Why Running? Why Stoicism?

Art + Athleticism Come Together

A General Painting of Everything (2019) This 2019 painting of mine is accurate to running and art: they are everything.

Aside from health, why run? It’s a big time commitment; it’s frequently painful; and it will never make most of us any money. Building on last week’s creativity and running newsletter, here are four more reasons I run; let me know your reasons in the comments!

I run because running is dance.

It’s an art form, whether you've ever thought of it that way or not. Dance is movement, and sports are just movements made inside some basic rules (except cricket. There is nothing basic about cricket rules). 

Movement feeds our souls. I think we all learned that during the pandemic, when, suddenly, we couldn’t dance or play sports or do any movement outside our houses, much less in groups, together. A lot of us were surprised at how much we missed having the option to do those things: just to move, to dance, to run; just to feel the joy of your body in the air and on the earth.

I run because running is poetry.

Running’s got a rhythm to it, a logic to it that is sometimes metered and sometimes scattered. It can change within itself; it can be perfectly even. It can rhyme and flow; it can not rhyme and still flow. It can be super obvious and embarrassing, or deeply boring and over-intellectualized. Running is poetry; running is art; it's sometimes good, and it's sometimes bad. But the risk is worth the reward.

I run because running is hard.

Which is sort of bananas, right? But so is the technical execution of art. Writing a piece or setting up a photograph correctly requires a lot of concentration and effort. Despite the popular reputation of art as something that’s entirely emotional and spontaneous, making artwork is usually more like a grinding out a milage run than it is like a party: there are many tedious details to see through before an artist actually accomplishes the work they set out to make. But in the end, if you’re lucky, you do accomplish that mileage goal or make the artwork you wanted to make. So yeah, I run because it’s hard. 

I run because running makes me kind.

Like, I literally feel the capacity to be kinder after I run than I did before. It's almost like running, for me, creates the space and time it takes to be kinder and hyper observant, which are two key elements to my artist practice. I’m not interested in being an asshole artist, and hurrying is not conducive to creativity. 

A small example: When I’m stretching after I run I’ll see ants or a roll-y poll-y bugs on the ground and I’ll think “oh I don’t want to hurt them!” And I’ll be really careful to let them pass by me unscathed and to make it to whatever point of interest they seem to be going towards. I consider the lives of the insects and think about their perspective, instead of taking my normal stance, which is to overlook them. Running does that for me. 

The grind of tasks and productivity and demands somehow drains this kindness and observational ability from me, or maybe denying myself those things just makes life actually navigable. But for a few minutes after I run, I am that intentional person; I do see life in that high fidelity. To be a stoic and to make art well, that sort of high-fidelity patience is required. 

Living between the “bad at sports” art trope…and the “I don’t get it” jock trope.

All of those are nice reasons to run, if they speak to you. But they’re not exactly what one might find common reasons. Generally in the United States, the cultural reciprocity between sports and art is strained or nonexistent, so for decades I have carefully separated my Sports Self and my Art Self. I even separated my Design Self and my Art Self, because design, like sports, has practical points that are easy to understand and navigate, like fitness and equipment. Art, on the other hand…well, art is weird. People who like art pride themselves on being counter-culture and people who don’t like art are repelled by that pride and sometimes by the art itself, because it’s self-consciously counter-culture. 

People, especially kids, divide themselves into Jocks and Artists and assiduously maintain distance throughout their lives. They are not friends: they don’t chat at the lockers or around water coolers on Monday mornings; they don’t go to each other’s parties on Saturday nights.

People who live between these groups, like I do, end up hiding their competing interests from each group in order to fit in. Like I said, I did that for decades. But the thing is, people are smart; they know when you don’t quite fit; they can feel it. So neither I nor the people in those groups ever quite believed I belonged.  

Stoic Running is my attempt to show that these two interests, athleticism and art, actually can and do work together. In this project, I’m trying to bring these groups closer to each other. I know I’ll never quite fit, but I also know I’m not the only artist-athlete in the world. Running is one of my art mediums, like painting or photography is for other artists. I see the world in running, I express my emotions through it; I create new energy and perspective using it. Art is Running. Running is art. The rest is just social pressure. 

That’s all for this week. If you want to share why you run, please do so in the comments! Hashtag it #IRunBecause to make it easy to see. See you all next week on IG and YouTube; please follow me on those platforms so you never miss a post. Thanks for going on this journey with me, and for today, remember: go run.