How Being a Runner Has Hurt My Mental Health

The dark side of being competitive and ambitious

The consensus across pop psychology and health articles on the Internet is that running is good for your mental health. Dr. Poonam Sachdev says that running produces endorphins and serotonin, which improves mood, and that regular running at a easy to moderate effort can improve your mental health and memory.

I am a marathon runner who has qualified for the Boston Marathon in 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. I have personal records of 74 minutes in a half marathon and 2:39 in the marathon. But I have run track and cross country since I was twelve years old, in high school and college. I have a personal record of 15:36 in the 5k and I ran a 4:36 in the mile.

I don’t list my resume of running personal records to show how good I am. I list them because I have run times that any recreational runner or marathoner would love to have, and in my head, I still think I suck and have only achieved a fraction of my potential. When I list my running “accomplishments,” I feel like a failure.

For most of my life, I have not run because it was good for my mental health. I didn’t always run because it was fun. For most of my life, I ran because I wanted to be good. I wanted to win. A personal record of running faster than I ever had was one of the best feelings in the world — it made me feel like I leveled up and transcended who I was before.

I have seen mental health benefits from running and gained more than I could have possibly imagined in doing so. Through running, I found lifelong friends and have best friends I would not have otherwise. I used to have social anxiety and running and being around runners in these competitive cross-country and track teams greatly aided in my social skills and simply feeling significantly less lonely.

I like to think I’ve been a part of that community for others. Any time I sour from running and take time off, I go back, reminding myself of the community that running has given me and how it’s just a part of my life and who I am. I also realize I drink more alcohol and have less healthy eating habits and sleep when I don’t run, so running is also a safeguard against my addictive personality and vices. I don’t know where my life would have led if I hadn’t become a runner, and I don’t like to think about it.

But it hasn’t been all positive. I think there is a dark side to being a runner, particularly being a competitive runner. I think I speak for a lot of runners when I say that some of the worst feelings of my life have come on days where I had bad races and underperformed, whether it was running a 5k, mile race, 10k, or marathon.

When I first started running, I had no expectations and was just happy to have finished. As I got more and more ambitious and had more lofty goals (with pressure from my teammates and coaches, but above all, myself), running a bad race would completely ruin my day. I would not stop thinking about it. It wouldn’t just ruin my whole day — it would ruin my whole week. My teammates often felt the same way.

I had parents who never came to a single track or cross country meet and just didn’t understand why I would care about running so much at the expense of my academics. And that was a gift in terms of running, because they never pressured me into doing it, and they would be supportive the best they knew how, but I never wanted to inconvenience them.

But I had teammates whose parents went to every one of their meets and lived vicariously through their sons’ performances. I would, like anyone else, give these teammates space with their parents when they had a bad race or did not perform like they wanted.

But I would overhear the conversation when walking past and feel incredibly bad for my friends, with the most emasculating expletives (unsayable in 2024 on the Internet) in the book hurled at a bad performance. These were the friends who eventually burned out of running and felt freed when they finally had the opportunity to never do it again, and I couldn’t blame them. I started running because I wanted to. They became runners because their parents wanted them to.

Also, all the coaches I had would usually do one of two things: once in a while, they would get mad at you for running poorly and let you know about it before focusing on the other parts of the meet. But that would not be long — for the most part, coaches would try to give us space and leave us alone.

They would give more attention to the athletes who did do well, and who can blame them? What was there to say? What could anyone say to console us when we were so despondent at feeling like complete failures? We trained for months for this race, only to underperform when it mattered, and no one could be more self-critical of me than I was myself.

We often wouldn’t want to talk to anyone, and usually, it would have to be a peer who also ran poorly talking about anything other than running who could reach us in those moments. We would often try to be encouraging and genuinely be happy with our friends who had great days, and of course, when we were younger, we would sometimes get jealous, but they were still our teammates and friends at the end of the day.

Since then, I’ve developed a much healthier relationship with running. I still race, like to be competitive, and work hard and just skip running a lot of days I don’t feel like it. I still get down and catastrophize when I have a bad race, but I have a much better mindset now. A bad race is just a bad race. There’s nothing you can do to change it after it happens, and dwelling on it isn’t going to do anything. Plus, there’s a next one and a next one. Learn from mistakes you made or things you could have done differently, but then the next one is more important.

I eventually got to the point where I was as happy for the success of my friends and teammates as I was for myself, because these were my best friends and my brothers. They knew more about me personally than any other people in the world. I was never in the military, but in all the times I considered joining the military, this camaraderie, brotherhood, and unity were what I dreamed of, and I got that through a group of people that meant much more to me than just running.

I also learned that running is just running. I learned there were many more important things in life, including friends, family, and faith. I learned not to read so much into it. I learned to just shake off a bad day because it was just that: a bad day.

Although I have this healthier relationship now, running has not always been good for my mental health, nor has it always been great for the mental health of my teammates, friends, and peers.

Here are all the reasons why.

The dark side of being competitive and ambitious

I have countless friends who stopped running in high school and lived much happier and less stressful lives as a result. I have countless friends who stopped running after college and have no intentions of ever going back to that same level of intensity they used to have with the sport. They seem happier, more balanced, more relaxed, and like they have just moved on with their relationship with running. They might still do it recreationally and stay in shape, but they aren’t trying to chase 4 minute miles or 14 minute 5ks like they used to.

A friend told me an anecdote about being a Division I collegiate runner at a pretty competitive school. He had friends who ran 14:10 in the 5k, and just kept running 14:10 after 14:10. Normal people would be ecstatic to run 14:10, which is around 4:32 mile pace. I would be ecstatic to run 14:10.

But these guys who just kept running 14:10 over and over again were miserable. They felt like they were slow compared to the cream of the crop in Division I running. They felt like they could have and should have done much better, and it was true that there are people who run under 13:30 and now even under 13 minutes in college.

When you’re competing at that level, your self-worth is not tied to just “doing your best.” Your results do matter and it sometimes feels like they’re all that matter. You want to dream, and you hold yourself to the goal and standard of the dream. If we’re super competitive runners who all one day wanted to make the Olympics but fell well short of that, we don’t want to just give up on the dream because it’s not working out. As runners, we can be delusional, but it’s that delusion that sometimes propels us to feats beyond what we’ve done before.

The worst part is not even when you get worse — you can attribute that to injury, illness, or just being turned off the sport.

The worst feeling is when you try really hard, sacrifice hours of your day every day and completely drain yourself of energy for other tasks to just run the same times or slightly worse times. It’s the plateau that hurts the most.

For two and a half years, I have not broken 2:39 in the marathon. I have put in weeks where I ran 80 to 100 miles, only to not make any improvements in my personal record in the race I cared most about. I have put in months of over 300 miles and prioritized running over more objectively important life challenges, like law school. It’s not the pressure that hurts you as much as the disappointment.

It’s a real-life disappointment that everyone goes through — why am I stuck? Why can’t I make any improvement? Why can all these other people make improvements and I’m just in the same place? Why was I in the exact same, if not better shape than all these people three months ago and suddenly I’m stagnant? What’s the point of putting in all this effort just to stay the same?

We all know these are not healthy mindsets in any other context. But I know this on an intellectual level and still feel it anyway. I can’t just reject my feelings and internalizations. I can move on to some other thing and recalibrate to focus on other parts of my life, but I still think I’m a complete failure for the whole hour after my race, like I did a lot of things wrong like I’m wrong or dysfunctional because I could not run a personal best and faltered well short of my dreamer expectations.

When I had bad days, I used to call myself every curse word in the book. Having worked so hard to not see results is something everyone goes through in a plethora of other fields. But learning to shake it off was incredibly difficult, and it’s often not just one bad race you go through throughout your career. The incredible lows of bad races happen over and over again.

Over the years, I learned to approach running with more of a growth mindset. But the competitive aspect has led friends with 5k PRs in the 14 minutes, time and time again, to express how much of a weight it was off their shoulders when they finally stopped running competitively. I still run competitively, but most of my teammates and friends relished finally being able to explore the rest of life and not take it so seriously anymore.

There’s a certain fun in dreaming and doing your absolute best to hit your dream. But they say that happiness is when there’s a gap between reality and expectation. When you’re a competitive runner with super high standards, you’re generally just not happy because your expectations are super high and reality will not always meet up to those expectations.

Injury depression

In my sophomore year of college, I missed three months of running due to a torn labrum in my hip. I was incredibly angry. I had done my best training in my life up to that point. I had an incredibly promising summer of training and wanted to be a major contributor and scorer on my team.

The hard part about being injured when you’re on a competitive running team is because you can’t do what everyone else is doing. When all your friends are racing and running cross-country meets, all you can do is watch. When all your friends are running 20-mile-long runs, you’re relegated to cross training.

For those that don’t know, cross training is engaging in different types of (mostly cardiovascular) exercise that can keep you in shape while you’re injured. This can involve swimming, aqua jogging, being on the bike, and being on the elliptical.

There are two awful parts about cross training that you don’t experience when you’re healthy and running. The first is that most of the time, you’re alone. You don’t have any friends around you to help the experience go by faster unless you have people with you. An hour of swimming can drag on like half a day. I tried this a few times, but I can barely swim, and my haphazard above-the-water freestyle or backstroke didn’t feel like it was benefitting my aerobic fitness much as much as I felt like I was just trying not to drown.

The second terrible part about cross training is that it takes a significantly longer time and a much higher level of effort to get the same fitness benefit in cross training. I burned 2,500 calories the last time I ran 22 miles in two and a half hours. It was easy. When I was on the elliptical, I would be going as I possibly could to get that same benefit. I went so hard on the elliptical that the machine started smoking and another gymgoer complained to the front desk attendant that the noise I was making and the intensity I was going at was disrupting the whole gym.

I wasn’t going that hard just to get the fitness benefit. At that point in time, I had no clue when I was going to be healthy again. I was seeing trainers, chiropractors, and physical therapists. There was a chance I would never be healthy again and quit running altogether. I was just incredibly angry and going that hard on the elliptical was a means of taking the anger out on the machine.

Almost every runner goes through at least one major injury or major health problem. Some go through eating disorders. Others have constant stress fractures. I had a friend who was so talented he ran a 4:08 mile off three seasons of healthy training. However, he had a stress fracture for the vast majority of the rest of his college career. He was supposed to run a fifth year of being a collegiate runner but chose to forego it altogether due to not being able to take the constant injuries, physical therapy, rehab, cross training, and the feeling of never being able to be healthy again.

It’s no secret that being injured as an athlete sucks. But most people just don’t know the mental process and thought processes that happen when you’re injured. When a lot of your identity is tied to being an athlete, the loss of identity can be very existential.

The energy expenditure

Unlike other sports like football, soccer, and basketball, you can’t practice all day because you can’t run all day. Your body breaks down. On days I do long runs, the longest I run is about three hours, and that’s if I’m running 22–24 miles. Depending on how fast you’re running, it can take just as long if not longer.

As such, running is not a time-consuming sport or activity compared to other sports. You can balance being a runner with a lot of other commitments. Most competitive runners who felt disillusioned were obviously very focused, intense, and committed people and were able to commit that same intensity to other pursuits.

Undoubtedly, the lessons we learned from running and the discipline and systems we developed to, for example, shaving 10 seconds off our 5k personal bests, apply very broadly to a lot of areas of life. Some of these lessons include getting enough sleep, making sure you have good nutrition, pacing yourself, and putting in consistent, steady, and gradual amounts of effort instead of behemoth bouts of procrastination. These are the lessons we learn about how to get better at running, and although we don’t always follow these lessons, they do apply broadly to everything else.

However, it’s not the time commitment of running as much as the energy commitment that completely ruins your day and hurts your mental health. I would do 20-mile long runs at 7 a.m. in the morning and then have to go through the whole day of other commitments, including studying, clubs, and working my part-time job in college to pay my tuition. Throughout it all, I could barely stay awake. In other instances, I would run eight miles at 5:35–5:40 mile pace and then barely be able to focus through physics or chemistry labs.

As a post-collegiate runner, this manifests itself very similarly, but I handle it a lot better. If I have a hard workout or long run on the schedule, I have to segment my day to have more periods of rest and possibly a nap. If it’s during a work day, I have to plan these hard and high mileage sessions on low-intensity work days where I can function at 60% peak mental capacity and productivity. If I have super urgent meetings or an exam, it’s just not wise to do this.

It’s hard to game plan this perfectly every time. It’s hard to reconcile your dreams as a runner with the rest of real life. The reality is there are so many of us who are in the middle — not hobby joggers, not Olympian professional athletes, but people in the middle who have jobs, and families, but still want to pursue this dream because it’s a personal goal and something we want to do for ourselves.

Like all things, running isn’t all good or all bad. Anyone who has been running as long as I have is bound to have a somewhat complicated relationship with it.

There are problems other runners have with their mental health that I didn’t struggle through. I never struggled with obsession about my weight or with an eating disorder. But a lot of runners do struggle with eating disorders, thinking it can make them faster or just being extremely conscious of body image or body dysmorphia. I won’t tell any specific details, but this was a very common problem in my running teams, mostly among some female athletes but in some male athletes too.

A lot of these harms of running don’t come from the medical and health research, but the competitive aspect of any sport where athletes put a ton of pressure on themselves. It can happen in any sport where so much of your identity is tied to the sport.

It’s so easy to say “don’t tie your identity to being a runner/athlete,” but it’s much, much easier said than done. Of course, when it’s going well, you feel like you’re on top of the world and it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your life. It’s a rush that I’m constantly chasing that I didn’t feel in any other moment — when I got a raise when I got into college when I got a half scholarship to get into law school. Any runner can tell you that running a personal best or winning a race is, sometimes, the best you’ll ever feel.

But when it’s bad, when you plateau, get worse, or get injured, it can be the worst you’ll ever feel. And that’s something we learn not to feel or take seriously over time.

I sometimes wince when people present running as a unilaterally positive activity because like anything, it’s best when in moderation and not as intense as people like me take it.

Like anything, running is something where we have a love-hate relationship, particularly in relation to mental health. It’s not all good and not all bad, but I think it’s important for people to see the bad.

I know everyone has a different experience and relationship with running. But if one person out there can not make the mistakes I made in how seriously I took the sport, that would be a greater accomplishment than any personal best or win.