Arda Saatçi, 99 laps, Run Raves, Satisfy x Adidas, gym bro backyard ultras, Tudor watches for trail running pros... The list changes every couple of weeks, but the feeling underneath stays pretty similar. Something happens in this sport, I look at it, and a part of me reacts like an old man standing at the window, shaking his head at the kids in the street.

I am trying not to become that guy.

But it’s hard. And I doubt it is only a personality thing.

Why I Keep Flinching

Part of this is probably just the oldest conflict in the world: a generational clash. One generation builds something, the next one walks in and moves the furniture around. The parents hate what the kids love. Their parents hated what they loved. In the end, everyone takes turns being unreasonable.

There is one piece missing for me, though: I was never a young runner.

I started running in 2013, at 34. By then I was already an adult in most ways that matter. I had a job, a life, a solid sense of who I was, and a lot of the earlier damage had already been cleaned up or at least put into a place where I could live with it. The one part that still needed serious work was my health, but running took care of that.

So I never knew what it felt like to be a young, self-confident, trend-aware runner who enters the sport and immediately wants to leave a mark. I did not grow into running through crews, hype coops, brand activations, fashion signals, or social codes.

In fact, the first two to three years of my running journey, I trained and raced alone. Everything I knew about running came from books (yes, actual books) and a few shaky YouTube videos.

Before Running Became Content

After all, the internet in 2013 was still a very different place. The social web still meant Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr & other blogs, forums, RSS readers, Flickr, YouTube and the very early days of Instagram, when people were still posting memes there. Vine had just launched, Snapchat Stories had just arrived, while TikTok, Instagram Stories, Discord, (a free version of) WhatsApp and Substack did not exist yet. Strava did, but no one cared.

So yes, running was also happening online, of course, but it had not yet become a permanent high-pressure content storm. It was something people wrote about, documented, discussed and searched for in quirky corners of the internet. Much less visible than it is today. And much quieter.

Who I Looked Up To

Also, all my running heroes were older than me. Besides, there weren’t exactly many options to choose from, which is why we all looked up to Anton Krupicka, Scott Jurek, Jenn Shelton, and young Kilian. Dean Karnazes was around too, but I always thought he was a bit of a blowhard.

Most of my running friends, who I met after my lonesome start, were older than me, too. The early lineup of the Willpower Athletes were mostly oldsters I knew from the hardcore scene. Many of them already had several years of running under their belts.

Overall, it felt a bit like I discovered a version of running that had already been gone for at least 5 years when I arrived.

Sounds nostalgic, I know. And I am always suspicious of nostalgia, especially my own.

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Still My Sport?

Trends always interested me. They still do. Running a brand makes it necessary to understand where the sport is moving, what people care about, what language they speak, which symbols have power, and which ones are overused and empty. I still think I have a decent sense for that.

The difference is that many new influences in running seem to move against the version of running I fell in love with and the values I draw from it.

That does not automatically make them wrong. It only raises the question I keep coming back to:

Do I recognize myself in this?
More often than before, the answer is no.

I already argued with myself about that here:

DAS Z LETTER — Running, Culture & Self

Getting Older in a Young Sport

Getting older in a sport that worships youth means asking myself, more honestly than before, what running still gives, what it takes, and what it is allowed to become…

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2 months ago · 33 likes · 12 comments · Chris Z

You Run, But…

I am 47 now. I do not have to find the same things cool that a 22-year-old runner finds cool, and that’s just fine. It would probably be terrible for everyone if I did. What I miss, though, is the simple unifying element that running used to have for me:

That was the whole thing.

Now it often feels like belonging requires extra proof. You have to be a part of the right bubble, with the right attitude. Do the right races, speak the right language, and show the right amount of visible passion.

I know this is not the full reality of the sport. I still meet runners all the time who simply run, love it, suffer like Jesus for our sins, and still don’t share it on Instagram. I wrote an appreciative piece about these “Invisible Runners”:

DAS Z LETTER — Running, Culture & Self

In Good Hands

Most runners will never become visible…

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a month ago · 32 likes · 5 comments · Chris Z

However, the image portrayed in the broad media and across the social web is a completely different one.

Yes…

It would be easy to fold my arms now and spend the next forty years (“Run Till Death”, baby!) complaining about everything running is turning into. And the worst might still be to come.

But I really do not want that life.

I want to stay curious. I want to be open-hearted toward people who discover this sport in ways that look nothing like my own beginning. I want to remember that their excitement is real, even when the visibility around it makes me tired. I want to leave enough room for running to become something else for someone else.

But…

At the same time, I do not want to wave everything through just because it is new and trending. That would be dishonest. It would also be useless.

A community does not get better when the alumni disappear into polite silence.

Experience can be annoying, yes. The same goes for values. But they can protect a culture from selling every last piece of itself to big corporations and becoming a dull, watered-down version of what it could be.

This Will Not Get Easier

So this is where I am.

Somewhere between tolerance and suspicion. Wanting to welcome what comes next and at the same time defending what still feels worth defending. Knowing very well that running does not belong to me but somehow feeling responsible for the part of it that saved my life.

I don’t think this conflict will go away. If anything, it will probably get worse.

That’s probably the work now. My work. To stay in the room and listen without losing my judgment. To criticize without turning bitter. To keep loving a sport that keeps changing in ways I do not always like.

And to go out for a run whenever I find myself standing at the window too long. Figuratively speaking. Of course.

Everything Not Running

I’ll just come right out and say it: there’s nothing that interests me less than soccer. I’d rather watch a 3-hour (okay, nowadays 2-hour) live broadcast of a road marathon than even a 10-second highlight reel of a soccer game. I don’t find anything — and I mean absolutely nothing — about it exciting or worth getting worked up over.

So I couldn’t care less that the World Cup just kicked off. At least from a sporting perspective. Politically, though, I find this ticking time bomb quite exciting. I’m pretty sure one scandal will follow another. It’s already off to a good start with entry bans, jersey bans, three separate opening ceremonies in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, protests, and the intriguing question of who has to beat whom so that the U.S. ends up in a match against Iran. All under the watchful eye of a mad orange goblin king and a corrupt mafia boss who heads the world soccer federation.

I suspect these will be a few turbulent weeks, which is why I’m absolutely thrilled that I couldn’t care less who wins. So tell me: Who’s going to win?

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On Repeat

We’ve had them on repeat before, too: Die Toten Hosen. And even last time, I claimed that I’m not really that big of a fan. Still, this band has been with me my whole life, and the fact that they’ve just released their last album, “Trink aus! Wir müssen gehen”, justifies mentioning them here once more. But only if...

...there’s a song on the album that really blows me away, and that’s the case with “Schlechte Nachbarn.” An incredibly lively punk blast for a club of over-60s! You can tell that Die Toten Hosen have never lost touch with the times or their connection to the younger generation. That’s probably why they’ve consistently managed the difficult balancing act between “staying true to themselves” and “reinventing themselves.”

By the way, I first heard about the album when their singer Campino was a guest on the ever-popular podcast “Hotel Matze.” I was surprised and delighted by how much overlap I still feel with Campino’s values and viewpoints. While listening to the podcast, I kept getting the feeling that we’ve aged gracefully together, haha.

In the generous reading, this is encouragement and motivation. In the less generous, and probably more accurate one, it is egotism and marketing for some product.

Especially for new runners, this kind of attitude can do real damage. It turns natural curiosity into pressure and makes shorter distances look like unfinished business. It sells ultrarunning as the place where running finally becomes real.

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What’s So Special About Ultras Anyway?

I understand the appeal.

Ultrarunning has a cinematic quality that most other race formats simply do not have. The sheer scale, the landscapes, headlamps, mountain ridge sunrises, busy aid stations, dramatic weather changes, volunteers handing you popsicles while you question every decision that has led to this moment.

It offers the seductive idea that somewhere beyond the marathon, your true identity as a runner might be waiting.

That idea is powerful. It is also stupid.

Because ultramarathon is a race category and not a lifestyle. It is not a moral upgrade and not the final form of running. It does not automatically make anyone deeper, tougher, freer, wilder, wiser, more authentic, more spiritual, or more interesting at dinner.

It simply means the course is longer than a marathon. That’s it.

The Ladder Nobody Asked For

Running has a hierarchy problem. It likes to pretend it does not, because runners also like to pretend they are relaxed people who only compete against themselves, which is adorable considering how fast they can calculate age grading in their heads.

The hierarchy usually starts harmlessly. A first 5k. Then a 10k. Then a half marathon. Then the marathon, the grand public certification of having done something serious with your body and a few weekend mornings. After that, the obvious question arrives from somewhere in the room, often wearing a cringy belt buckle.

As if running were a military career ladder with rank insignia.

However, many of us internalize this very quickly. We start to believe that distance equals development. That farther means deeper. That the next race has to be longer because otherwise we are somehow standing still.

That is where the damage starts.

Because once running becomes a ladder, every distance below the next one starts to look like a rung you are supposed to climb as quickly as possible and then leave behind.

Nothing Small About It

I have raced almost everything from 3000 meters on the track to 100 miles through the Sierra Nevada. This sounds like a humblebrag because it probably is one, although at least it comes with plenty of personal embarrassment.

Let’s go through it chronologically, for the sake of dramaturgy by distance.

• The 3000 meters was my first track race, after I had already been running for a couple of years. On paper, 3000 meters looks like nothing. A warm-up with a bib number. In reality, it feels like an all-out interval session where someone forgot to schedule the jog recovery in between.

Race That Stayed: Läufercup Karlsfeld 2016-2018. My first track race, and I had no idea what I was doing. I still returned many times like a comeback kid.

• A 5k race is not kinder. Take the hardest part of a 10k, remove the opening politeness, compress the suffering, and there you are. It is short enough to make pacing feel optional for the first minute and long enough to punish that thought mercilessly.

Race That Stayed: ISPO Night Run 2020. A compact evening format in the Olympic Park, Munich, with high winds that blew over the construction fences, trees, and runners.

• The 10k was my first race distance, at the Munich Marathon in 2013, and the kickstart of my running “career”. For years it was the cleanest measure of my progress. At least I thought it was. You can also race 10,000 meters on the track, of course. But let me warn you, it feels like it never ends.

Race That Stayed: Munich Marathon 10k, 2013. The first official suffer face, and the certainty that there is no turning back.

These distances do not need mountain scenery or nightfall to become large. They do not need a crew, a pacer, a drop bag, or a 27-minute YouTube video called My Journey Into The Unknown. They can empty you in less than twenty, thirty, forty minutes. They are small only if your imagination is.

The Cruel Middle

• The half marathon is probably the distance I have raced most often. When you hit the right sweet spot, it feels boundlessly beautiful, almost like floating. A pace you should not be able to hold, held anyway. Just wonderful.

Race That Stayed: Johannesbad Thermen Marathon half, 2023. The sweet spot exists, but rarely where you expect it.

• And then comes the marathon. The queen of all races. No other race format creates more desire, projection, storytelling, workplace conversations, and mother-in-law updates. Finishing a marathon is a real achievement. Running a good marathon, right on the edge of your ability, is close to witchcraft. I spent years trying to unlock this distance. And yet, to this day, the marathon remains a black box to me. That is exactly why I love it.

Race That Stayed: Boston Marathon 2019. I started out ignorant and full of myself, and finished the race having been painfully humbled. Ever since then, I’ve felt the need to go back and try again with humility and respect.

Welcome To Ultra, Sort Of

• The 50k is the official doorway into ultrarunning, which is funny because in many cases it is mostly a marathon with an afterparty. It can be wonderful, though. Flat, runnable, relaxed, especially compared to the marathon because there are usually fewer sacred reference times hovering over the running bubble. Nobody asks whether you broke three hours in a 50k.

Race That Stayed: Rodgau. Always Rodgau. A wonderfully unglamorous place to run loops at the very heart of this sport. It’s where the family meets (“Es ist ein Ort echter Menschen. Ich liebe diesen Ort. Einmal im Jahr bedeutet er Familie.” – ).

• The range between 60 and 80 kilometers is its own little in-between world. Once you have made it that far, people naturally start looking at 100k. Because 100k sounds better. That is the entire argument. In practice, the difference can become marginal. If you are out there for 20 hours over 80 kilometers or 17 hours over 100 kilometers, you are deep in the same discipline. And trouble.

Race That Stayed: Stubai Ultratrail, 2021, old race course. Sixty-seven kilometers with an insane amount of vert and the longest climb ever all the way up the Stubai Glacier.

• The 100k looks terrifying on paper. In reality, it is sometimes less mysterious than the number suggests. For most of us, by that point, the race has little to do with VO2 max, 1000-meter repeats, or whatever heroic value your watch had in store for you this morning. It becomes a long problem-solving and eating competition under physical stress.

Race That Stayed: Zugspitz Ultratrail 2025, pre-UTMB era. A hometown lesson in limits with an unexpected Western States heat vibe.

The Hundred-Mile Fever

• Then there are 100 miles. For many Europeans, the distance still feels exotic. The Americans, meanwhile, have turned it into a national mood. They are obsessed with it in a way that is almost concerning. Western States, Hardrock, Leadville, Javelina, Hurt, Vermont. Say any of these names to the right person and watch their eyes get wide. And still, a 100 miler is not the top floor of running. It is not a diploma or a degree in running. It is simply very, very far. Much farther than 100k, by the way, which sounds obvious and still catches people off guard.

Distance Has No Ceiling

• Then there are the 200-milers, becoming quite popular lately, hashtag Cocodona. I have never raced one. I supported my wife Lisa once and our friend Juliane once at Tor des Géants, which is a little longer than 200 miles and additionally features an insane amount of alpine vert. Watching that kind of race from the outside raises many questions.

Race That Stayed: Tor des Géants 2021 and 2025. Supported twice, raced never, fell in love forever.

If anything, 200-mile races make the whole hierarchy even more absurd. Once you accept 100 miles as the top of the ladder, somebody moves the roof. There is always another distance, another format, another escalation. Another race that makes your biggest achievement look like someone else’s Sunday longrun.

That is the problem with treating distance as status. It never ends. The sport keeps extending itself beyond every supposed final border. The ladder has no last rung.

So the better question is not how far running can go. The better question is which race actually belongs to you.

The Race That Is Yours

The point of all this is not to shrink ultrarunning. I love ultrarunning. I understand why people are drawn to it, why they dream about it, why they want to know what happens when the day gets long and the simple act of moving forward starts to strip things away.

I also understand the wish to belong to it. To say “I am an ultrarunner” has a certain weight. It sounds like a door opening into a more committed version of the sport. A little wilder, a little less polished, a little farther away from the start corrals and split mats and office conversations about your marathon time.

But identity is a slippery thing in running. It can give us direction, then slowly start charging rent.

At some point the question becomes whether you are choosing the race or whether you are chasing the label attached to it. Whether you are curious about the experience or trying to step into a costume that looks good from the outside. Whether the next distance calls you, or whether you simply heard that it should.

There is no ladder. There is only the question of what keeps pulling you back.

I took years before I ran my first ultra. Looking back, I am grateful for that. I did not need to arrive there faster. I needed the races before it.

And I probably needed the marathon most of all.

The Race of All Races, At Least For Me

If I had to choose my race, it would still be the road marathon. This may sound slightly bizarre from someone who wrote a book about a 100 miler, but here we are. No other race format has occupied me more. No other distance has given me more, taken more, confused me more, or made me feel more exposed as a runner. I have not raced one in a long time, and still, when I think of running as a lifelong argument with myself, the marathon is the room where most of it happened.

Only If It Calls You

So run an ultra if the distance honestly calls you.

Sign up if the long day scares you in a useful way. If the mountains pull you. If you want to know what remains after everything has fallen off and the only plan left is to keep eating, keep moving, and avoid sitting down too comfortably.

That is reason enough.

Just do not let anyone talk you into believing that your running has to graduate into ultra. Do not let a feed full of headlamps, buckles, mountain reels, and superficial post-race wisdom convince you that you are still waiting outside the real sport. Your path does not need approval from someone who turned a race category into a personal brand.

Find the distance that means something to you.

Stay with it for as long as it keeps asking questions you cannot answer yet. Return to it. Fail at it. Love it. Let it shape you in its own language.

One last time:

Find your own race.
Then run it like it matters.
Because it does.

Everything Not Running

A belated happy World Running Day!

To mark the occasion, we teamed up with Willpower to release a limited-edition design called “Run Deep,” which we introduced with the following text:

On Repeat

There are songs that do not comfort you by making things lighter. They comfort you by refusing to look away.

Tim Barry has always been good at that particular kind of honesty. Memento Mori has that bare, worn-down clarity I love in his songs: life is short, people disappear, time keeps moving, and somehow you still have to decide what you do with the day in front of you.

He’s also a runner, by the way.

Happy World Running Day. Wenn ich eine Sache am krass schnell wachsenden Laufsport 2026 am meisten vermisse, dann ist es Tiefgang. Die vielen Dinge, die dieser Sport mit uns anstellt, wenn wir uns wirklich darauf einlassen und damit meine ich ganz bewusst nicht nur die schönen Momente.

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Run Deep bei Willpower

• Sprachnachricht supporten ja geil 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

Der perfekte Lauf. Wetter schön, Laune gut, beste Playlist, Kramerplateauweg, laufen ohne auf die Uhr zu gucken, Knie spielt mit… Und trotzdem hält die Freude und Zufriedenheit darüber nicht länger als ein paar Minuten an bis wieder diese Gedanken kommen was der Lauf alles hätte sein können oder müssen: Niemals genug. Irgendwie bin ich da falsch verdrahtet und darüber spreche ich in dieser Sprachnachricht.

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Das Z Letter zur Folge

• ON REPEAT: Turnstile - Never Enough

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Sprachnachricht supporten ja geil 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

My knee rehab is finally moving [Yay!].

I write that carefully, because after months of setbacks, back and forth, micro improvements, and mornings that decided the meaning of the day before, every bit of optimism still feels slightly suspicious. But it is true. The small steps have become bigger lately.

Quick reminder, here’s where I stood in January:

I can run three to four times per week again, mostly without symptoms. Sometimes I even forget to stare at my watch every few minutes to keep the run safely inside its prescribed limits. Uphill works, which it already did last year. Flat running works again, which feels new and beautiful. Rolling terrain is back in the repertoire too. Small climbs, small descents, and a little bit of that flow feeling that makes running feel effortless.

The knee’s reaction to the new load has been mild enough. Acceptable. More important than the run itself, most mornings after are okay. That 24-hour-rule has become the real metric. A run can lie. The next day usually does not.

So yes, this is progress.

I am happy about it.

And still, I want more.

The Gap

I want more – that is the part I keep running into. The injury makes the feeling more visible, but it did not create it. I know this state from healthy training blocks too.:

• The plan does not progress fast enough.

• The hard sessions are too rare.

• The long runs are too short.

• The track paces feel too soft.

• Some runs seem to serve no purpose, while others come with a heart rate that looks wrong for the effort.

• Too few weekly miles.

• Too little time on feet.

• Too little elevation.

• Too little proof of progress.

Even when things are going well, part of me immediately starts looking for the gap.

Never enough.

I know this feeling so well that I had it tattooed on myself years ago as a warning:

Written in a direction only I can properly read (the tattoo artist hated it), which made sense to me when I got it done, because the pressure was always private first. Nobody had to tell me I should be more. I had been doing that job for years.

The easy reading would be to call this a flaw. There is truth in that, especially during rehab, where progress arrives in painfully small units.

But is “never enough” really just bad?

My “Never enough” is also my ambition. It got me out the door when vague motivation would not have lasted a week. It made me train, care, build routines, write things down, take the sport seriously, and create a life around running that did not appear by accident.

Ambition is not some toxic monster hiding under the bed. Often it is the force that gives shape to some real epic sh*it.

Ambition opens doors. Unfortunately, it keeps opening them on and on.

The difficulty is that the same thing that moves me forward can rob me of the place I am standing on.

Kramerplateau Flow

A few days ago, I had a run that showed me this predicament perfectly. I left home without much of a plan, just a handheld bottle of water, decent legs, and the kind of hot summer day that still feels friendly. I ran over gravel paths toward the Kramerplateauweg, climbed up, followed the rolling path for a while, came back down into the valley. Meanwhile, I listened to just the perfect playlist, cruised at an enjoyable 4/10 effort, and thought surprisingly little about my knee.

For more than an hour I was simply running again, in a way that felt close to ordinary. That was probably why it hit me so hard afterwards.

When I got home, there was this small physical and emotional sense of relief. The after-run-bliss. You all know it. For a short while, I was content.

Then the day went on, and my mind started its work.

• A year ago this would have been a regular easy run, now it is a highlight.

• I want four or five of these every week.

• I want a longer one, too.

• I want more distance, more downhill, more speed, more confidence, more proof.

• I want to stop treating ten kilometers like something precious.

• I want to run without checking the next morning for consequences.

The run itself had not changed. I had changed my view on it.

Grateful, Still Hungry

I want to be grateful. And I want more.

Both are true.

I want to honor the fact that my body is giving me running back in pieces, and I also want to grab the whole thing at once. I want patience to feel noble, and at the same time hate it. I want to celebrate the small wins more and want them to carry me longer than they do. I want the feeling after that Kramerplateau run to stay with me.

This is where my “how-to” conclusion should go but I do not know how to make that happen.

Outsiders probably have a few clever tips to offer, but they’re no use to me if they don’t come from within me.

So for now I am trying to catch that Kramerplateau moment before I ruin it.

I wish I could live there longer.

I cannot, at least not yet.

But I was there.

Everything Not Running

And then there are the things that really matter in comparison. Unfortunately, Harry isn’t doing so well. After an extravagant dental surgery and several vet visits, we’ve finally figured out why he could rarely keep his food down and would spit it back up right after eating. A lymphoma is pressing on his food pipe and blocking access to his stomach. Even worse, that wasn’t the only tumor we found during the examination; other organs were affected as well. Basically the same situation as with his twin brother Toto.

At this point, I’d normally write about how sad we are and how helpless we feel in this situation, but there are two reasons why I’m not doing that.

First, we’ve found a great treatment that allows Harry to live out the rest of his life with dignity and comfort. With corticosteroid depot injections, the lymphoma shrinks for a while and he can eat normally again. The injection lasts about two weeks and then needs to be repeated. This has worked three times already, and we’re hoping for many more times.

The second reason is denial. Our grief over Toto is simply still too deep for us to be able to fully confront the fact that Harry won’t be with us much longer either. Especially since he’s in such good spirits – waddling into the bedroom in the morning, hungry and wide awake, letting us pet him (and purring), chilling on the balcony in the sun, and occasionally working on the scratching post.

We’re enjoying this time as long as he’s still doing well. We’ll have to deal with reality soon enough.

On Repeat

You guessed right. Honor to whom honor is due.

Waren zwei harte Wochen für Running. Wahrscheinlich geht es vielen so, aber ich habe wirklich große Probleme mich den Hype- & Empörungs-Wellen zu entziehen die gerade über die Lauf Bubble herein brechen. Ich kann mich dem ganzen einfach nicht entziehen, einfach weil mir das Laufen so viel bedeutet. Dabei ist es “nur Laufen”, wie mein Trauzeuge Chris immer zu sagen pflegt. Wer hat am Ende recht?

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Das Z Letter zur Folge

• ON REPEAT: EYES OF SALT “Flower of Pain”

• ON REPEAT: CANCER BATS “Stay Stuck”

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Sprachnachricht supporten ja geil 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

I’m honest here. Everyone who writes wants to be read. I will never pretend otherwise.

Still, I mean it when I say I would have preferred that kind of response for another article of mine. A more personal one, or one that had less to do with someone else’s marketing campaign and more with the depth of running I usually try to write from.

The truth is, I did not even want to write about Circle Pit at first.

I already felt uneasy before I wrote the first sentence. The whole thing had that familiar internet vibe: something weird (in that case cringe) appears, irritation gathers speed, jokes harden into takes, takes harden into positions, flanked by memes, and a few days later everyone moves on, mildly annoyed, mildly amused, oddly unsatisfied, and already waiting for the next thing to happen.

I know that process very well. We all do. A large part of me wanted to leave it alone, close the macbook, go outside, and run.

In the end, I wrote my piece because something felt absent. Parts of the discussion came too easily. Yes, 300-dollar shorts are absurd, and yes, influencer marketing has been overdone to death. That alone, however, is hardly a revelation.

What irritated me was the way a subculture aesthetic gets put on a marketing mood board and then sold back to us as attitude and anti-mainstream.

But why do I even care?

Because I do.

That is the simple answer.

I care because, for me, running has never stayed in the clean, harmless corner of sweating, clearing the head, getting fitter, and passing time.

It has always been more to me.

From day one, running became a gravity my life formed around. It gave me a language, a community, a body of work, and a way of understanding myself that I did not see coming when I first tied my shoes and went out for a really really horrible and painful run.

So when someone says, “It’s only running,” I know they are right. In fact my best man Chris says that all the time.

And still, the sentence misses something.

Never Just The Thing Itself

Music was never background sound to me. Writing has never been the simple transmission of information either. Some things enter my life and quickly become more than what they appear to be from the outside. They become places like home. They become lenses, my way of viewing myself and others. They become ways of moving through this weird world.

That is how I seem to work: When I give myself to something, I do not give myself halfway.

This can be exhausting. When things get charged with meaning so quickly, they do not only bring joy and fulfillment. They also create friction.

For some people, running is a sport. A beautiful sport, maybe even an important one, yet still something they do. For me, it has become one of the places where life explains itself. Let that sound dramatic to you, I can live with that. I have learned too much from it, built too much around it, and met too much of myself through it to treat it as neutral.

That is the gift. That is the trap.

Because once something means that much, you become vulnerable to it. You notice when its language changes. You react when it gets flattened. You feel protective even when nobody asked for protection.

This is the part I have to watch.

I care too much sometimes. I probably always will.

It Is Only Running

So maybe there is more to this sentence: “It is only running.”

A necessary correction.

Running can become too heavy if you let it. It can carry so much meaning that the simple act disappears underneath everything you have placed on top of it.

That is when the sentence can save me.

It brings the whole thing back down to earth. It reminds me that running does not need to do something all the time.

I can let it become smaller again: put on shoes, leave the house, let the body take over for a while.

The deeper meaning can wait. The argument, too. The irritation – and also the inspiration – will either still be there afterward, or it will have lost its importance somewhere along the way.

Running does that.

It gives things meaning, and then, if you are lucky, it also takes some of that meaning away again. It lets you care deeply and still return to the simplest version of the thing.

A body moving silently through the world aka Only running.

Thank God for that.
Atheistically speaking.

Everything Not Running

Shoe Talk? Shoe Talk.

For my knee comeback, I have been looking for running shoes that feel simple.

Firm, direct, light enough, low enough, with as little “technology” underfoot as possible. I am not looking for a huge stack, a soft ride, a trampoline feeling, or a carbon plate that turns every step into a little engineering project. A few years ago, this would have been a pretty easy task. These days, it feels almost impossible.

Most modern running shoes seem to be built around comfort, bounce, protection, or some kind of forward-driving sensation. There is nothing wrong with that in general. I understand why people like it. I liked some of it too, before my knee became extremely sensitive to every force that travels through my body.

And force is force. The energy from the ground has to go somewhere.

When I run in a firm and direct shoe, I feel more of the impact in my foot and ankle. That gets tiring at some point, of course, but in my body those structures seem to tolerate quite a lot. When I run in a very reactive shoe, especially a carbon racer, the whole system feels different. The shoe returns energy directly to the knee. Ouch.

When healthy, that is totally fine in reasonable doses. Right now, I am trying to keep my knee load as deliberate and predictable as possible. I do not need extra surprises from below.

The funny part is that I am not looking for anything special. Quite the opposite. I am looking for the kind of no-frills running shoe that used to exist everywhere. Simple, direct, not overbuilt, not trying to impress anyone. Can’t find it, though.

On trails, I am currently getting by with the Adidas Terrex Agravic Speed 2, although even that one feels almost too bouncy for what I am after. For the road and treadmill, I eventually ended up ordering an old Adidas Adios 8 from some slightly sketchy reseller shop, in a truly horrific violet-blue colorway with neon yellow laces. The shoe has basically disappeared from the shelves 3 years ago, but I love it. I went through at least four pairs of it and ran my fastest marathon in one.

If you have tips for firm, direct, lightweight road or trail shoes that still exist in 2026, I am very open to suggestions. Serious recommendations only. My knee will be grateful.

On Repeat

Eyes of Salt is a new hardcore band from Denver, CO. So far, so unremarkable. And yet, somehow, they sound different from almost every other new hardcore band I’ve heard in recent months. More urgent. More piercing. More emotionally sincere.

These qualities are particularly evident in the song I’ve picked, “Flower of Pain.” The fact that Eyes of Salt managed to stretch this simple hardcore song — without a piano intro or outro, or movie quotes — to over five minutes without ever being boring for a single second speaks volumes.

The album “Collapse the Infinite,” released in April 2026, features a whole host of outstanding guest appearances. On “Flower of Pain,” for example, the singer from the band Dead Hearts makes an appearance. A band I’d almost forgotten about.

Pro tip: Keep an eye on Eyes of Salt.

running wylder

Thoughts While Running #38

I have another half baked version of this post where I talk about how collabs are dead but I realized that’s not true when I got an email yesterday granting me early access to the Ganni x Melissa collab and I clicked immediately. My J.W. Anderson x Diadora Equips are somewhere en route between here and Italy…

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a month ago · 31 likes · 2 comments · Katherine Douglas

Salt & Flickers

Calling It Cringe Lets Them Off the Hook

On May 16th, Adidas x Satisfy staged a performance in the desert. To say the backlash was immediate still makes it sound like the discourse arrived in slow waves. It didn’t. It detonated…

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a month ago · 49 likes · 14 comments · Howie Goldklang

Running Supply with Cole Townsend

Running Supply #80: When A Niche Brand Goes Mainstream

Thoughts on SATISFY x adidas “The Circle Pit,” cultural divergence, and what could have been done differently…

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a month ago · 54 likes · 18 comments · Cole Townsend

Notes from JL.

The internet had a fit.

I found it hard to move past the sight of a gong next to a bitumen pump track in the Arizona desert…

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a month ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · Josh Lynott

Not A Conversational Pace

The Rise Of Performative Running Culture

The term “grifter” has been increasingly thrown around in online communities, and I never actually knew what it meant until recently. I feel that now is the perfect time to educate myself on this term, why it’s relevant in run culture, and provide some commentary on what I’m seeing. This topic has been brewing in my mind for quite some time, and I was i…

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a month ago · 40 likes · 16 comments · Allison

At first, I did not want to add anything.

The event had already done what these things do now. It split the internet for a few days. Selectively invited and paid influencers posted they had a “great time”. A large part of the running community reacted with mainly two words I kept seeing in comment sections over and over again: cringe and corny. That was before comments and posts started to disappear, get cleaned up, or be replaced by polished, streamlined brand footage.

There are many reasons why this event WTF’ed a lot of people. But the main reason it bothered me so much has not been discussed yet:

A Life Before The Look

I am not a scene gatekeeper. I am genuinely happy for every person who finds punk, hardcore, Straight Edge, running, or any other thing that gives their life more direction, language, friendship, hope or friction, like these things gave me.

I also do not think I know everything better. I do not claim that my own running brand, Willpower, does everything right. That comparison would not even make much sense. Willpower comes from a completely different place, with a completely different scale and purpose than Satisfy, let alone Adidas.

I am writing this because this disturbing brand theatre in the desert moved something personal in me.

Punk entered my life when I was seven or eight, shortly after my parents got divorced. My life was loud and angry, and so was the soundtrack. Hardcore and Straight Edge followed when I was sixteen, and I mean it in the most literal sense I can: they saved my life.

I had started drinking heavily at twelve. Without hardcore and Straight Edge, I probably would have become another small-town fuck-up, and certainly an alcoholic.

Instead, punk and hardcore gave me a clear mind (not always a pleasure), lifelong friendships, ethics, an outlet for anger, a way into the world, empathy, self-reflection, political instinct, and a foundation for almost everything good that came later in my life, including running.

So yes, maybe I take this a little personally.

No Holy Scene

I have no interest in romanticizing hardcore as a holy place. It never was.

The scene has always been too white, too male, and in large parts painfully superficial. Some bands have absolutely nothing to say and some shows would probably be more honestly announced as amateur MMA events.

There is plenty of shadow in that world.

Still, compared to many other subcultures and music scenes, hardcore has held on to a surprisingly stubborn agreement around a few things that make sense: community, DIY spirit, equality, positive thinking aka P.M.A., animal rights, self-criticism, social criticism, and the very basic understanding that Nazis are shit.

That does not make hardcore innocent. But it makes it worth defending from those who want the look without the weight.

Fashion Wearing Hardcore

[This Paragraph has been updated]1

This is where Satisfy bothers me.

Brice Partouche may have his own history with punk, hardcore, and Straight Edge. But Satisfy as a brand does not operate like a punk or hardcore project that somehow found running. It operates like a fashion brand that moved into performance running and repeatedly reaches into punk and hardcore for underground credibility.

And that difference matters.

Personal history does not automatically make every commercial use of that history accountable. Knowing the reference does not mean carrying the responsibility.

Because the issue is not biography. It is behavior.

It is what a brand does with the things it claims to understand. It is whether it contributes to the culture or only uses it as an archive of underground credibility. It is whether the people, bands, shirts, codes, and histories remain part of a living world, or get turned into expensive proof that a product has edge.

Hardcore has always had a simple, imperfect rule: everyone can become part of it, as long as they show up with respect and give something back. You do not need a perfect biography. You do not need permission from the other kids. But you cannot just take the symbols, the shirts, the language, the tension, the dirt, and the danger, filter them through fashion, price them like fashion, and sell them back as culture.

That is not appreciation. It is exploitation.

The Pit Was Already Dead

My whole point is already revealed in the event title: “The Circle Pit”.

Yes, this comes from punk and hardcore. But let’s be honest: the circle pit has not been truly dangerous, weird, or exciting for a long time. It has become the most common crowd animation trick in heavy music. A standard move for big festivals, reunion shows, arena concerts, and bands that have long outgrown the small venues that gave them meaning in the first place.

When someone yells for a circle pit today, it usually feels cringe or corny, unless you are shit-faced enough to mistake choreography for a real mosh pit.

Paid In Credibility

At least the bands at The Circle Pit brand activation were not random. Drain, One Step Closer, Jivebomb, and Upchuck brought the one thing Adidas and Satisfy obviously could never produce on their own: scene credibility.

I am not going to get too deep into why a band would agree to play a gig like this, knowing perfectly well that it has nothing to do with a hardcore show and everything to do with marketing. That is thin ice for someone who has had their own tour bus loaded with Monster Energy drinks and once played at gamescom. And yes, that was actually cool.

Suffice it to say: the average hardcore band fee is probably less than what the Adidas marketing department spends at Starbucks during their lunch break.

Straight Edge For Sale

It is worth mentioning that The Circle Pit was not Satisfy’s first reach into this world. Of all their punk and hardcore rip-offs, their Straight Edge2 capsule pissed me off the most.

They sourced vintage (my friend Andy calls them “OG”) Straight Edge tees, many of them from the prime era of the 90s, overprinted them with Satisfy branding, and sold them through the Satisfy universe, with a Satisfy price tag, of course.

I own most of the shirts that were up for sale. They are in my basement and have most likely, unnoticed, upgraded themselves into homegrown MothTech by now. I still have them, despite all of them being size XL, because that was basically the only size available in the 90s. And the reason I never sold them to Mills Vintage is exactly this: I do not want anyone to make 190 dollars from them, and I do not want anyone to pay 200 dollars for them.

Those shirts carried real meaning for me. Wearing their message gave me strength and confidence when I needed it most. They were not just merch. They were proof that you had shown up, supported the bands, and become part of the world those words came from.

Straight Edge was never a trend, and it was never fashion. In fact, it was not even a subculture or a scene. It is a decision. A deeply personal one, made for a lifetime. And after more than 30 years, it still holds. At least for me.

Taking that depth and meaning, printing a brand logo over it, and selling it back as premium running culture to rich kids is already cynical.

The fact that Satisfy released a 420 stoner-themed collection only a few weeks later makes the whole thing almost too perfect as a symbol.

One drop, Straight Edge. Another one, weed culture. Whatever makes Satisfy appear edgy and underground. Whatever can be turned into a product.

Bridges, Not Campaigns

As I mentioned before, I am not a gatekeeper. In fact, running and hardcore merge surprisingly well. There is a real bridge between them. One that allowed me to move from one passion to another, and one that offers the same possibility to anyone, in both directions. I wrote about that overlap in #28:

But real bridges are built through people, time, care, and contribution. Fake ones are built through campaigns.

Since I do not want to be that grumpy old hardcore kid only complaining from the side of the room, here is an example of how this can be done well: Diadora’s Squadra di Corsa.

The punk and hardcore references there feel authentic because they appear through long-standing relationships, not brand theatre. Bridges built by people who are actually connected to that world. The president of Diadora USA, Bryan Poerner, comes from the hardcore-punk scene, and you can feel the difference between someone carrying a history and someone shopping for one.

And that difference matters.

A brand can touch a subculture with care. Or it can walk in, steal the symbols, book the bands, pay the influencers, film the pogo dancing (cringe alarm), sell the shoe, and call the whole thing underground culture.

That is what The Circle Pit felt like.

And people exposed it. Runners and hardcore kids alike. They decoded it because something real was being used to sell something expensive.

That is where corny turns ugly.

The problem was not a bunch of influencers running on a pump track. The problem was the exploitation of a subculture that stands for everything Satisfy and adidas are not.

Do not write about Arda Saatçi.
Do not write about Arda Saatçi.
Do not write about Arda Saatçi.
Do not write about Arda Saatçi.
Do not write about Arda Saatçi.

Damn.

There are many things about this whole Red Bull desert-running spectacle that heavily irritated me. Mostly the way how ultra running was portrayed clean, loud, big, hyper-masculine, and broadly consumable as a giant marketing machine wraps itself around it. The Cyborg thing did not exactly help. And the biceps flexing. But that one is personal.

I could write that version of this Das Z Letter.

I could become the exact guy I promised my friends Flo Neuschwander and Martin Grüning I would try very hard not to become: the grumpy old man of running, standing at the side of the road with folded arms, mumbling about how everything used to be more honest when people still carried paper maps, ate Minnesota Mashed Potatoes, and brought their families instead of a production crew to an ultra race.

And honestly, that grumpy guy lives in me. He has opinions.

But the truth is more complicated, and probably more uncomfortable.

Arda Saatçi inspires a huge number of people. Literally millions. Many of them will find their way into running because of him. They saw someone move through something absurdly hard with joy, drama, emotion, exhaustion, humor, and visible belief. Enough inspiration to buy running shoes for the first time.

That is great. It really is and I do not want to talk it down. Arda Saatçi is a running hero for many people. A role model. A source of inspiration.

For me, he is none of these things.

What he does and how he does it does not make me want to run. It does not reach the part of me that running reaches when it goes deep or hits hard. It does not give me that feeling of: yes, this is why.

And that is interesting. Because it raises the following question:

Or do they choose us?

The mirror we follow

It would be easy to think running heroes are simply the people who did the biggest things, the most crazy sh*it, or simply win all the races.

The fastest, the strongest, the most fearless. The ones with the longest resume, the wildest race history, the most impossible-looking photos from impossible-looking places.

This idea seems legit. It is also false. At least for me.

Most of the runners who shaped me did not do so because they were impressive on paper, even though many of them were. They shaped me because they gave form to something I was already looking for without knowing it: Depth.

Scott Jurek reached me because Eat and Run showed me that greatness did not have to be loud. That you could do extraordinary things and still carry them with calm, restraint, humor, and a certain softness.

Kilian Jornet reached me because over the thirteen years of my own running life he somehow managed to become more inspiring, not less. The more he won, the less the winning seemed like the whole point. His running, his understanding of the human body, his environmental work, his curiosity, his relationship to mountains and community, all of it grew into something far bigger than athletic dominance.

Zach Miller reached me because, I mean, look at YaboyZachMiller! There are athletes who make suffering look noble. Zach makes it look like he is wrestling a dinosaur in a parking lot and still somehow having the time of his life.

Courtney Dauwalter reached me because she makes dominance look almost suspiciously light. Candy, weird shorts, an unbreakable smile, and pain tolerance from another planet. She makes running ultras feel human.

François D’Haene reached me because even as a full-blooded elite runner, he always seemed connected to a life outside the sport. Family first and a passion for his wine estate. The vibe that training is part of a life, not a hostile takeover of it. No offense, Zach.

Nicky Spinks reached me because she made age, injuries and illness look like bumps in the road, not the end of a runner’s story.

Martin Grüning reached me because he taught me the art of the marathon. He also explained to me why humility matters, and why a lack of it will ruin everything. It took me years to fully understand.

The Willpower Athletes reached me because they reminded me that running can be brave, slightly stupid, playful, and deeply alive. A playground, not a military training camp.

My wife Lisa reached me because she showed me what it means to give yourself to a race without holding anything back. To enter it fully. To let it take what it takes, because otherwise you never find out what is really there.

And my dad will always remain the standard for keeping the love for running alive into older age. No campaign or running book about aging could manufacture that. A life spent running says it all.

I could continue this list for a long time.

There have been many people who influenced my running life. Some famous, some close, and some almost invisible to the outside world. They impressed me, carried me, irritated me, taught me, corrected me, and pulled me forward.

What connects them is not spectacle. It is depth. Depth in their relationship with running. The long arc of staying with something.

That is what I have always searched for in running: Hold.

The inspiration industry

This is where the social criticism enters, unfortunately wearing very expensive sunglasses. Because our current culture does not gently introduce us to heroes. It builds them, packages them, ranks them, edits them, monetizes them, and pushes them into our faces and forces us into admiration.

The modern running hero is rarely just a runner. They are a content engine, the top of the algorithm, a brand and the brand’s products.

This is the part that makes me suspicious. Less the person. More the marketing choreography around the person.

But it obviously works. And I know why it works. We want to feel something. We want to believe in something. We want someone to make running feel enormous, like a miracle.

I just do not need running to convince me of its power anymore. I know what it can do. I know what it can give and what it can take. I know how seductive it is when suffering starts to feel like identity. I know how quickly a big goal can become a black hole you throw yourself into.

So my problem is not that someone runs far through the desert. My problem begins when the whole thing arrives already pre-interpreted and with a trending hashtag: courage, freedom, strength, grit, dedication, you name it. As whatever we are supposed to feel before we even had a chance to feel anything ourselves.

That kind of heroism leaves very little room for doubt. And doubt is where running usually becomes interesting to me.

The heroes who stay

This could be my answer to the question “How do we choose our running heroes?” – I do not choose my heroes by what they achieve. I choose them by what they expose in me.

Some people make me want to train harder. Some make me want to think clearer. Some make me want to stay softer. Most of them remind me that running is a lifelong negotiation rather than a thing you conquer once.

That is a very personal filter. Probably an unfair one, but it is the only one I have.

Arda Saatçi does not pass through it. His running may be huge, emotional, impressive, and important to a lot of people. To me, it arrives with too much volume and spotlight around it. Too much certainty. Too much ready-made greatness. And no depth. I look at it and feel the machinery before I feel the running.

Probably not even Arda’s fault. It only means he is not an inspiration for me.

This could be the whole point. Running heroes are not universal. They are private distortions. We do not admire the same people because we do not need the same things. One runner sees bravery. Another sees branding. One sees freedom. Another sees a business model with legs. One sees a reason to start. Another sees a reason to step back.

None of us watches from nowhere.

We bring our hunger, our wounds, our vanity, our history, our fatigue, our age, our taste, our unresolved bullshit. Then we call the result inspiration.

So, how do we choose our running heroes?

We point at them.
And reveal ourselves.

Everything Not Running

Has anyone actually not seen the mountain rescue documentary In höchster Not yet?

The second season just came out, and somehow they managed to make it even more gripping, more thrilling, and more heartbreaking than the first one. No Hollywood mountain drama comes close, because Hollywood still has to make things up. Real life apparently tells the best stories.

The drama pulls you in, but the warning is what stays.

Social media has made the mountains look accessible, picturesque, and weirdly harmless. In other areas, that distortion is just annoying. In the mountains, it can become dangerous very quickly.

I have written about humility and respect for the mountains many times. But those words only land properly when you see what happens after one bad call, one wrong turn, one weather change, one moment of overconfidence.

In höchster Not shows exactly that. Free to stream in the ARD Mediathek.

On Repeat

Have you heard of the Cancer Bats? Well, you should. As someone said recently: “The most Canadian-sounding Canadian band ever.” That about sums it up.

Unmistakable lumberjack vibes meet hardcore, metal, and rock ‘n’ roll. What could possibly go wrong? Nothing. The Cancer Bats’ mix is a sure shot for anyone who likes it raw and heavy.

New album “Give Me Dirt” coming in August.

Was ist eigentlich diese Running Culture? Steile These: Nicht (nur) das was uns auf Instagram angezeigt wird. Fernab der Profis, Runfluencer, Celebrities und Online-Coaches gibt es nämlich noch den Rest von “uns”. Die breite Masse ohne Sichtbarkeit. Menschen, die einfach nur laufen, ohne sofort jemandem davon zu erzählen… Sagt der, der jede Woche über das Laufen schreibt & erzählt.

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Das Z Letter zur Folge

• ON REPEAT: COUNT ME OUT “What We Built”

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Sprachnachricht supporten ja geil 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

Most runners will never become visible.

They will never be interviewed, sponsored, photographed at sunrise, added to a brand campaign, invited on a podcast, turned into a case study, quoted in a newsletter, or followed for their motivational quotes. They will never build a platform around their running, never explain their routine to strangers, never post the long run, the comeback, the finish line, the failure, the new beginning.

They will simply go outside, move through their neighborhood for a while, come back sweaty, shower, eat something, answer emails, pick up their kids, call their parents, feed the cat, continue.

That’s the running I trust the most.

The Missing Majority

It’s a fact: the largest part of this sport is almost absent from its public image. What we see every day are the professionals, and of course we should. We also see the almost-professionals, the coaches, the creators, the lifestyle athletes, the celebrities who discover endurance as an exciting personality extension (for a while), and the fictional runners built by brands to tell us how running should look, feel, and sound like. And of course which shoes and shirts belong to which identity.

There is nothing wrong with any of this. It is part of running. It becomes a problem only when we start mistaking it for the whole thing.

We’re at constant risk of letting the visible world replace the real one. We begin to forget that most running happens without any witness at all. No audience, no proof, no one waiting for the story.

That is not the edge of the sport but its center.

Inside The Machine

I honestly admire the people who do not turn running into a subject. There is something deeply sane about that relationship.

These runners seem to ask less from the sport, which might be the reason it can give them more. They do not need running to hold their entire identity together. They do not need every week to look committed from the outside. No approval from anyone. Their love has limits, and those limits protect it.

This sounds a bit uncomfortable coming from me. I write about running all the time. I have written articles, books, newsletters, captions, and long emotional weather reports about what running does to a person. I own a running brand. I have turned a private obsession into public subject so often that I sometimes wonder whether I still know how to experience something without immediately analyzing it, and sharing it with the world.

Some honest tension here. I am part of the visible side, even if only in a small weird corner of it. But writing helps me understand things. To understand myself. It gives shape to my inner mess and also to the beautiful part. It also connects me to people who recognize themselves in the same tension. I do not want to pretend otherwise.

Still, I admire (sometimes even envy) the ones who can leave the run where it happened.

They finish, and nothing has to be extracted from it. The run does not become a metaphor or have to carry a message. It can simply be a run.

Better Boundaries

Sounds like a healthy form of devotion: loving something without forcing it to explain you.

Running becomes dangerous when it has to do too much. When it has to make us feel worthy, interesting, disciplined, healed, special, untouchable, different from everyone else.

I know this because I have asked too much from it myself. I have wanted running to make me strong when I felt fragile, alive and inspired when the rest of life seemed flat. Sometimes it did. But other times it collapsed under the weight of what I needed from it.

The invisible runners remind me that running works best when it stays connected to the rest of life.

In Good Hands

When I write about running, this is what I hope survives underneath my words. I hope the running is only the doorway. A way into questions that belong to far more people than only runners: what we do with longing, how we handle comparison, where we place our hunger, how we continue when the body changes, how we keep something alive without turning it into a public performance.

The runners we never see understand this.

They are not outside the culture. They are the culture. They are the reason running remains much larger than the people who explain it, sell it, document it, and dress it in meaning. They are the foundation under the spectacle.

With them, running is in good hands.

Everything Not (?) Running

Speaking of being invisible: I reactivated my Strava profile yesterday. I’m not exactly sure why, it was just an impulse I acted on without thinking.

I probably felt like I’d crossed a certain threshold with my running that justifies this visibility. I’ve been dreaming for a long time of running about 10 kilometers three times a week, and recently I’ve even added occasional mountain adventures on top of that (yes, still without any downhills).

I’m pretty sure that outsiders don’t make nearly as big a deal out of this small change in visibility settings from “Only you” to “Your followers” as I do. Many probably didn’t even notice that I suddenly disappeared from Strava in January.

What’s different now? Not much. I’m happy to get a few Kudos. However, those aren’t for my outstanding athletic achievements but rather for quirky cat photos, or a little “I’m glad you’re running again.” Plus, I see my weekly stats graph tentatively trending upward. Whether that’s really a trend remains to be seen, but right now my body feels good, and more importantly: I’ve started trusting it again.

All with reservations. I’m not usually the type for on-off relationships, but with me and Strava, it could be over just as quickly as it began.

On Repeat

I still remember very well how I started writing my own songs in the mid-90s. Or at least I tried aka “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Songwriting is a fine art, and it takes years, if not decades, to understand all the rules and, on top of that, be ready to follow them. Or, alternatively, to consciously break them.

Anyway, I always wanted to write a hardcore track like “What We Built” by COUNT ME OUT. Not too much of anything, not too little of anything, 100% on point, full power ahead, pure spirit.

Even today, “What We Built” would still be the blueprint for the ultimate hardcore song.

Of course, it is not normal. It is still absurd to travel to a remote place, put on a small vest, eat wild amounts of food, and move through mountains, forests, heat, darkness, weather, and doubt for days and nights.

Ultra running only feels normal because the language around it has changed. Everyone seems to do it because we see it everywhere. Instagram has flattened the exceptional into the everyday. Once something becomes visible often enough, it starts to look available.

The same thing has happened to moving through alpine terrain.

Somewhere along the way, it became silently expected that if you run trails, you also move through the mountains with natural confidence. That steep descents, exposed ridges, loose rock, river crossings, snowfields, ladders, chains, scree, wind, wet roots, and narrow paths above consequences are simply part of the package. Part of the aesthetic. Part of the fun.

And for some people, they are.

There are runners who seem to belong out there with their whole body. They read rock like a language. They know where to place their feet before they have consciously made the decision. They move lightly, calmly, almost indifferently, through places that make other people’s stomachs drop. I admire that. I really do.

I also know I am not always one of them. I can openly say that. It is not a confession of weakness. It is the kind of knowledge you need in places where pretending can have consequences.

The Illusion Of Being Fine

Fear itself is rarely the real danger.

Fear can be useful. Fear is information. It tells you that something in front of you deserves your full attention. Yes, sometimes it is exaggerated, misplaced, or connected to an old memory rather than the actual situation, but it is still a signal.

The real problem starts when we pretend the signal is not there.

Mountain running has a way of producing a very specific kind of performance. A performance of ease. Everyone wants to look like they are simply flowing through the terrain. Nobody wants to be the person who freezes before the exposed traverse, hesitates at the steep descent, or quietly admits that what they are facing is more than they expected.

So we smile. We joke. We keep moving. We act casual.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes the body follows the act and finds its confidence again. Other times, the act becomes a liability. You override something that deserved to be heard.

I know this from myself.

There are days when I move surprisingly well on terrain that would have made me nervous at another time. My feet are awake, my eyes are sharp, my body feels connected to the ground. I can read the next few meters, solve the small problems quickly, and stay relaxed enough to even enjoy it.

Then there are other days: same person, similar terrain, completely different reality.

Suddenly I feel clumsy, slow, and a little stiff. My steps get louder and my focus narrows. I start thinking too much about every foot placement and do not trust myself in the same way.

I have learned to acknowledge and respect these moments.

Risk assessment starts there for me. With weather, route, exposure, gear, daylight, and escape options, of course. But also with the less obvious inventory: How awake am I today? How steady? Am I stressed out? Am I in danger of becoming a victim of my own pride?

Turning Around Is A Skill

My rule for days like this is simple: I turn around.

Definitely not a heroic rule. It does not sound especially adventurous and it will never make a good caption. But it’s the most important principle I’ve set for myself in the mountains.

When I feel unsafe, I stop trying to convince myself that I am not.

First, because it ruins the reason I went there in the first place. I do not run in the mountains to spend hours in a state of silent tension, pretending that I am having a deep experience while my body is in permanent alert mode and my mind is busy calculating possible failure.

Second, because insecurity changes how we move. The hesitant step is often worse than the confident one. The stiff body reacts more slowly. The anxious mind sees too much and too little at the same time. You start avoiding risk in a way that creates more risk.

And third, because I have nothing to prove there.
To others, yes. That should be obvious.
More importantly, I have nothing to prove to myself.

Experience Is Not A Vibe

Difficult terrain is often discussed as if confidence were mostly a matter of mindset: Stay calm. Trust your feet. Commit.

All of that can be true. It is also super incomplete.

Moving well through difficult places takes experience. A lot of it. Repeated exposure, hundreds of moments where you were scared, handled it, learned something, and slowly became less surprised by what the mountains can ask from you.

You do not become comfortable on exposed ground because you watched enough reels of people skipping over ridgelines. You do not become safe on technical descents because someone sold you a shoe with the perfect outsole. You do not become mountain competent only because it is expected from you as a trail runner.

You need experience. And experience enters the body slowly.

It is built through awkwardness, mistakes, better judgment, small recoveries, bad weather, wrong turns, unexpected snow, loose stones, wet roots, trembling quads, and all the unglamorous moments nobody films because they make everyone look clumsy and uneasy. Or in other words: ordinary and human.

This is where the current culture around trail and ultra running is dishonest.

We have normalized the image of the alpine runner without normalizing the long apprenticeship behind it. We show the ridge, the summit, the long descent into golden light. We rarely show the years it takes to know when a ridge is a ridge and when it is a place you should leave alone that day.

Racing Changes The Question

Everything becomes more complicated in a race.

On a training run, turning around is rather easy. A bit annoying maybe, disappointing sometimes, but easy. You can choose another route, shorten the day, go for coffee, call it a smart decision, and move on with your life.

In a race, turning around usually means that your race is over.

That changes the emotional pressure completely. You have paid money, traveled, trained, told people about your great adventure, imagined the finish, maybe built a whole season around this one day. Then you arrive at a section that asks more from you than you can responsibly give. Behind you, other runners are approaching. In front of you, people are moving through. The markings are clear: This is the way.

A terrible setup for honest self-assessment.

Most races are organized for a broad audience, and most race directors do a serious job of making difficult terrain manageable. Dangerous passages are often secured, marked, staffed, rerouted, or removed entirely. That work is important. It allows many of us to experience landscapes we might never dare to enter alone.

Still, a marked route does not turn a mountain into a theme park.

A difficult place stays difficult. A narrow passage does not become easier because fifty runners are breathing behind you. A wet slab does not care that you are wearing a bib. A gust of wind on a ridge is not softened by the fact that an aid station is only four kilometers away.

That is why organizers carry responsibility.

If a race is made for a broad field, the course has to respect that field. If it contains terrain that requires real alpine competence, the race description has to say that clearly. No romantic code words. No vague talk about “technical beauty” when the actual message should be: you need to be confident and experienced in exposed mountain terrain.

Runners also carry responsibility, of course.

We have to read the information honestly. We have to stop confusing desire with ability. We have to understand that finishing a race is never proof that every decision along the way was smart.

Still, the responsibility cannot be pushed entirely onto the runner. Race organizers shape the frame in which decisions are made. They know what pressure does. They know how hard it is to quit inside a system that is designed to move everyone forward.

The Thrill Is Not The Point

I do not go to the mountains for the thrill.

That may sound strange coming from someone who runs ultra distances and has chosen plenty of objectively questionable ways to spend a weekend. I understand that from the outside, mountain running might look like thrill-seeking by default.

But for me, it is almost the opposite. I go there for release.

For the feeling that my head finally has enough space. For the way the body becomes occupied by something immediate and honest. When the world gets bigger and my own problems and negative thoughts shrink.

And I do not need complicated terrain to feel that.

A simple trail can be enough. A forest climb, a runnable ridge with room for error, a downhill that that makes you feel like flying instead of falling. The mountain does not become more meaningful just because it shows its dangerous side.

At the same time, I know that the mountain alone decides what it gives.

A route can look harmless on a map and still change completely. A landslide can take part of the trail away. A fallen tree can force an awkward detour. A storm can arrive early. A dry path can turn slick. A stream can rise. A strong wind on a ridge can turn a beautiful day into a nightmare.

That unpredictability is part of the agreement.

Running in the mountains means entering a place that does not organize itself around us. The mountain is not hostile, but it is indifferent. It gives nothing just because we came prepared. It owes us neither safety nor drama. It simply is.

A Different Kind Of Courage

There is courage in going on.

Everyone in endurance sports understands that. The long effort, the bad patch, the climb that does not end, the race that slowly strips you down until only stubbornness remains. We have built a whole mythology around continuing, and I understand why.

But there is also courage in stopping.

This kind of courage receives less applause. It often feels terrible in the moment because nobody gets to see the accident that did not happen, the rescue that was avoided, the bad decision that wasn’t made.

Good judgment rarely gets a high five. Maybe that is why it matters so much.

Everything Not Running

I keep thinking about how often adulthood rewards pretending.

Pretending we understand things we only half understand. Pretending we are comfortable in rooms that make us feel small. Pretending we know where life is going while we are feeling completely lost.

That is why I have become more suspicious of confidence that arrives too quickly.

Real confidence comes from having been wrong before. It knows how quickly things can change, how easy it is to misjudge yourself, and how little a strong pose is worth once the ground gets serious.

The older I get, the more I trust people who can say:

“I do not know.”
”I am not sure.”
”This might be too much for me today.”

There is dignity in that.

On Repeat

I managed to hold back for a week, but when the number of repeat plays skyrockets to record levels, it’s clear this is a worthy and long-overdue track for ON REPEAT: 100 Demons – “Meat For The Beast”.

Yes, I know, we’ve already had 100 Demons on ON REPEAT, and I’m usually very hesitant to feature bands more than once. But in this case, it’s simply unavoidable.

Not releasing an album for 22 years and then, against all trends, simply picking up exactly where you left off? Not every band can do that. 100 Demons don’t even try to sound modern or reinvent themselves. They know exactly what their strengths are and exploit them ruthlessly.

100 Demons are back, and “Meat For The Beast” makes it unmistakably clear exactly why that has to be.

Verletzt sein ist kacke. Die Schmerzen sind aber nicht das eigentliche Problem, sondern die Ungewissheit. Sie frisst dich von Innen auf, raubt dir jede Hoffnung und nagt an deiner Liebe zum Laufen. Wirklich so schlimm? Ich bin da mal eingetaucht.

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Passender Das Z Letter zur Folge

• ON REPEAT: MASSIVE ATTACK & TOM WAITS “Boots On The Ground”

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Sprachnachricht supporten ja geil 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

Pain, at least, says something. It has a place, and some kind of mood. Even when it is vague and it changes, it still feels like information.

Uncertainty does not. Uncertainty spreads like a virus. It turns a physical problem into a mental one.

That is the part I struggle with most right now.

I can deal with discomfort. Running taught me to. I can deal with missing races. They’re nice to have but not essential. I can even deal with the temporary humiliation of feeling weak, unfit, or far away from myself. What really f*cks me up is not knowing what is true.

• Am I on the right therapy path, or just wasting time on the polite version of failure.

• Is this taking longer because healing takes longer than I want it to, or because I should have made a different decision weeks ago.

• Would surgery be the better option. Would it have been the better option from the start.

• Am I doing too much and irritating the tendon again, or too little and keeping it forever in that grey zone where nothing truly gets worse, but nothing really heals.

What Counts

That is the exhausting thing. Injury does not simply interrupt running. It forces me into interpretation.

Every run becomes a test. Every rest day becomes a guess. Every exercise becomes a small act of faith.

And after a while, even the language gets unstable.

You go out for a short run and no longer know what to call it.

Is this training?
Is it rehab? Just a way of checking what the body allows today?
An experiment?
Or is it a cautious return to running?
Is it allowed to count as part of my running life?
Is it running at all?

That ambiguity is a big deal to me.

Because running is usually one of the clearest relationships I have in life. You do the work. Something happens. It may not happen fast enough. It may not happen in the exact form you want. You may still fail on race day. But the basic contract remains intact. Effort means something. Consistency accumulates. Training has a direction. That’s the deal. That’s the promise.

Injury breaks this contract.

Suddenly, effort becomes unreadable. Rest becomes unreadable. You can do all the right things and still feel worse. You can have a day that feels promising and pay for it afterwards. You can take a week off and learn nothing. You can return to running and feel decent during the run itself, only to wait for the body’s verdict in the hours that follow.

That waiting is the worst thing. Truly miserable.

The Wrong Turn

This is also why hindsight becomes so seductive.

At some point, almost every injured runner starts building a private mythology around the “wrong turn”. The workout before the pain became real. The race that should have been skipped. The warning sign that should have been read correctly. The phase where ambition quietly turned into something utterly stupid. The injury before the injury.

I know that logic well. It is tempting because it promises order. If only I can identify the exact place and time where I went wrong, then the whole thing becomes meaningful again. Then I can tell myself I will be smarter next time and the chaos of injury turns into a valuable lesson.

But reality is usually less clean than that.

The wrong turn is obvious only after the fact. Life rarely presents us with neat arrows and moral clarity in the moment itself. It gives us mixed signals, partial information, hope, fear, momentum, ego, and a body that can be resilient and fragile at once.

We do not misread our lives because we are stupid or ignorant. Well, sometimes we are. But even more we misread our lives because we are inside them.

That is why injury can feel so cruel. It punishes you with certainty only after denying you certainty when you actually needed it most.

The Future Tense

Then there is the future. Also full of questions.

Will I fully heal, or only find a way to live with this?
Will my running life look like it used to?
Will I run long again? Fast again? Downhill again?
Will I race again? If yes, what kind of races?
Will I come back wiser, or simply more cautious?
And if this takes so long that running starts to feel more like loss than love, will I even still want it the way I used to?

That last thought hits hard.

Because runners are expected to frame injury as longing. As pure desire, just deferred. Sure, sometimes this is true when injury strips everything back and reminds us what mattered in the first place.

But long uncertainty can also do harm. It can wear down desire itself. Kill the flame. It can turn running from a place of freedom into a place of administration. It can make every attempt feel preloaded with consequence. It can make the sport you love feel like paperwork with emotional side effects. Until even they disappear.

Pain & Doubt

We love talking about pain in running because pain is dramatic and visible. Doubt works differently. It is sneaky and has no clear shape. Much harder to explain. Yet it is often the more destructive force. Pain may stop you for a day. Doubt can enter every decision, every plan, every step, because you don’t know how you will land and how it will feel.

Injury does not only interrupt the body, but also trust. Trust in process. Trust in sensation. Trust in your own gut feel. Trust that what you are doing today is leading anywhere you actually want to go.

And still, this is where many of us end up at some point if we stay in the sport long enough.

Pain is hard.
Uncertainty is harder.
Pain lives somewhere in the body.
Uncertainty moves into the whole life around it.

And after long enough, you realize that this is the real threat.

Everything Not Running

I’m selling my Oura Ring. Again.

I’d hoped it would somehow provide me with a kind of meaningful framework while I work on healing my knee, but the exact opposite was true. The signals and feedback the ring gave me were mostly diametrically opposed to how I felt.

This was particularly noticeable during some awful situations I’ve unfortunately had to face this year. Whether it was putting Toto to sleep, knee injections, extreme stress at work, or many nights when I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Oura had an accuracy rate of less than 50%.

Neither the data nor the text feedback the app gave me were even remotely helpful. Most of the time, it just annoyed me. That’s not what tech gadgets are for. If I want to get annoyed, I can just turn on the news.

Bye, Oura — until our next try!

On Repeat

This week is super tough because I have so many contenders on my list, but I’m going with Massive Attack & Tom Waits.

It’s not often that I call a song a masterpiece, but when two such extraordinary artists as Tom Waits and Massive Attack come together and release a track (and video) with such a clear political charge, that’s an absolute exception. It is called “Boots on the Ground.”

Both giants bring their A-game to the table. Massive Attack create that slow, ominous pressure beat and sphere they have always been masters of, while Tom Waits sounds like the voice of a world that has seen too much. The result is dark, heavy, and deeply unsettling in the best sense. It does not flatter the listener. It stands there like a warning.

Few tracks manage to sound this haunted, this angry, and this dignified all at once. This one does.

Getting older in running does not arrive all at once. It does not show itself only through slower times, longer warm-ups, or more frequent injuries. Instead, it enters quietly.

• Through the first real sense that not everything is still ahead of you.

• Through the body saying not that again.

• Through the realization that some chapters will not be repeated just because they were fun once.

In a culture built on personal bests, breakthroughs, debuts, fast comebacks, and first times of every kind, this can feel strangely lonely. Running, at least in the way it is publicly narrated now, remains obsessed with ascent. All stories seem to move in one direction: upward. More speed, more volume, more races, more ambition, and more things that have never been done before. Even aging itself is often repackaged as a challenge. As if the only goal was to keep on performing youth rather than to actually embrace change.

More interesting to me than that upward narrative is what happens when running stops being a ladder and becomes a relationship.

A sport full of beginnings

Running in 2026 still feels, in many ways, like a very young world. Well, the sport itself is not young, obviously. It is ancient. But the culture around it often behaves as if it has only one emotional state: emergence. New shoes. New goals. New identity. New city. New FKT. New distance. New content. New version of yourself. So much of it is built around becoming.

There is nothing wrong with that. Beginnings are powerful. They should be. They embody energy, hunger and momentum. I understand why people get hooked on them. I understand the seduction of first marathons, first ultras, first real seasons of taking yourself seriously. I understand what it means to want more from your body and your life, and to discover that running can become the perfect vehicle for that desire.

Still, a culture centered so heavily on beginnings has very little language for staying. For changing shape without disappearing. For wanting something deeper than improvement. For remaining devoted when desire changes shape and ambition no longer sounds the same inside you.

That is where I increasingly find myself.

What I am actually afraid of

To be clear, I am not talking about quitting. I do not feel close to that. Running is too deep in me for that, and too alive. But I keep experiencing a bunch of déjà vu moments.

Years ago, music had become something I could no longer see clearly. I held on to it for too long, until it became unhealthy. I did not recognize how much it had started to take from me instead of give to me. I did not see that the price had long become too high. The horse was dead and I kept riding it anyway, partly out of loyalty, partly out of identity. Also out of habit and because I did not know who I would be without it. By the time I understood that I had to move on, I had already stayed too long.

That is not what I want with running.

The situations are not identical, though. Running still gives me far too much for that comparison to fully hold. But the memory remains useful. It reminds me that love alone is not enough. You also have to remain honest. You have to notice when your attachment to something stops being life-giving and turns into a form of self-neglect.

That is why I think a question like Running, what do I want from you? cannot be asked once and filed away. It probably has to be revisited over and over again. Because what we want changes. What we need changes. What we can bear changes. What we are willing to sacrifice should change too.

Late to the party, early to the reckoning

Maybe part of why the dominant story of running feels slightly foreign to me is that I came to running late. I did not come to it as a gifted teenager, or even as a sporty young adult. I came to it in my mid-thirties, as someone who had not exactly been built by a lifetime of athletic continuity. Or any athleticism, for that matter. By the time my real Sturm und Drang phase in running arrived, my body had already begun drawing clear lines.

That matters.

It means I never fully belonged to the mythology of endless potential. Some things in the current running culture I recognize immediately, others feel foreign to me. And some I simply never lived through at all. Maybe that is a gift.

Because the older I get, the less interested I am in letting younger people, faster people, more visible people, or louder people define the meaning of running for me. Their version can be theirs. Mine does not have to resemble it.

That freedom feels real. So does the detachment that comes with it.

What running still is to me

I had a conversation with friends recently about what running can give a person, and what it can take away. That question has stayed with me. For me, running has never been a shallow sport. It has never been just movement, fitness, social recognition, race travel, or measurable progress, even though at times it has also been all of those things.

At its deepest, running reveals me to myself in a way no other practice does.

It brings me to parts of myself that daily life keeps hidden. It strips things down. It shows me fear, ego, hunger, resistance, tenderness, vanity, patience, self-pity, gratitude, delusion, and sometimes grace. I do not know many other things in life that can do that with such reliability.

For me, running has always contained both pain and relief. Not as opposites, but as twins. I do not want one without the other. I do not want a version of running that is only cleansing and never hard, only restorative and never demanding. The depth is in the tension. In enduring something and being changed by it. In entering difficulty without becoming stupid about difficulty. In finding, every now and then, that the thing which hurts is also the thing that opens something.

That remains true for me, even now. Maybe especially now.

What has changed is not the depth, but the priorities around it. I no longer need the same proofs. I no longer want every season to point toward a bigger race, a better version, a more impressive line on paper. I still want challenge, but not in every form. I still want intensity, but not if it empties the whole rest of my life. I still want ambition, but not the kind that makes me ignorant.

Leaving one culture, keeping the practice

When I look at younger parts of the running scene now, I often do not recognize much of what I love most about this sport. I see moth holes, bare chests, social pandering, constant display, a lot of surface confidence, and a lot of movement without much inwardness. That is not a moral judgment. It is also just an outside view. And to be fair: every generation builds its own rituals, which is great.

Still, I do not see much of the depth I look for there. Or not much of the willingness to sit inside the contradictions long enough for them to become meaningful. I guess that is asking too much from a public scene. The deeper parts were always private anyway.

Either way, I am increasingly at peace with the fact that I do not need to recognize myself in what running currently looks like from the outside.

What is happening feels, on one level, like a slow uncoupling from what running is supposed to mean in this moment.

On another level, though, it feels like the opposite of withdrawal. It feels like a return. A deeper, more private, more self-governed connection to running. One that is less mediated by the scene, less dependent on applause, less confused by trends, and maybe therefore more durable.

I do not know if that equation fully works out. I hope it does.

Run till death, but differently

There is an old fantasy hidden inside a phrase like Run Till Death. I still feel its pull. A wish to remain connected. To keep finding ways back in. To let running change without abandoning it just because it no longer answers the same needs.

This could be what aging in running really asks for. Instead of endless performance, denial, or bitterness, a willingness to keep renegotiating the relationship before it hardens into a lie.

I do not know how many versions of my running life are still ahead of me. What my body will permit, or what my mind will still long for five or ten years from now. But I do know that I want to notice when something shifts. I want to ask better questions and ask them sooner. I want to protect what is alive before I start defending what is already gone.

And above all, I want to keep finding my way back to a way of running that feels like mine.

Everything Not Running

Much sooner than I expected or hoped, I found myself back in a situation I really didn’t want to face again anytime soon. Standing in the vet’s waiting room with the cat carrier, waiting impatiently and anxiously for a diagnosis, hoping it wouldn’t be “Unfortunately, there’s nothing more we can do” again.

A few days ago, Harry, Toto’s twin brother, started vomiting up large portions of his food shortly after eating. It got worse and worse until, in the end, he didn’t even want to go to his bowl anymore. Emergency mode again, more anxiety and hope.

The vet suspects toothache is the cause. We had already planned a dental cleaning for Harry this year anyway, so we’ve simply moved it up. We humans don’t like this procedure, but for animals it’s a full-scale surgery with general anesthesia and everything that goes with it. It also carries a certain risk for older cats.

The good news: Harry survived the surgery like Rambo in Part III surviving his battle against the Soviet army in Afghanistan. The neck brace? He hates it with a passion. But he has to wear it for a while longer, because they also removed a lump on his paw.

Such a brave fighter. I told you, Rambo.

On Repeat

What is AS I LAY DYING without Tim Lambesis? That’s right: fucking awesome!

For anyone who just can’t deal with the AS I LAY DYING frontman’s steroid-fueled outbursts anymore, I recommend WOVENWAR’s self-titled album from 2014. Back then, the band didn’t know what to do without their singer, who was in jail at the time, so they did the only smart thing: they recorded an album without him.

Musically, it’s very close to the best phase AS I LAY DYING ever had. Back when metalcore was still exciting and innovative, not just the same song reproduced a thousand times, something AI can now pull off better than real musicians.

WOVENWAR, I’m telling you, WOVENWAR.

Ich bin verletzt. Die Frage ist: Wie bin ich überhaupt in diese missliche Lage gekommen? War vielleicht der Zugspitz Ultratrail an allem Schuld? Und wenn nicht, wer oder was dann? On top gibt es noch ein Reha Update mit gefährlichem medizinischen Halbwissen.

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Passender Das Z Letter zur Folge

• ON REPEAT: GUILT TRIP - No Love Lost

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Sprachnachricht supporten ja geil 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

The longer my injury hangs around, the more often I come back to one question:

Could I have avoided this?

And if yes: when exactly? Where did I take the wrong turn? Where, in the actual timeline of 2025, did a niggle become a full-blown injury?

If I were lazy with that question, it’d be easy to name one culprit: Zugspitz Ultratrail (ZUT). Easy target.

One hundred kilometers on a knee that had already been complaining for weeks. On paper, it sounds very straightforward:

Big race.
Big load.
Big damage.
Final blow.
End of story.

Except it’s not that simple.

Because running ZUT was a conscious decision. A deal, actually. I knew my knee wasn’t in perfect shape. I knew the risk. I looked it in the eye and said:

“I’ll run my main race. Then I’ll rest as long as it takes.”

And that’s exactly what I did. I kept my side of the deal. Only the body didn’t keep its end. The damage was already done.

I’ve said it many times and it’s still true: I don’t regret running ZUT. Not for a second. If I’m honest with myself, the real mistakes happened earlier. At smaller junctions. The kind you only recognize as junctions when you’re much further down the road, limping.

Mistake #1: The Steep Return

Remember? In 2024 I tore my meniscus. After six months of conservative rehab to no avail, I had at least piled up months of disciplined strength and mobility work. I went into my meniscus surgery in November 2024 with super strong legs and solid structure. The operation itself went smoothly. Two centimeters of meniscus removed. Also a plica. And some cartilage shavings. All cleaned up, but also a completely new environment inside the knee.

Post-op, I did everything by the book. I followed the recommended rehab plan. I respected the phases. I literally did “jumps before strides” like I once wrote in an article about my return to sport.

By the end of January, “return to sport” was checked off. Onboarding: complete. So far, so good.

The problem wasn’t the comeback. It was everything after.

From February onwards, the curve got stupidly steep. I ramped up quickly. Too quickly. The training volume exploded. The intensity followed. I got fitter, oh boy, dramatically fitter. Within three months I had stacked one hard block on top of another and squeezed five races into a handful of weeks, including my fastest trail half marathon to date, which, in retrospect, was a bit over the top.

Looking back, this training block — and how steeply it ramped — was the first real mistake.

Because with a knee that had just been structurally altered, I was in a completely new situation. The load distribution inside that joint had completely changed. Less meniscus, less cushioning, new contact points, new stress lines. Same old hunger to go all in.

Apparently, that combination didn’t mix very well. The result: patellar tendon irritation. Then inflammation. Then chronicity. All of this is further complicated by a bone marrow edema and chronic inflammation of the Hoffa’s fat pad, which makes standard tendinitis rehab almost impossible.

Mistake #2: Letting Strength Slip (Again)

The second mistake is almost boring because it’s so predictable: I let the strength work slide. And that was exactly when I would have needed it most.

During post-meniscus-op rehab, I was diligent. I did my prescribed sessions and then some. I checked all the boxes. My quads, glutes, and calves carried me well.

Then running came back, and strength got downgraded from “non-negotiable” to “nice-to-have” to “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

It’s not the first time this has happened. To be honest, I spent the first ten years of my running life doing zero strength training. Just vibes and volume. Somehow I always got away with it.

This time, I didn’t.

And the irony is brutal: in a situation where my knee needed muscular support more than ever (post-surgery, structurally changed, under increasing load) I gave it less. While both knees were clearly struggling during the race block, the logical move would have been simple:

1. Foot off the gas.

2. Double down on strength.

I did the opposite.

Mistake #3: Ignoring the Obvious

The third mistake is the most uncomfortable one to admit: I didn’t listen.

I remember standing in the kitchen the Tuesday after a track workout. I tried to squat down to pick something up from the floor and simply couldn’t. Both knees were so irritated that the movement just wasn’t there.

One of my knees managed to recover overnight, over and over again. The other one… eventually stopped bouncing back.

Still, as long as I had no pain while running, and I didn’t, I filed it under “sore from training” and kept going. The hunger to get faster and run further completely overshadowed my common sense.

In hindsight, it wasn’t ‘mental toughness’ or ‘grit’. It was greed.

The Kind of Injury This Is

Some injuries are clean-cut. You crash in a downhill, you hear a crack, and you know exactly when your season ended. You can point to the rock or the bad step and say: that’s where it happened. My torn meniscus last year was one of those injuries. One obvious moment. One obvious culprit.

This one is different.

This is the other kind of injury. The one that grows in the dark. The one that sends signals for weeks and months. The one that gives you ten opportunities to change course and watches you wave at each of them as you pass.

A bit too much load here. A skipped strength session there. A slightly sore knee that you decide is “just tight.” One more race. One more block. One more big week. One more small yes on top of hundreds of small yeses.

Until your body finally says no.

So… Could I Have Avoided This?

Back to the first question.

Could I have prevented this injury?
Yes. Of course. Obviously.

That’s the truth I have to live with.

I could have ramped slower after surgery. I could have treated strength work as medicine, not decoration. I could have taken those early warning signs seriously. I could have listened.

I didn’t. That’s on me.

It stings to admit that. But there’s also something strangely grounding about it. Because if my injury was only bad luck, there would be nothing to learn. Nothing to change. No leverage for the future.

At least it leaves me with something clear: Don’t repeat these three mistakes.

I can’t rewrite my 2025 season. I can’t retroactively give my knees the support they needed. I can’t go back to that kitchen floor moment and make a different call.

But I can carry this new honesty forward. I can be the person who remembers where the real turning points were and recognizes them sooner next time.

The ZUT didn’t “break” me. The hundred kilometers were just the last stone on an already overloaded pile. The real injury story is not about one race. It’s about the months before it.

That may be the most uncomfortable truth in all of this: most injuries are not fate or bad luck. They’re accumulation. They’re patterns. They’re the sum of decisions we don’t want to look at too closely.

I’m trying to look now.

Everything Not Running

Even if it does not quite fit the dramaturgy of today’s Das Z Letter, I wanted to give you a long overdue update on where I actually stand with my knee rehab.

After the crushing follow-up MRI in mid January, I radically hit the reset button and rebuilt everything from scratch. Since then, it has all been about patience, precision, and load management. Hard won, but real: I have worked my way back to 40 minutes of flat running. That may not sound like much, but for this particular injury it is. Uphill was never the real problem. You might remember that I spent the entire second half of 2025 running uphill almost obsessively. Flat running and especially downhill were the things my knee would not tolerate.

So yes, I am genuinely happy with those 40 minutes. And yes, of course I immediately want more. That part of me is still very much alive. But I have committed to a conservative progression and I intend to stick to it.

Alongside the running, we keep evolving the strength work. Two gym sessions, two home sessions, all with different emphases. We are building the quads and everything around them, while also trying to undo the protective patterns that have crept in over months. To avoid irritating the Hoffa fat pad, I have developed a habit of avoiding full knee extension in daily life, which then creates new problems for stability and movement. You close one gap and another opens. That is rehab in a sentence. My physio deserves her own thank you Das Z Letter at some point.

On the medical side, we are still working through options. Shockwave therapy back in November did not do much. PRP injections are the current experiment. I have done two so far. For anyone considering this themselves: the injection into the tendon is manageable. The Hoffa fat pad is a different story entirely. Deeply, spectacularly unpleasant. Downright terrifying.

The less encouraging part is this: although the last MRI did not show real healing progress, it did raise a new question. There may be a small bony irregularity at the patella, right above the irritated part of the tendon. If that really is creating mechanical irritation, it changes the whole picture. X-ray and ultrasound have not given us full clarity, so for now we are finishing the PRP route before discussing the thing I do not want to discuss at all: surgery.

The logic is simple: if we’re talking about mechanical irritation, I can rehabilitate my knee until I’m blue in the face, and it won’t do anything.

I am still holding that thought at a distance. I want to do everything I can to avoid surgery. But it is on the table now, and if by late summer nothing really moves, it may become a real option.

I am sharing all this for the same reason I always do: partly to give myself some room to breathe, partly because injuries can feel strangely isolating, even though so many runners live with them. And when things get difficult, one of the few truly helpful feelings is realizing you are not the only one in it.

On Repeat

The riff is back! Not unlike the vibe of Malevolence (a band I’ve been raving about heavily) Guilt Trip has been teasing a new album for months, and every track they’ve released so far has me even more excited.

Guilt Trip has actually been around for roughly 10 years, but they now seem to be reaching a wider audience now, including on tour with Malevolence.

Guilt Trip have carved out a niche somewhere between hardcore, metal, and crossover, and their latest single, “No Love Lost,” is the best example of that.

It has exactly the kind of straightforward heaviness and clarity I want from this kind of band.

Jeder kennt es, jeder hat es schon einmal gemacht: Ein Rennen abgesagt. Gründe dafür gibt es viele, aber noch spannender ist, was es mit uns macht? Warum wurmt es uns bei bestimmten Rennen so arg, wenn wir nicht starten können? Und welche Chancen übersehen wir vielleicht, die in einem Nicht-Start stecken?

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Passender Das Z Letter zur Folge

• ON REPEAT: Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes “My Town”

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Sprachnachricht supporten 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.

Registering is easy. Super easy. That is part of the problem.

It makes the whole thing feel almost consequence-free, as if you had simply purchased a ticket to a future life. A stronger life. A more focused life. A life in which you arrive at the start line self-confident, healthy, prepared, calm, and exactly on time.

Then the actual price begins.

The expensive part comes later

A race entry is never just a race entry. It is a commitment disguised as a transaction.

From that moment on, training is no longer abstract. It has a direction. Your weeks start leaning toward something. Long runs matter more. Recovery matters more. Small aches become threatening. Every good session feels like proof. Every bad one feels like a warning.

And in the background there is always that subtle uncertainty: will everything hold until race day?

That question alone is enough to humble the whole heroic image of racing. Because so much can go wrong, and often does.

The many ways a race disappears

• Sometimes the body cancels the race for you. Injury is the classic one. Boring, brutal, effective.

• Sometimes it is illness. A cold at the wrong time. A stomach bug. A fever three days before the start. Months of work undone by something so profane.

• Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate. Family issues. Work chaos. Travel problems. Missed flights. Bad timing. The kind of adult logistics that never make it into finish line photos.

• Sometimes the training never came together. Not because you are lazy, but because you were tired, distracted, overambitious, underrecovered, emotionally elsewhere, or all of it at once.

• Sometimes the weather turns absurd. Sometimes the race gets canceled before you cancel it. Sometimes the mountain, the heat, the storm, the fire, or the world itself says no.

• And sometimes the hardest reason is the least dramatic one: you know you are not ready, and for once you decide not to lie to yourself.

What the cancellation really says

I have canceled dozens of races in my running life.

Some of them meant almost nothing. The entry had been born out of boredom and disorientation rather than conviction anyway. In those cases the cancellation felt like clearing a table. Mildly annoying, financially stupid but emotionally manageable.

Some stung, but in a clean and manageable way. You tell yourself you will just do it next year. The disappointment is real, but still surrounded by confidence. The story remains intact.

Then there are the other cancellations.

The ones that feel like personal collapse. Where not starting does not only mean that a race is gone, but that a whole imagined version of yourself is gone with it. The disciplined runner. The healthy one. The one who got it together this time. The one who was finally going to show what all this work had been for.

That is why canceling a race can feel so severe. It is not merely an organizational decision. It can feel like an admission of failure. Too sick. Too hurt. Too weak. Too late. Too chaotic. Or simply not in control.

This hits hard for people who build meaning through their own efforts and think they can control the outcome with their actions.

The open account

And yes, some races leave behind an open account.

You move on, technically. You train again. You do other races. Your life continues. Yet the canceled race stays exactly where it was. Untouched. Like a door you never walked through. Not closed, just not entered.

That unfinished quality can haunt a runner more than a bad result sometimes. Because even a bad race is a race that at least happened. A cancellation leaves you with imagination, and imagination is often less merciful than reality.

Still, I do not think these missed races are wasted chapters.

The road you did not take still changes you

Every canceled race sends you somewhere else.

You turn left instead of right. You might stay with shorter distances. You might even discover the pleasure of training without immediate purpose. Maybe you become more patient or less naive. You learn to enjoy a season without turning it into a verdict on your worth. You find out that your attachment was deeper than you thought, or more conditional than you wanted to admit. And you come to understand that racing is sacred. And finite. And thus very special.

A missed race can redirect your whole relationship with running.

That is not always noble in the moment. Sometimes it just feels unfair. But looking back, a running life is never only built from the races we ran. It is also built from the ones we lost, postponed, abandoned, or never got to start.

Still a runner

Yes, races are powerful and magically captivating. But running itself would become unbearably small if races were the only thing that made it meaningful.

There are too many other reasons your running life matters. The private satisfaction of a good week. The powerful calm of an ordinary jog. The meditative repetition of the same old mountain. The strange dignity of starting over. The body learning trust again. The miles no one sees. The unseen rituals. The repetition that gives your life structure. The sense that you are connected to something real, even when nothing is being measured, announced, or proven.

You do not need a bib to belong here.

Some of the most important things running gives us have nothing to do with race day. No start line can grant them, and no cancellation can take them away.

A running life is shaped not only by the races we start, but also by the ones we lose, the ones we leave behind, and the ones that send us somewhere else.

Everything Not Running

I haven’t told anyone this, but I have a brand-new side hustle business idea all ready to go, just sitting in a drawer. The plan was actually to launch it this spring, but the whole thing with Toto completely derailed it. Now it’s just sitting there in the drawer, waiting for me to give it a go.

I have to say that it’s not unusual for me to have business ideas sitting in drawers. I have a blast developing them. Just for the sake of it, to see if they work. At least on paper. But my time (and financial resources, haha) are limited, and I can only dive into so many ventures. Besides, Willpower and writing are absolute labor of love projects that I would never put on the back burner just to start something new.

And yet: The idea is ready. And it’s good. And it touches my heart. I really feel like just going for it. If the whole thing takes off, you’ll be the first to know.

On Repeat

This song is 100% punk energy. It’s no coincidence that, out of all the musicians in the world, Frank Carter was chosen to front the legendary Sex Pistols’ final (?) reunion run (while original singer John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, sulks on the sidelines).

Frank Carter is an integral part of the British music scene. His very first band, Gallows, became a huge success and rightly so. But also his subsequent projects, Pure Love and now his current solo venture under the name Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes, prove that everything he touches turns to pure musical gold.

May he live long and continue to shower us with great songs and punk spirit.

Welcher Läufer möchte ich sein und wenn ja wie viele?

Eine Reflexion verschiedener Lauf-Identitäten, welche davon ich schon einmal war und welche ich in Zukunft (nicht mehr) sein möchte.

LINKS ZUR FOLGE

• Ein mehr oder weniger passender Das Z Letter zur Sprachnachricht: “Chasing The Runner I Used To Be”

• ON REPEAT Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify

• Fan der Sprachnachricht? Dann: Support 🖤

Die Das Z - Sprachnachricht ist kein Lauf-Podcast von Chris Z, dem Gründer der Laufsportmarke Willpower und Autor der Bücher Runhundred und Hundert-Meilen-Herz.