail and ultra races nowadays, running up Paris Mountain is almost a cakewalk. At Furman, we weren’t anywhere near the fastest collegiate team in the South, but my team was certainly fit enough to have run to the summit with relative ease. We could have incorporated the mountain into a training runs at least a few times a semester, but in my four years as a runner at Furman, I think I ran up to the summit only once or twice.

Why?

By all objective standards, Paris Mountain is still a stout climb. It’s a grind to the top, an ascent of nearly 800 vertical feet over two miles. The last 250 meters flicks up to a 12 percent grade—one final gut-shot if you’re already at your limit. When they held the , race organizers incorporated the mountain’s punchy climb to ensure the peloton would break up before the finish. It’s a significant test of physical abilities. So my team collectively reasoned that running up it on a regular basis would disrupt our training and risk injury.

But honestly, we were mostly just scared.

Ultimately, it took a marathon, a challenge of greater mythic stature, to displace Paris Mountain’s fear-inducing psychology. In training for my first marathon after college, I decided to tame the summit. I rented a cheap apartment near the base of the mountain. I started running up and over Paris on a weekly basis—which is how I found myself that one day, halfway up the climb, fishing puke out of my shoes.

Most of my runs up the summit were less memorable. To reach the summit, one follows Altamont Road, which weaves its way up the side of the hill. The trees hang close along the shoulder, making the curves along the ascent confusingly similar: “Was that the last bend before the next steep pitch? Or is there one more?” The narrow road is gray and worn, the tarmac cracked, and the lines of paint faded. Outcroppings of reddish, oxidized stone lean into the roadside.

As I ran up the mountain regularly, the climb assumed a ritualistic normalcy: “This is the turn with the decaying opossum carcass. Here’s the bit with the rampant kudzu. Watch out for the barking dogs that always run down this driveway.” And in this way, the mountain became less big. Such are the tradeoffs we make to improve: the mountains become flatter, the audacious becomes mundane.

The mountain didn’t become physically easier to run up—it resolutely continued to dominate the landscape—but its legend was eroding. One time, when I reached the summit, I looked down the slope, wondering if I could find my apartment. When I spotted the building, it seemed absurdly nearby. “I ran up all this way—and it’s just right there?” I eventually started doing runs with multiple ascents, and the mountain’s iconic status shattered. It remained an obstacle, but one that was mostly just part of the landscape, almost like furniture.

I don’t even remember the last time I ran up Paris Mountain before I moved away from South Carolina. But my running logs indicate that climbing Paris had become unremarkable. On May 11, 2008, I noted without fanfare that I had run a double ascent: up one side of the mountain and down the other, before turning back to climb back over it. “A little leg-weary at the end,” I wrote, “but felt pretty well overall.”

The mountain was runnable. The mountain was easy. The mountain, after all, was just a hill.

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For a sport that prides itself on its simplicity, distance running often plumbs the messy depths of the human psyche. I thought of this last month, as I sat slumped on the floor against my apartment door, trying to muster up the will to start my run. A nasty virus had hollowed me out. It was one of those bugs that enables acute awareness of your own bodily organs. (“Ah, so that’s where my spleen is.”) Although I had a ten-mile run on the training schedule, I convinced myself to take the day off. This was a wise decision, but as I crawled back into bed, I began to feel an expanding sense of guilt for the unplanned rest day.

Runner’s guilt is a familiar feeling for nearly every runner. It’s the visceral sensation of incompleteness that creeps up from missing a run. There’s a box, somewhere deep in our bones and sinews, that we’ve neglected to check off for the day. Even as I lay in bed, coughing up phlegmy grotesqueries into a tissue, I felt that nagging voice of guilt pestering me about why I lacked the discipline to fit my run in.

The notion of guilt implies something vaguely religious, and running does indeed require a form of faith—the audacious belief that despite our flaws, we can transcend our current conditions and make something better of ourselves. Runner’s guilt is the doubt that arises when we question that faith. It’s the various permutations of shame that bubble up when we fall short; the painful sight of blank days on a training schedule. Resting gnome-like at the margins of the mind, it pesters, Hey…you missed your run, when work, family, or even emergencies interrupt our lives.

But there’s also an alternative, less well-known strain of runner’s guilt, a sensation that occurs exactly because one is running. This guilt emerges with the recognition that running is itself a luxury, and one with real costs. It’s the uncomfortable feeling that tugs at us when we realize we often run at the expense of our families, our careers, and our friends. There’s indeed only so much time in the day, and this guilt is the looming understanding that we’ve chosen to spend a large chunk of it on ourselves.

For me, this type of guilt has grown more acute in recent years. A decade ago, I could easily fall back on the excuse that I ran because of scholarships or my commitment to the cross-country team—socially acceptable reasons for a teenager. But now I’m an adult, and I’m still playing at being a runner. Sometimes, especially when I’m logging heavy miles for a big event, a voice whispers in my ear, Who do you think you are? You’re not Mo Farah. You missed your shot. Indeed, you never had a shot. You don’t even have a savings account, and yet here you are wasting time by running at threshold pace alongside a freeway.

I hate this voice, mostly because it’s not entirely wrong.

One evening in the fall of 2011, I snuck out of an academic conference to run, and these same thoughts weighed down my mind. A panel must have just ended as I exited the elevators in my split shorts, because my dissertation adviser ambled into the lobby, chatting with another professor. Not wanting to get caught skipping the conference, I vaulted behind a large lamp and pretended to admire the wallpaper. After a few agonizing moments, the professors walked off and I was left unnoticed. But their presence spurred a sense of dread.

Guilty self-interrogations followed as I jogged out of the hotel. It was October, and the sun already hung precariously low. Was this not a bit selfish? I considered everyone who had sacrificed for my education so I could have the privilege of being at a top-tier academic program. And yet here you are, the voice dutifully reminded me, skipping it for a tempo run.

The run felt atrocious. I was tired, and my legs felt heavy from travel and hours of sitting in conference rooms. It was one of those miserable efforts when my body was simply out of sync. A sudden resolution popped into my mind: If I can’t run a mile in under five minutes right now, in this exact moment, I’m quitting. I’ll stop training. I’ll take up squash or CrossFit or whatever, but I’ll quit running.

It’s strange how guilt compels us. I approached the starting line, hit the lap button on my watch, and surged ahead.

Barely a lap in, I grunted, already struggling with the acceleration. You’ll never make it, the guilt whispered in my ear. You’re out of shape and hungry. You haven’t trained enough. But now I had a task. The run was not about my obligations, my family, or my star-crossed academic career. It was about covering four laps in less than five minutes. The guilt became quieter.

I was behind pace after the first two laps. I now had two minutes and 28 seconds to carry my body over half a mile. I gritted through the tightening sensation of oxygen debt that crept along the edges of my shoulders and legs. Whispering doubts gave way to blood pumping in my ears.

I pulled across the line into the last lap, still behind pace and breathing hard. I felt that old, familiar sensation of my body approaching its physical limits. I set my teeth, winding up into a sprint. The realization set in that I really didn’t want to quit running. I whipped my legs around the turn and kicked.

I pumped my fist, knocking back the guilt. After catching my breath, I jogged back toward the hotel, running retirement deferred. Guilt assuaged. The voice silenced, if only temporarily.

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I ran so hard up the mountain that I saw stars. It was late fall of 2015, and after climbing uphill for nearly an hour, I was approaching the summit of Mount Diablo, perched above the Bay Area suburbs, 20 miles east of San Francisco. The wind was blustery, whipping up the bluffs and knocking me off balance. The sun was rising, and I had the entire trail—perhaps the entire mountain—to myself. But I wasn’t really alone.

Two weeks earlier, my phone chirped and a stream of emails informed me that I had lost my entire set of Strava course records on the climb up Mount Diablo to my friend David. Strava has digitized running and cycling by allowing users to create “segments”—series of GPS waypoints over which athletes can compete. Athletes upload their rides and runs to compete for the fastest ranking: course records (CRs) for runners, queen/king of the mountain for cyclists. I’d worked hard for those CRs and wasn’t about to hand them over to David without fighting back.

As I redlined the entire climb up Mount Diablo, I envisioned David running ahead of me, in ghost form, growing more distant as I struggled over the steeper pitches. David’s shadow hovered over the trail—a pixilated veneer that obscured the dirt, rocks, and plants. I had no time to take in the view, no energy to spare on any thoughts other than to urge myself onward and keep up with the apparition. I went bug-eyed as I flailed over the last few hundred meters, hunched over and audibly rasping. I reached the door at the mountain’s lookout and rapped it with my fist. “Summit!” I wheezed out to an invisible audience. I looked down at my watch, saw the time, and deflated.

David’s digital ghost had won.

Running, once a space apart, is increasingly folded into the wider ecosystem of digital spaces. In late 2015, that frightened me a bit. So I tried to take a break from Strava. I deleted the app from my phone and stopped uploading the GPS data from my watch.

One evening, sans Strava, I grabbed my old stopwatch and headed for the hills. I ran up the trails out of Berkeley into the parkland beyond town. A dusky orange glow settled over the singletrack. As I reached the ridgeline, I could just see the shimmer of the San Francisco Bay as the sun fell over the Golden Gate. It felt ethereal and sad and wonderful.

Running is a fundamentally solitary affair. If you take up this sport, you will spend an incredible amount of time by yourself. Very few people want to wake before sunrise to log miles in the rain. Even fewer are compelled to pound out intervals or hill repeats after work. The English novelist Alan Sillitoe as “the loneliness of the long-distance runner,” suggesting that the activity was uniquely isolating and transgressive. Runners skip happy hours, social dinners, and work-related schmoozing for training sessions. Success in this sport is necessarily centered on the self. Running is sublimely lonely.

But Strava has dissolved this loneliness. I joined in early 2014, and suddenly every run became a space for connection, sharing, and encouragement. When I run with Strava, I run with my digital rivals, anyone who has trod the ground before me. Their previous runs, immortalized as GPS routes, haunt the roads and trails. There is an inherent comparison of effort and fitness on every step of a run, which changes how we understand our training. When I upload a run, Strava’s algorithms weave it into the wider connective fabric of the site. The run is immediately contextualized, socialized, ranked. In 2014, Strava launched a campaign called “Prove It,” implying that a run or ride isn’t truly real until it has been authenticated on social media. Running only counts if it’s networked.

With Strava, we also run for an audience; the site provides constant affirmation. Users leave kudos, as they’re called, on your activities, and encouraging comments push you through the midweek slump. You can take solace during heavy training blocks through weekly mileage standings. These elements are useful tools, creating digital spaces for distant people with similar interests. When someone from across the world leaves a nice comment on my run, I feel energized. Someone I don’t even know has taken a moment to recognize my struggle to become better at this sport.

What I lost with this connectivity was my propensity for introspection—that deep, mournful wonder about ourselves in the world. Solitude gives new perspective to approach an ever-changing society. For most of my life, running has provided a distance with which I can better see the world around me, in all its messy irregularity. It’s only when I run in the hills and the forests that the problems of the city present themselves.

Once I’d used Strava, the “real world” felt flat and slightly sterile. I began to realize that the site augments reality: it rebuilds hills, roads, and stretches of trail into a world teeming with virtual interaction and competition. Every bit of terrain is a realm for kudos, CRs, and orange-tinted interfaces. I realized I didn’t always want to be left alone with just my own thoughts. Running without Strava feels thinner.

When I left the app, I noticed an absence. It wasn’t so much the ritual of uploading my runs, and it wasn’t even the dopamine rush of giving and receiving kudos. But I felt the slight, itching awareness that something larger and collective was happening beyond my solo runs.

After a few weeks of cold turkey, I realized that I couldn’t just unplug. Strava had become an extension of my running experience. Running is evolving into something new, and I was too curious about what it was becoming to simply abstain from its online component. And so, perplexed and perhaps more than a little resigned, I crawled back to the app again. The memory of my first run back with Strava is vivid: It was winter and the sun had set beyond the California hills. My phone glowed, a cipher containing the running world’s seething vitality. I looked down the dark trail, started my watch, and began to run. Whether I like it or not, I will never run alone again.

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