Why I Run

I spend most of my days staring at screens - building software, thinking about AI, and navigating the fast-moving world of tech. It's exciting work, but it's also mentally heavy, messy, and sometimes endless. The problems are complex, and there's always one more thing to fix, one more feature to ship, one more fire to put out. My mind is constantly context-switching between different projects, client meetings, and the ever-present anxiety of production issues.

Trail running is how I hit reset.

On a trail, my brain works differently. No notifications buzzing around me. No Slack messages piling up. No client issues looping in my head. No bug reports waiting for my input. The trail demands my full attention in a way the office never does - watch your footing, navigate that loose gravel, duck under that low branch. There's no room for my mind to spiral on work problems when my body needs every bit of focus just to keep moving forward and survive. It's pure, simple, and exhausting in the best way.

Within the first kilometer of any trail run, I feel the mental noise start to fade. The anxious task-switching gives way to something slower, more deliberate. My thoughts don't disappear - they just become different, longer.

I used to run with music in my ears, convinced I needed the motivation, the energy. But somewhere along the way, I started craving hours of complete silence instead. One day I forgot my headphones and discovered I didn't miss them. Now I carry them with me - but what I'm really there for is the hours of nothing. That quiet is rare in modern life, and it's become addictive. In those silent hours, my mind wanders differently than it does anywhere else. I think about hard problems I'm facing, but without the urgency. I replay conversations. I imagine futures. Sometimes I solve a technical challenge that's been blocking me for days, not through forced effort, but because my subconscious finally has space to work. Other times, I don't think about anything at all. Those moments of pure physical presence are a counterbalance to a life lived mostly in abstractions: code and data. On the trail, everything is tangible. The rock is hard. The hill is steep. The mud is slippery. There's no ambiguity, no edge cases, no undefined behavior.

I run to disconnect, but also to reconnect - to my body, to the physical world, to the parts of myself that get buried under deadlines and expectations. I run to remember what it feels like to move forward purely for the sake of moving. In a world increasingly dominated by AI and automation, the trails remind me that some things can't be optimized away.

You can't shortcut a mountain. You can't automate resilience. You can't delegate the work of showing up. The trails remind me that focus, patience, and presence are still powerful, perhaps more powerful than ever. Every run is a lesson in limits, resilience, and clarity.

Every time I lace up my shoes, I'm choosing to step away from the screens and into the world. I'm choosing discomfort over comfort, silence over noise, presence over distraction.

And every time I come back - legs tired, mind clear, spirit renewed - I remember why I'll keep doing this.

Not because I have to. Because I need to.