Mental Suffering as an Endurance Sport
Exploring our fascination with endurance sports, and what happens when we fail
Every year, since 1897, hundreds—now, thousands—of people make their long journeys to settle into temporary lodgings across the greater Boston metropolitan area. Normally a city represented by a people whose identities delicately cradle the stark dichotomy between the American intelligentsia and the blue-collar galère, for a handful of days in April, characters from Nebraska to Osaka fill the city’s restaurants and stores, each of them with some variation of the same goal in mind: finish.
“[The] Boston [Marathon] is the cream of the crop of the marathon world,” once said Olympic champion swimmer, Summer Sanders. “It has such a history that you feel such honor just being a part of it.” Sanders is a two-time finisher of Boston. For many (if not all) serious, long-distance runners, the Boston Marathon is their raison d’être; behind all the hill sprints and fartlek runs is a deeply-embedded desire to attain a BQ (Boston-qualifying time). And it is, for most, an objective that will remain unattained.
The starting line for the Boston Marathon is located roughly 30 miles east (by car) of Boston proper. If you hop on I-90 East, you’ll eventually find yourself in Hopkinton, Mass. “Home of the Boston Marathon starting line” reads one sign along the main road that runs through town (it’s how I learned that Hopkinton is where the race begins). Hopkinton is quiet, and I couldn’t tell whether that’s its perpetual state or whether that’s merely conditional and I stumbled into its boundaries during a rare lull. Driving through town on an early evening in July, one would think that there’d be more people out in its streets; I counted two.
Taking that road further south, you’ll pass a town square where a statue of a U.S. doughboy soldier has stood since the early-1920s—a memorial for the Boston suburb’s sons who fought in World War I— and then a Shell gas station that sits on the right side of an intersection, across the street from a CVS Pharmacy that resembles a strip mall dental office, one of those fixtures of the local community for 20 years (if that makes sense). I’d later discover that this particular Shell doesn’t turn on its gas pumps until 9 a.m.—a reflection of the sleepy vibe of Hopkinton? Are they all late-risers? Do people not live here? Who knows!
Make a left at that intersection and drive about three-quarters of a mile, and you’ll pass a small trail parking lot on your left. So nondescript—with no printed signs distinguishing it as a lot of any kind, let alone a parking lot leading to a trail—that it’s easily missable. It’s here in this parking lot—and within the walls of my Subaru Outback, windows covered by hand-constructed blackout shades (specifically, by my hands) to maintain discretion from the exterior world—that I find myself starting this draft.
To say that I’ve always had a fascination with endurance sports would be a lie. I think, like many others, I happened upon running consequentially. At the time, several of my close friends were signing up for races; running started off as an activity to connect me to the people in my circle. But it was also just shy of over a year living in New York City, and the bullshit of Gotham—particularly the city’s obsession with (and defining ethos of) hustle and success—had led to another conflict with my mental health that was degrading my willingness to live (in ways more literally than figuratively). Long-distance running—and the challenges it placed on my physical and mental resolve—turned into a fundamental source of relief, if even temporary.
When I moved to Vermont during the pandemic, I got exposed to another endurance activity: intensive day-hiking (which would eventually evolve into trail and mountain running). Although I considered myself a pretty strong hiker before moving to the Northeast, the caliber of hiking to which I was exposed was a huge shift from the “difficult” 10-or-so-mile hikes I’d done previously in the southern region of the Appalachian Mountains.
I embedded myself into a hiking community that was used to hiking 15 to 30 miles in a day, overcoming 5,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation gain within a 24-hour period. It was tough, and it was long—and I loved it. I threw myself into it. I made every effort to reserve my weekends for knocking out peaks on the list of the Northeast 115—the highest peaks throughout New England, with mountains across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. And much like many endurance athletes, I made it my objective to complete the list—and to do it before I left the Northeast.
A couple weeks ago was the two-year anniversary of a 2021 suicide attempt that’s left me, still, questioning how to overcome this issue. Nowadays, I have a hard time finding the same level of excitement that I used to have for hiking or mountain running. I get panic attacks whenever I’m in the Northeast, especially when I’m near any kind of mountain. I get angry. And I get sad. And I get disappointed in this belief that I’ll never complete this goal that I’d set for myself. And I get frustrated in my inability to grow past the traumas that have left me paralyzed in this seemingly immovable position.
What happens when endurance athletes are blocked from achieving their goals? What happens when they can no longer turn to the activities that bring them relief from the other demons that they battle? When barriers and limitations get in their way that they can’t overcome? When, to put it simply: they can’t finish what they set out to achieve?
“Before it became as popular as it is today, it was pretty common to encounter people who had pretty intense histories with mental health issues, substances issues, and other traumatic events,” says Alex, when our conversation about running treads into the realm of ultra-runners. Alex is a friend from college; I caught up with him recently to learn more about his personal interest in and experience with endurance sports. We reconnected a couple years ago when I lived in New England, he and his wife (another college friend) still residing in Boston at the time. In recent years, Alex has gotten more into endurance sports—having most recently run both a 50k trail race and a half-marathon road race this past Spring—and it’s a connecting interest that brought us closer together post-college.
“I like to challenge my body in what is otherwise a very comfortable world.” Alex says this while wearing a work-from-home uniform that exudes our white-collar comfort: a blue tank top and Boston Red Sox cap. “We wake up, we sleep in awesome beds, we take warm showers, we always have food available to us—we’re in this very privileged position where we get to choose to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations.”
For him, as well as for other folks who manage to find themselves getting addicted to the near-monotonous, consistent intensity and discomfort of any endurance activity, the mental caesura becomes the core reward. “When I’m running, I’m putting myself in a stressful or difficult situation, where I’m not necessarily having to think through complex problems. It’s more about: ‘I need to keep moving, I need to take the next step, I need to eat calories, I need to drink water, and I need to reach the end destination.’ It quiets down the other stuff in my head.”
Although the studies are limited, there’s some research suggesting that the ultra-endurance-athlete population has a disproportionately large percentage of folks dealing with psychiatric disorders (diagnosed and undiagnosed), including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, ADHD, and schizophrenia. Other research has found that there’s a positive correlation between the incidence of mental disorder (including the list of disorders above, but also alcohol abuse, bipolar disorder, OCD, and PTSD) and volume of training per week; the greater the frequency and intensity of endurance training per week, the higher the likelihood of an ultra-endurance athlete dealing with some kind of disorder.
The documentation around this is sparse partly, I think, because a lot of the public rhetoric that we encounter in the coverage on endurance sports is motivational and aspirational, and aims to shift the narrative towards endurance-activity-as-health-booster (whether that be physically, mentally, or emotionally) rather than endurance-activity-as-coping-mechanism. The bulk of the literature around endurance athletes and mental health revolve around mental toughness: how do these athletes build up their mental endurance in order to last the many miles and many hours of physical labor to accomplish these great feats? What unique traits make them particularly well-equipped to develop the resilience or the grit to get to the finish line?
In a 2022 survey conducted by the Trail Ultra Project, for example, 68 percent of respondents agreed strongly that “running is important for my mental health and helps me to feel more positive in life.” The language and framing matters, here, and there’s an optimism bias in that scripted response. Rather than directing the motivations for trail- and ultra-running as parts of their personal searches for a kind of panacea for their current mental health issues (or, simply, having a more morally-neutral set of responses within the survey), the narrative changes to “my mental health was okay prior to engaging in this sport, and getting more earnestly into it has only improved my mental health and strengthened my resolve.”
Of course, I can understand some of the reasoning for the modulation of this public discourse to focus on the positive (I mean, yeah, it’s not exactly inspiring to say “I run 100 kilometers because otherwise I’d kill myself”). But, the implications of this naiveté include the stunting of scientific inquiry into what seems to be a legitimate issue (that ultra-endurance athletes might have major mental health issues to begin with)—a consequence of our avoidance of pathos, an unfortunate oblation on the altar of our Ideal Self.
“I’ve always had self-esteem and self-confidence issues,” says Kat. “Fitness—and participating in these endurance sports—is something to boost my confidence. I feel like a better person when I’m doing it.” Kat is another friend from college that I reconnected with while I was exploring this issue of mental health and endurance sports. In recent months, she’s thrown herself into endurance training, with the hope of running her first marathon next Spring and then, eventually, getting into triathlons.
“I’ve always been an athlete and into fitness. That’s always what I grew up with. And that’s something that I’ve always been good at.” Sharing her experiences with me and her motivations for living an active life, she discloses her personal history with an eating disorder.
“For part of high school, and throughout college, and even when I was in the military, it was something that I had to get through. And it was something that, on my own, I had to get out of.” On camera, Kat is visibly subdued. She steers her eyes away, trying to hide the tears that are building up; seeing her like this is unexpected for me. I’ve always thought of Kat as this hyper-athletic girl who was bubbly and confident—and her admission eventually finds me in tears on our Zoom call. For Kat, turning to endurance sports has served primarily to calm the mental hurdles that come with self-acceptance.
“The physical challenges—and the benefits to my body—are really just secondary for me,” echoes Jonathan. “I think I can speak on behalf of a majority of [ultra-runners] when I say that many of us participate in these very time-consuming, very expensive races because there’s something mentally or emotionally that we want to silence.” I’ve never talked to Jonathan face-to-face before our call (let alone met with him in the real world), but he’s someone that was introduced to me through a mutual hiking and trail-running friend. With a few road marathons under his belt, he’s spent the last two years mountain-running throughout New England and prepping for his first 100-miler.
“It’s hard, though, especially when you get so committed to it and you find yourself in this position of ‘well, what can I achieve next?’ And, sometimes, I’m thinking ‘is this actually making me feel good or is this next goal totally pointless?’”
A recent post from my friend, Jon Yagel, brought back to mind this concept of a hedonic treadmill, or arrival fallacy: the idea that goals, once accomplished, ultimately mean very little to us. The satisfaction we gain from achieving them are temporary; we are innately predisposed to set some new goal to try and simulate the same high, and we are never satisfied. This obsession with continuous achievement (particularly, this mentality of incessant goal-setting and -attaining) is something that seems almost endemic to the endurance community. When an endurance athlete—a member of a community with already-underlying mental health deficiencies—fails to achieve one of their goals, what does the end-impact look like?
In 2014, Maddy Holleran, a cross-country runner at the University of Pennsylvania, committed suicide by jumping off the ninth-story of a parking garage. A competitive soccer play and all-star runner throughout high school, Holleran reportedly felt the intense pressures of needing to be the best at her sport—and discovering that she could no longer achieve the same levels of performance and success. In 2017, Gabe Proctor, then-rising star in the distance-running field, had been suffering from severe depression, and was found dead from suicide at his parents’ home in Vermont. In 2019, elite ultra-runner, Rob Krar—who’s won legendary races like the Leadville Trail 100—revealed in a profile in Outside his battles with suicidal depression, and how his pursuit of the next challenge seemed almost easier than his battles with mental unwellness.
If I don’t get over this disappointment of not being able to achieve this endurance goal, what will become of me?
If I don’t overcome the traumas that have left me in this deeply, emotionally- and mentally-imbalanced state, will I fall prey to my own doing?
Is mere survival—how long I can go without ultimately ending my life—the last endurance sport that I’m pursuing?
In Training for the Uphill Athlete: A Manual for Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers, professional alpinist and mountain guide, Steve House, emphasizes this need for mountain runners to take the sport seriously and with full intention—but to not do so in a way that it takes over every compartment in your brain: “Train well, but don’t make it your whole world. It shouldn’t feel like an obligation. That’s when it starts to be a problem.” The difficulty this poses, I think, is having enough self-awareness to realize when a goal is something that fulfills me rather than merely something that provides me with temporary self-validation; for many committed endurance athletes, I think it’s hard to separate these overlapping notions.
At this year’s Boston Marathon, Evans Chebet beat out the race favorite, Eliud Kipchoge. Kipchoge is the world’s record holder and, for many, considered the greatest marathoner of all time. In a statement to race organizers after his defeat, Kipchoge shared: “I live for the moments where I get to challenge the limits. It’s never guaranteed, it’s never easy. Today was a tough day for me. I pushed myself as hard as I could, but sometimes, we must accept that today wasn’t the day to push the barrier to a greater height.” It was a statement of acceptance—of one’s loss and of one’s limitations. But, true to the spirit of endurance athletes, he added “…there is always tomorrow to set a new challenge.” Kipchoge has made it a goal to win all six major marathons.
Powerful words my friend.
Hey man, not sure if I was aware of what happened a few years back or not, but I appreciate you sharing your plight. Among anyone else, your mental fortitude is hulk-like in nature, and while I understand that may not mean much, it's a strong motivator for those around you.