In my previous posts I talked about habit, averageness and routine; running that survives without passions. There is something that I did not mention: most runs are simply unremarkable. They do not inspire, transform or impress. They happen, and then they fade from memory. You go out, you run, you return. They definitely aren’t posted online because nobody would post a run like “5k. Nothing happened” or “Ran. Came home”. If you tried to describe them later, you would struggle to find anything worth saying.
Yet, these are the runs that form the backbone of your running life. While they pass without incident, still they accumulate quietly. Unremarkable running is like the hours spent studying before an exam, or the preparation before cooking a complicated meal, the thinking, jotting down, crossing out and starting again before the final paragraph emerges. Without that invisible groundwork, the higher moments, if they come, have nothing to stand on.
Running culture tends to highlight the peaks: the breakthrough run, the personal best, the comeback after injury. To the untrained eye, it would seem that running is a constant ascent: euphoric, progressive, always improving. Yet most of it unfolds at ground level. Most runs are emotionally neutral. They are not bad enough to question why you run and not good enough to feel proud of. They sit somewhere in between. That middle ground is easy to overlook because it doesn’t require interpretation.
Neutrality has the important function of removing drama. When most runs are ordinary, running becomes less about performance and more about presence. You stop waiting for something to happen and begin to accept that nothing happening is, in itself, the point.
If running has lasted in my life, it is not because of the memorable days, but because of the forgettable ones. The runs I can’t recall in detail are the ones that built familiarity with the roads, with the seasons, with my own rhythms. The peaks are occasional. The neutral miles are constant.
Perhaps that is why running endures: not because it is extraordinary, but because most of the time, it isn’t.
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