Stoic Running
Dichotomy of control

There is a moment in every long race — and if you’ve run enough of them, you know exactly which moment I mean — where the plan stops working. The pace you carefully calculated over weeks of training, the nutrition strategy, the splits you rehearsed in your head on a hundred early morning runs. All of it quietly dissolves somewhere around mile 20, and you are left with something much more fundamental than a race plan.

You are left with a choice.

That choice — and more precisely, what you do with it — is where Stoic philosophy and long-distance running meet in a way that I find more useful than almost any training programme I’ve ever followed.

Epictetus didn’t have a GPS Watch

Epictetus was born into slavery in ancient Rome, around 50 AD. He had no freedom of movement, no control over his circumstances, and by some accounts suffered a permanent physical disability after his master broke his leg. What he developed instead — out of necessity as much as philosophy — was one of the most practical mental frameworks ever articulated.

He called it the dichotomy of control, and it begins with a single, almost ruthlessly simple distinction: some things are up to us, and some things are not.

“Make the best use of what is in your power,” he wrote, “and take the rest as it happens.”

For Epictetus, what was up to us was a surprisingly short list: our judgements, our intentions, our desires, our responses. Everything else — the opinions of others, the weather, the body we were born into, the circumstances we find ourselves in — belonged to a different category entirely. Not ours. Not our responsibility. Not worth our anxiety.

I think about this a lot at 5 in the morning, running through Roskilde in the dark, when the wind is coming off the water and my legs haven’t fully woken up yet.

What the weather has to do with it

I am not a fast runner. I want to be clear about that, because it matters for what follows. I am not someone who races for podiums or age-group prizes. I am someone who has run consistently for decades, through injury and bad form and worse weather, because somewhere along the way I stopped measuring myself by pace and started measuring myself by something else entirely.

What I cannot control on any given morning is considerable. The temperature. Whether my sleep was good. The state of my tendons. Whether the path is icy. Whether the music I planned to run to somehow feels completely wrong for my mood. Whether my body decides, for reasons known only to itself, that today is not a day for easy kilometres.

What I can control is whether I put my shoes on.

That sounds reductive. It isn’t. The Stoics understood — and Marcus Aurelius returned to this theme again and again in his Meditations — that the place where character is actually formed is not in the grand gestures but in the small, repeated decisions that nobody sees. The emperor of Rome, writing to himself by candlelight, not for publication but for practice, reminded himself daily that difficulty was not an obstacle to the good life. It was the material from which the good life was made.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

A bad run is not a deviation from the training. It is the training.

Premeditatio and the long run

There is a related Stoic practice that I find particularly useful in preparation for long races. The Romans called it premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of evils. Before a significant event, you deliberately imagine everything that could go wrong. Not to catastrophise, but to prepare. Not to worry, but to rehearse your response.

Before a marathon, I sit with the uncomfortable thoughts. What if it rains? What if my knee starts hurting at kilometre 25? What if I go out too fast and pay for it in the final ten kilometres? What if — and this is the one that used to frighten me most — I simply have a bad day for no reason at all?

The Stoic answer to all of these is the same: fine. Let it happen. Your response is yours. The race is not.

This isn’t pessimism. It’s the opposite. By removing the illusion that a good result is guaranteed if you’ve trained hard enough, you free yourself from a particular kind of suffering — the suffering of the runner who has done everything right and still hits the wall at mile 20 and experiences it as a personal failure. The wall is not a failure. The wall is part of the course.

The personal part

I host a Danish podcast about running. I’m writing a book called The Stoic Runner. And every morning at 5AM, before Roskilde wakes up, I go out and practice what I am slowly learning to articulate.

What I have found, over years of early mornings and long kilometres, is that the dichotomy of control is not primarily a philosophy for race day. It is a philosophy for the Tuesday morning in November when it is raining and dark and there is no medal at the end and nobody will ever know whether you went or stayed in bed.

Those are the mornings that matter. Those are the mornings where you either build something or you don’t.

Epictetus would have understood. He spent his whole life proving that what you own — truly own — has nothing to do with your circumstances. Marcus Aurelius ruled an empire and still had to remind himself, every single day, that the only territory worth governing was the one between his ears.

I just run. But I think they were talking about the same thing.

/Ole