I completed my first 5K last weekend. It was the culmination of a yearslong spiral that began the day I turned 30, when all of my more Sybaritic desires were replaced by the anxious instincts of self-preservation, kicked into gear by a watershed get-your-shit-together blood pressure reading. If I were to bolster my odds of a life well lived—at least in the classical sense—then I would need to get out of my comfort zone, idling on the rain-slicked asphalt of Prospect Park on a grim, cloudy morning, ready to mangle my body toward fitness across three 10-minute miles.
I was almost dismayed by how much I liked the experience. It brings me no joy to report that all of the clichés about running are true. The lucid sense of sublime determination, when your mind hovers in the rapturous open skies above the ache in your joints and muscles, is better than most drugs. The same goes for the jittery anticipation at the starting line, or the waves of glorious, blissful pain that radiate down your legs after you reach the home stretch—surrounded by a gaggle of cheering friends bearing paper cups of lukewarm Gatorade and perhaps a screen-printed T-shirt proving your accomplishment. Best of all might be the wild-eyed thirst for more once you officially have a 5K under your belt. Could I do a halfsie next? Will I be one of those people entering the raffle for the New York City Marathon? How many more ways can I bludgeon my loved ones with the inspiration of my journey?
In other words, I am starting to become an Annoying Running Guy, which is a cultural character I have disdained throughout my life. You know who I’m talking about. The folks who screenshot their marginal circuits and post them to Instagram on Tuesday mornings while you’re still rotting in bed. (“1st Rule of Run Club: Always talk about running,” quipped one Reddit user sharing grievances about the culture.) The friends who are perpetually decked out every weekend in high-performance latex purchased, with fetishistic abandon, from the Nike store. (The New York Times published an entire story about the overabundance of the “exercise dress.”) Or the “athletes” who can talk to you for hours on end about their most recent lap time, shamelessly comparing an invigorating day on the track with a Joan of Arc–like touch of the divine, in a tone reserved most often for Olympic medalists. (Could I interest you in a $27 hardcover copy of Running Is My Therapy?)
There is nothing more obnoxious than someone who has allowed running to hijack every aspect of their personality, and I am dangerously close to losing myself to the cult. It is up to me—and only me—to pull myself out before it’s too late.
Meg Takacs, a running coach and fitness writer in Colorado, has a few theories about why running tends to sabotage our interpersonal etiquette. First, and most importantly, if you have decided to be a runner in 2023, you will undoubtedly be introduced to a whole network of gadgets and apps—Garmin, Strava, the Nike Run Club, and so on—that supply a litany of biometric data (cadence, distance, heart rate) directly to your phone. Those stats are addictive, and they can help you adjust your training regimen as you knife your way toward a respectable pace. So, naturally, when Strava informs a new runner that they’ve finally broken the nine-minute barrier during their last mile, they’re compelled to share that news with an ambivalent audience across all social feeds, over and over again.
“Once you get that feeling of accomplishment, you want to talk about it, show it, and relish in it,” said Takacs. “I think these things light up the endorphins in our heads.”
This solipsism gets even worse if you’ve recently had a workout injury, she added. There is nothing runners love more than discussing their various flavors of tendonitis—for that is the only arena in which one can harvest sympathy and athletic envy at the same time. “We joke about our older relatives complaining about their ailments, but I promise you, get a group of runners in a room, and it will be a thousand times worse,” continued Takacs. As someone who suffered an injured knee two weeks into my running career, I can attest that my lovely fiancée informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I “needed to stop talking about it so much.” There’s an oddly decadent dignity to athletic recovery, and I was selfishly slurping up every drop.
But frankly, the No. 1 reason fitness of all stripes brings out the worst in us while we interface with our fellow man is the fundamental truth that training—at a bracing pace, with resolute discipline, in pursuit of a lofty goal—is really hard, but things that are really hard are not always provocative. To successfully prepare for a marathon, one is required to let themselves slip into the deep end, entering a psychedelic fugue state where everything—everything—is framed through the prism of fitness. Therein lies the problem, argues longtime fitness blogger Hamilton Nolan. Once you’re way down in the running hole, it’s possible to lose your faculties of what is, and is not, fertile colloquial terrain. The only solution, he said, is a healthy dose of ego death.
“A good way to maintain a healthy perspective on running is to think of it as a form of training for more interesting things, and not as an interesting thing in itself,” explained Nolan. “If you can step back from your infatuation with running for a moment and think about it honestly, it’s a repetitive movement, repeated repetitively. If you want to discuss running for more than one sentence, just find other running people to do it with.
“This is one reason why it’s healthier to think about working out as a deep, dark journey into the nameless black hole that lies within yourself, rather than as a social activity,” he continued. “Journeys into the black hole involve less talking. This is something we all must aspire to.”
Takacs essentially offered me the same advice. Runners are all capable of being obnoxious about their hobby, but the more socially adept of them have learned to uncork the depths of their fitness geekery exclusively in the presence of others who are on the same page. If you find a robust running group chat or are involved with a local community of strivers, then you will have created a safe space to be “the most annoying version of yourself”—a sort of mindset, she added, that can absolutely help a new runner grind toward their aspirations.
Even so, Takacs told me, she has a number of friends who have either muted or politely unfollowed her Instagram page because, after absorbing hundreds and hundreds of running-flavored posts—replete with lengthy captions discussing glycogen storage and shin-splint rehabilitation—they have simply become, in her words, “tired of my bullshit.” Takacs completely understands where they’re coming from, but she hasn’t slowed down one bit.
“My advice would be to embrace the phase you’re in and don’t take anything personal,” she said. “If you want to train hard for something, your psyche is just as important as your physical health.”
I find Takacs’ conclusion strangely liberating. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m better off embracing my inner cringe during this intrepid cardio adventure. One of the first things you learn about running is that you can make progress only by surrendering to the pain. I like to think that the same is true of the way the hobby warps your mind. I’ll evolve into both my best and worst selves as I eye a half-marathon next summer, in the best physical shape of my life, while alienating all of my friends as I derail the conversation into the topic of “negative splits” for the umpteenth time at the bar. I’m becoming an Annoying Running Guy, and as much as it pains me to admit it, I’ve rarely been happier.
