Stoic running
Amor fati
There is a Latin phrase that has followed me for years, through good training blocks and bad ones, through races I’m proud of and races I’d rather forget. Amor fati. Love of fate. Not acceptance of fate — that’s a lower bar. Not tolerance of fate. Love.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who borrowed heavily from the Stoics even when he pretended not to, put it plainly: his ambition was not merely to endure what was necessary, but to love it. To see necessity not as a constraint but as the very substance of a good life.
I live in Roskilde. I run out of Roskilde most mornings at 5AM. And on many of those mornings, the conditions are doing their absolute best to make the case that I should have stayed in bed.
What the stoics actually meant
Marcus Aurelius didn’t use the phrase amor fati — that came later — but the idea is threaded through every page of his Meditations. What kept returning to him, in that private journal written by a man who had more power than almost anyone alive and used it to remind himself to be humble, was the insistence that the universe is not making mistakes.
What happens, happens as it must. The question is not whether you can change it. The question is what you do with your relationship to it.
Epictetus, as ever, was more direct. Born with nothing, owning nothing, he wrote with the confidence of someone who had already stress-tested the philosophy under real conditions: “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.”
This is not resignation. This is something much more radical. It is the decision to want what is actually happening — not a cleaned-up version of it, not the version where the weather cooperates and your legs feel fresh and everything goes to plan.
The actual version. The one you’re in.
The fjord in November
I know the route out of Roskilde well. The fjord in the early morning, the light — or the absence of it — the particular kind of cold that settles over the water in November and doesn’t lift. I have run this route in every condition it can produce. I have run it grateful and I have run it grimly and I have run it in a kind of blank automatic state where the kilometres pass without much being registered either way.
And then there are the mornings where something goes wrong.
A few months ago I set out for what should have been a straightforward long run. Within the first kilometre it was clear my body had other plans. The energy wasn’t there. The legs were heavy in a way that isn’t tiredness exactly — more like disconnection, like the signals aren’t quite reaching where they’re supposed to go. I turned around after forty minutes having planned for two hours.
The old response to a run like that was frustration. A vague sense of having failed, of lost fitness, of time wasted. A mental ledger that had just recorded a deficit.
The Stoic response — the one I am slowly, imperfectly learning — is different. Not “this is fine” in the passive, slightly defeated sense. But genuinely: this run is part of the training. Not a deviation from it. This is what the body needed to do today, and my job is not to override that with a plan I made last week in different circumstances.
Amor fati. Love the run you got, not the run you planned.
What this has to do with marathon running
Long distance running is, structurally, a series of things going wrong.
You train for months and get injured. You recover and lose fitness. You build back up and have a bad race. You have a good race and immediately start worrying it was a fluke. The marathon itself is essentially a controlled experiment in how many things can go slightly wrong simultaneously while you keep moving forward anyway.
The runner who needs everything to go right in order to have a good race is a fragile runner. And I have been that runner. I know what it feels like to arrive at the start line with a plan so detailed, so carefully constructed, that any deviation from it lands as a small catastrophe. A slower first kilometre. An unexpected hill. A gel that sits wrong at kilometre 28.
The Stoics would recognise this immediately as a failure of philosophy rather than a failure of training. You have placed your wellbeing inside the result rather than inside your response to whatever happens. And results, as Epictetus would tell you with some impatience, are not on your list.
What amor fati offers the long-distance runner is something more durable than a race plan. It is a relationship with uncertainty that doesn’t require uncertainty to resolve in your favour before you can be okay.
You love the rain. You love the heavy legs. You love the race that falls apart at mile 23, because that race is teaching you something the good race never could.
The personal part
I am 56. I have been running most of my life, and the further I get into it, the more I think the philosophy and the sport are not just compatible — they are, for some of us, the same practice expressed in two different languages.
The early morning run out along the Roskilde fjord is not a metaphor for anything. It is just a run. But it is also, every single morning, a small rehearsal in amor fati. Some mornings the rehearsal goes well. Some mornings I am a slow and reluctant student.
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world and still had to remind himself, daily, to love what was in front of him rather than what he wished was there instead.
If it was a practice for him, it can be a practice for me.
5AM. Whatever the fjord looks like this morning. That’s the run.
/Ole