Stoic running
Memento mori
There is a practice the Stoics recommended that would, by modern standards, be considered deeply morbid. Before sleeping, before a significant undertaking, sometimes simply in the middle of an ordinary day, they would pause and remind themselves of a single fact.
You are going to die.
Not as a provocation. Not as a source of dread. As a tool. A clarifying instrument, sharp enough to cut through the noise of complaint and hesitation and all the small reasons we find not to do the things that matter to us.
The Latin phrase is memento mori. Remember that you will die. And for two thousand years, it has been one of the most useful things anyone has ever said.
The skull on the desk
Marcus Aurelius returned to mortality more than almost any other theme in his Meditations. This is striking when you consider who he was — emperor of Rome, commander of armies, a man with every reason to believe in his own permanence and importance. And yet, page after page, he came back to the same reminder: you are not here for long. Neither is anyone else. Neither is any of this.
“Loss is nothing else but change,” he wrote, “and change is nature’s delight.”
Epictetus, coming from the opposite end of the social spectrum, arrived at the same place. If you have truly understood that everything can be taken from you at any moment — because he knew this from direct experience — then what you do with the time you have takes on a completely different quality. Not urgency exactly. Something quieter than urgency. Intentionality.
The Stoics kept physical reminders of death nearby. A skull on the desk. A ring engraved with a death’s head. Not out of morbidity but out of discipline. The reminder was the practice.
I don’t keep a skull on my desk. But I do run at 5AM.
What 56 feels like at kilometre eight
I am not going to pretend that mortality is abstract to me. I am 56 years old. I have been running most of my life, and my body is not the same body that ran its first marathon. The recovery takes longer. There are mornings where something aches that didn’t used to ache. The pace I once considered comfortable has shifted, quietly and without asking my permission, into something that requires a bit more negotiation.
This could be depressing. For a while, at certain points in my running life, it was.
The Stoic reframe — and I use that word carefully, because it’s not a trick or a positive-thinking exercise, it’s something harder and more honest than that — is this: the body changing is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition under which you are running. You are running a mortal body through a finite number of mornings, and the fact that the number is finite is not a reason to stop. It is the reason to go.
Out along the Roskilde fjord at 5AM, in the dark, there is a particular quality to the silence that I have come to need. The town is asleep. The water is still or it isn’t. The cold is there or it isn’t. And for an hour, sometimes more, I am simply a person moving through the world while most of the world is not yet awake.
Memento mori doesn’t arrive as a dramatic thought on these mornings. It arrives as something quieter. A low awareness that this — exactly this, this specific dark morning, this specific body at this specific age — is not repeatable. I will not run this morning again. I will run tomorrow morning, if I am lucky, but it will be a different morning.
That is not sad. That is the whole point.
The runner who waits for the right conditions
I have known runners who stopped. Not because of injury, not because of circumstance, but because somewhere the calculation shifted and the reasons not to run began to outweigh the reasons to run. Too tired. Too busy. Too old. The weather too unreliable, the body too uncooperative, the results too underwhelming to justify the effort.
I understand this. I am not judging it. But I think the Stoics would identify what’s happening there quite precisely: a failure to remember that the time is limited. When you truly absorb memento mori — not as a slogan but as a lived awareness — the question “should I bother today?” changes character entirely.
Of course you should bother. You have a finite number of mornings. This is one of them.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Confine yourself to the present.” Not to yesterday’s run or tomorrow’s race. This morning. This kilometre. This breath.
The runner who is waiting for ideal conditions, for the motivation to feel right, for the body to cooperate fully — that runner is spending their finite mornings on something other than running. The Stoic runner goes anyway. Not heroically. Just consistently.
What the practice actually looks like
I am not suggesting you think about death every morning before you put your shoes on. That would be exhausting and also slightly alarming to anyone you live with.
What I am suggesting — what the Stoics were suggesting, in their more rigorous and demanding way — is a quiet background awareness that resources are limited. Time is limited. The body is on loan.
Some mornings I run well and some mornings I don’t. Some mornings the fjord is extraordinary and some mornings it’s just a dark path next to cold water. But I have never finished a run and wished I hadn’t gone. The Stoics would recognise that asymmetry immediately.
The regret runs in one direction only.
I’m writing a book called The Stoic Runner. The further I get into it, the more I think memento mori might be the most important principle of the ten — not because death is the point, but because the awareness of it is what makes the 5AM alarm worth answering.
You are going to die.
Now go for a run.
/Ole