Stoic running
Premeditatio malorum
There is a practice so counterintuitive that most people, when they first hear it, assume it must be a recipe for anxiety. The Stoics called it premeditatio malorum. The premeditation of evils.
Before something important — a journey, a battle, a difficult conversation, a race — you sit quietly and imagine everything that could go wrong. Not vaguely. Specifically. You walk through the failure in detail, you feel the disappointment, you rehearse the moment where the plan unravels.
And then you go anyway.
This is not pessimism. It is, in a precise and practical sense, the opposite.
What the Stoics were actually doing
Seneca, who was perhaps the most readable of the Stoic philosophers and certainly the most quotable, wrote about this practice with a directness that still lands two thousand years later. He recommended setting aside time each day to contemplate adversity — not to dwell in it, but to strip it of its power to surprise you.
“Let us prepare our minds,” he wrote, “as if we had come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing.”
Marcus Aurelius practiced something similar in his Meditations — that private journal he kept not for publication but for discipline, returning again and again to the things that could go wrong so that when they did, he was not meeting them for the first time. An emperor, preparing for catastrophe. Not because catastrophe was inevitable, but because preparation was a form of respect for reality.
Epictetus, who had experienced catastrophe in ways Marcus Aurelius never had to, was characteristically blunt about the whole thing: the person who is surprised by difficulty has not been paying attention. Life is difficult. Bodies fail. Plans collapse. Weather turns. The question is not whether these things will happen. The question is whether you will have thought about them in advance.
Most of us haven’t. And so when they arrive, they arrive as crises.
The honest conversation before a long race
I have a ritual before any significant race. Not the carbohydrate loading or the kit preparation or the careful study of the course profile — those are practical, not philosophical. The ritual I mean happens a few days before, usually in the evening, usually after a short easy run along the fjord.
I sit with the uncomfortable thoughts.
What if the weather is terrible? What if I go out too fast in the first ten kilometres and pay for it in the final stages? What if the knee that has been slightly off for the past two weeks decides race day is the moment to make its objections fully known? What if I simply have a bad day — one of those days where the energy isn’t there, where the body and the mind are operating at a deficit for no identifiable reason, and there is nothing to do but move through it?
I don’t try to answer these questions with reassurance. I don’t tell myself it will all be fine. I try, instead, to fully imagine each scenario. To feel what it would feel like to be at kilometre 30 with dead legs and a pace that has slipped well outside what I planned. To feel the particular disappointment of a race that doesn’t go the way I hoped.
And then — and this is the essential step — I ask myself: and then what?
What would I do? How would I respond? What would it actually mean, in the long run, if this particular race went badly?
By the time I arrive at the start line, I have already run the bad version of the race in my head. And because I have run it, it no longer has the power to break me if it arrives.
The 5AM version
Premeditatio malorum doesn’t only apply to races. It applies, in a smaller and quieter way, to every morning.
I set my alarm for 5AM. Before I sleep, without making a drama of it, I run through what tomorrow might look like. It might be raining — it often is in Roskilde in the shoulder seasons, a particular kind of grey persistent Danish rain that isn’t heavy enough to feel dramatic but is thorough enough to soak through everything within the first kilometre. My legs might be tired from yesterday. I might wake up at 3AM for no reason and spend two hours half-sleeping, which means by 5 I am already running a deficit.
None of this is a reason not to go.
But having thought about it in advance, having already accepted the possibility, means that when the alarm goes off and the rain is audible on the window and the legs remember that yesterday was hard — none of it lands as a surprise. It is simply the conditions. I have already made my peace with the conditions, hours before I met them.
Seneca again, in a letter that reads like it was written last week rather than two millennia ago: “He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.”
That is the whole practice. Perceive the coming. Be already there. Then go.
What this is not
I want to be careful here, because premeditatio malorum is easy to misunderstand in a direction that makes it useless.
It is not a practice of expecting failure. It is not a way of lowering your ambitions so that disappointment can’t reach you. It is not the same as telling yourself you probably won’t have a good race so you won’t be too upset when you don’t.
The Stoics were not pessimists. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire. Seneca was one of the most ambitious and successful men of his age. Epictetus built a philosophical school from nothing. These were not people shrinking from life.
What they were doing was removing a specific and unnecessary source of suffering — the suffering of being ambushed by difficulty. The suffering that comes not from the difficulty itself but from the gap between what you expected and what arrived.
Close that gap in advance. Imagine the hard version. Make your peace with it.
Then go and run the best race you can.
The thing about the wall
Every long-distance runner knows about the wall. The point in a marathon — typically somewhere in the final ten kilometres — where the glycogen is gone and the body has to find another way forward, and for a while everything becomes significantly harder than it was. Some runners hit it dramatically. Some runners manage it into something more like a gradual dimming. Some runners, with careful pacing and nutrition, minimize it considerably.
But no serious marathon runner is surprised by it. You know the wall is there. You have thought about it. You have trained through versions of it on long runs. You have a plan for when it arrives, and you know the plan will probably need adjusting in real time, and you have a plan for that too.
That is premeditatio malorum in its most practical form. Not worry. Preparation. Not anxiety. Readiness.
The wall is not a crisis if you have already met it in your imagination.
The personal part
I am writing The Stoic Runner, and the further I get into it, the more I think this principle might be the most misunderstood of the ten. People hear “premeditate evil” and they think: what a grim way to live.
But the grim way to live, the Stoics would say, is to sleepwalk through your days assuming smoothness and then be devastated, repeatedly, when reality declines to cooperate. The grim way is to arrive at mile 20 and be ambushed by difficulty you could have anticipated. The grim way is to let the rain on the window at 5AM be the thing that keeps you in bed, because you hadn’t prepared yourself to meet it.
I run in Roskilde. I run in the dark. I run in the rain. I run on mornings when the body is complaining and the motivation is nowhere to be found.
None of this surprises me anymore.
That is the practice.
/Ole