There’s a moment, usually around kilometer three, when my mind stops lying to me.
Some days this feels like relief—my breathing settles, my legs find their groove, and the city opens up around me like it’s been waiting. Other times, it hits like a slap. My lungs are screaming, my legs feel like someone filled them with wet sand, and suddenly every emotion I’ve been stuffing down comes bubbling up with each footfall.
Whether it feels like coming home or getting mugged, running strips away every mask I wear in my day-to-day life. It’s the most freeing and most terrifying thing I do, sometimes within the same ten-minute stretch.
This wasn’t always the case. Growing up, my body was just a vehicle for motion—dance classes, boxing sessions, lifting weights, or simply being outside until the streetlights came on. Moving felt as automatic as breathing. I didn’t analyze it, track it, or worry about what it meant. It just was.
Then I moved to Berlin at twenty-one, and everything I thought I knew about myself crumbled like old concrete.
Without the structure I’d built my identity around, I fell apart in the most predictable ways. Evening walks turned into chain-smoking sessions on my balcony. The endorphin highs I used to chase got replaced by whatever was in the bottle that night. My body went from being my ally to something I actively neglected, dragging my mental health down with it.
The Recovery Trap
My comeback wasn’t pretty. I attacked weightlifting like I was trying to excavate the person I used to be, six days a week, thirty pounds lighter within months. The gym became my church, my therapy session, my proof that I could still do hard things.
For a while, it worked exactly like I needed it to.
I found a space where I could sit with my thoughts without immediately reaching for cigarettes or something stronger. The binge eating that had crept in during my spiral just… stopped. I was cooking my own meals, sleeping better, feeling more like myself than I had in years. My mental health stabilized. My body felt strong again.
What nobody warned me about recovery was how uncomfortable it makes other people when you change too much, too fast.
„You’ve lost enough weight—be careful not to go too far.“
„Your life seems so restricted now.“
„You don’t have to be so strict with everything.”
“You’re still young. You should enjoy life.“
Each comment was like a tiny splinter working its way under my skin. I started second-guessing myself. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was taking it too far. Maybe I should loosen up a little.
The final straw was quitting smoking—the last thread connecting me to my old, destructive patterns. I thought it would be liberating. Instead, everything I’d rebuilt came apart.
Fighting nicotine cravings while trying to maintain the approval of people around me, I started making compromises. A few more snacks here and there. Less rigid meal planning. More flexibility with my „rules.“ The weight crept back slowly, and with it came the familiar decline in my mental health as my body started feeling worse again. The voice in my head returned, keeping meticulous score of every calorie, every rep, every minute on the treadmill.
Exercise as Currency
I started bargaining with my workouts again: train for forty minutes so I could have a proper meal. If I wanted dinner out with friends, I needed to get an extra sweaty session in beforehand. Track every step so I could justify eating without guilt. Exercise became currency instead of joy. The binge episodes came back and made my mental spirals even worse.
For a while, every workout felt like a transaction. My worth got tangled up in numbers—pace per kilometer, pounds on the scale, workouts completed. I wasn’t quite tracking every macro or calculating pizza against miles, but the mental math was always there.
The gym stopped being about strength or joy and became about forcing my body into a shape that felt acceptable to the world around me.
But endurance training has this way of demanding something deeper than vanity metrics. You can’t fake your way through a twenty-kilometer run. You can’t charm your way up a hill repeat. Marathon training teaches patience in ways that no six-week transformation program ever could.
Slowly, without me really noticing, running started showing me what my body could do beyond how it looked. It pushed boundaries I didn’t know existed, broke me down completely, then helped me rebuild something stronger and more honest.
The healing wasn’t linear. It still isn’t. Even now, as I’m learning to appreciate what my body can accomplish, the binge episodes still creep in sometimes. It’s confusing to hold both realities at once—finding strength and purpose in movement while still sometimes falling back into old patterns.
New Rules, Same Game
Here’s what I learned about escaping one trap: you usually just walk into a different one.
The commentary around my body didn’t stop—it just shifted focus. First came the „you’re getting too small“ observations when I lost weight. Then, as I started running more seriously, the training police arrived: „you’re exercising too much,“ „don’t you know what rest days are for,“ „running this much can’t be healthy for your joints.“
Suddenly it wasn’t enough to look a certain way and eat the right foods. I also had to train the right amount, recover according to someone else’s schedule, and set goals that fit other people’s definition of „balanced.“
Society has opinions about your training frequency. Friends have thoughts about your race times. Even fitness brands want to tell you how often you should rest. Train hard and you’re obsessive. Take breaks and you’re lazy. Fuel properly and you’re indulgent. Restrict anything and you’re disordered.
The rules are designed so you can’t win.
Digital Distortion
This constant judgment gets turbo-charged in our digital world, where every run gets documented and every breakthrough gets shared.
Don’t get me wrong—social media has created incredible connections within the running community. Seeing someone push through a rainy morning run at 6 AM can light a fire under you when your bed feels too comfortable. Sharing your own victories, small and large, can feel genuinely celebratory. There’s real belonging in these global networks of people who understand why you’d voluntarily get up before dawn to run in circles.
But the same platforms that connect us also amplify comparison in toxic ways.
Strava gives you kudos for your personal best, not for the recovery jog that made it possible. Instagram shows finish-line euphoria, not the mental breakdown on your kitchen floor at 2 AM when the training felt impossible. The highlight reel becomes the measuring stick, and it’s easy to forget that everyone else is also fighting battles you’ll never see.
Living in the Middle
I’d be lying if I said I’d figured it all out.
My relationship with my body is still complicated most days. I still catch myself categorizing foods as „good“ or „bad“—not based on how they make me feel like, but according to old, harmful patterns that are harder to shake than I want to admit. The binge episodes still happen sometimes, usually when I’m stressed or tired or just overwhelmed by the constant mental math of trying to be healthy without being labeled as obsessive.
The neural pathways carved by years of disordered thinking don’t just disappear because you’ve found better coping mechanisms. Recovery isn’t a destination you reach and then get to stay at forever. It’s more like a direction you keep choosing, over and over, especially when it’s hard.
And here’s what running gives me that no diet plan or gym mirror ever could: a place where I can acknowledge all these contradictions—the doubt, the pressure, the ongoing struggle—and still come out feeling more whole than when I started.
It’s about learning to hold control and surrender at the same time. To push hard without punishing. To care about performance without letting it define everything.
The Only Rules That Matter
Endurance sports exist in constant paradox. They liberate you and trap you. They build confidence while creating new anxieties. Social media amplifies both the community and the comparison. These tensions aren’t problems to solve—they’re just realities to navigate with as much honesty as you can manage.
What I’ve learned, slowly and with plenty of backsliding, is that none of us are here to meet external expectations about how we should move, how fast we should improve, or what our bodies should look like in the process.
You don’t owe anyone explanations for your pace. You don’t need to prove that you’re getting better fast enough. You don’t have to justify your goals or defend your methods or make your training make sense to people who don’t do it.
The only obligation you have is to yourself: to move in ways that feel authentic and life-giving, even or especially when that looks different from what everyone else thinks you should be doing.
If you’ve ever felt caught between loving your sport and resenting the pressure that comes with it, that tension doesn’t make you broken or weak or wrong. It makes you human.
And you’re definitely not navigating it alone.
Schreibe einen Kommentar