60 kilometers in the dark

I have never cared much about celebrations.

Birthdays, New Year's Eve, most of these dates never carried much weight for me. As I got older, I also started associating a lot of them with the same routine. People get together because that is what you do, alcohol becomes a bigger part of the night as it goes on, and at some point you are participating in something without really knowing why.

New Year's Eve 2024 was one of those nights.

I had plans. I had been invited somewhere. There was nothing particularly wrong with any of it.

I just really did not want to go.

In the days before, I had spent more time alone than usual. Enough time to think about some things I had kept pushing away and some things I had wanted to do for a long time.

One of them was stupidly simple.

I wanted to start running and see how far I could get.

So that is what I did.

At around 8pm on New Year's Eve, I put on a running vest I had bought shortly before, filled it with water, electrolytes, some food and whatever else I thought I might need, put a lamp on my head and left.

I was not trained for an ultramarathon.

My equipment was not particularly good.

I had never done anything close to this before.

Naturally, I decided 100 kilometers sounded like a reasonable target.

There was something about that number. I wanted the three digits. No deeper explanation. It just felt like the number worth chasing.

I had told a few close friends what I was doing, but that was basically it. I did not post about it. I did not want people following along. I had actually chosen my route partly because I wanted to stay away from everything happening that night.

Most of it went through fields around my hometown.

It was foggy, cold and almost completely dark.

For large parts of the night, the only thing I could see was whatever happened to fall inside the beam of my headlamp.

And for the first few hours, it was honestly fine.

I had made a playlist I really liked. I am a big fan of SoundCloud, especially these edits where someone takes a speech or a conversation and puts music underneath it. Some of them can make you feel capable of pretty much anything for five minutes.

The first kilometers passed relatively easily.

The progress looked almost disappointing on the watch because the number I had in my head was still 100.

10.

11.

12.

There is something annoying about having a huge target because every early milestone feels small in comparison.

Still, I felt good.

Then somewhere around kilometer 30, my legs started shutting down.

Not dramatically. There was no single moment where something snapped.

They just became heavy.

My feet were harder to lift. My pace dropped. Movements that had felt automatic a few kilometers earlier suddenly required attention.

And the math in my head became worse.

I am at 30.

I already feel like this.

I still think I am doing 100.

That combination is extremely demotivating.

At first I tried the obvious things.

Music louder.

Drink something.

Eat something.

Stop for 30 seconds.

Start again.

None of it gave me the reset I wanted.

The pain did not disappear. It just became the new baseline.

At some point the music stopped helping too.

There is only so much you can distract yourself when every step hurts.

And eventually I did not want distraction anymore.

The night became very quiet.

No music.

No people.

No phone.

Just darkness, a small circle of light in front of me and whatever was going on inside my head.

Pain does something strange to your thoughts.

On one hand, I was thinking a lot. I was reflecting on things I had done, things I had not done, other moments where I had expected more from myself.

On the other hand, it was difficult to go particularly deep into any one thought because the body constantly pulled me back into the present.

Another step.

Another step.

Another step.

There was no escaping the moment because the moment physically hurt.

I hated it.

But there was also something about fully feeling it that made me want to stay there.

The marathon distance suddenly became important.

Earlier that evening, 42 kilometers would have felt like an intermediate checkpoint toward 100.

Now it felt like something I genuinely wanted to reach.

That was probably the first indication that my original plan had been bullshit.

I had underestimated what I was doing.

And I had definitely underestimated what doing it without training would feel like.

Still, I kept going.

Sometime after midnight, around kilometer 50, the calculation changed again.

It was no longer just pain.

I could tell that I was hurting myself.

There is a difference between something being extremely uncomfortable and realizing that continuing with the same goal is becoming stupid.

I eventually had to admit that 100 was not happening.

That was harder than the decision probably deserved to be.

The whole night had been built around that number.

But I also did not want to turn one bad estimate into an even worse decision just because I was too proud to change the plan.

So 100 disappeared.

For a moment there was no real target.

Then I thought, maybe ten more.

Around 55, it became 60.

Just get to 60.

I knew it was arbitrary.

But I wanted to finish at a point where the next morning I could look at the night without feeling like I had simply given up once the original plan fell apart.

The last few kilometers were probably the quietest.

My phone was nearly dead, so I stopped touching it. I had no music anymore. There was almost nobody outside where I was running.

It was New Year's Eve and I barely experienced New Year's Eve.

Somewhere else people were drinking, hugging, watching fireworks, counting backwards.

I was walking and running through dark fields with a lamp on my head, trying to get a number on a watch from the high fifties to 60.

Eventually it did.

60 kilometers.

And then basically nothing happened.

That might be the part I remember most.

No finish line.

No crowd.

No one cheering.

No music getting louder.

No person waiting to tell me that what I had just done was impressive.

The number was simply there.

60.

I reached it, and the world looked exactly the same.

I went home.

I sat down.

I charged my phone.

I answered New Year's messages from friends and family and gave a few updates to the people who knew what I had been doing.

I ate.

I watched something.

And suddenly the thing that had completely occupied my mind a few minutes earlier was already in the past.

I think we imagine achievement differently when we know it from the outside.

A marathon has a finish line.

People clap.

Someone puts something around your neck.

The whole environment tells you that something meaningful has just happened and gives you cues for how you are supposed to feel.

You should be relieved now.

You should be proud now.

You should celebrate now.

I had none of that.

And there was something useful about it.

Nobody would have cared if I stopped.

Nobody would have known if I had gone home at kilometer 35.

There was no social punishment for quitting and no social reward waiting at 60.

For most of the night, I was doing something that mattered exclusively because I had decided it mattered.

I think about that more than I think about the distance.

Doing things when nobody is watching.

Training when there is nothing to post.

Working on something nobody knows exists.

Keeping a promise that only you know you made.

Taking care of your body or your mind without turning it into part of how other people see you.

I am still trying to get better at that.

I also noticed something else after that night.

My reference point for difficulty changed.

Once you have been in a situation where your body was telling you for hours that it wanted to stop, it becomes harder to automatically believe the first signal telling you that something is difficult.

That does not mean every training session should become some stupid test of suffering.

If anything, that night also taught me the opposite.

I did not run 100 kilometers.

I stopped at 60 because eventually continuing would have been less about discipline and more about refusing to admit that I had made a bad decision.

There is a difference between stopping because something hurts and stopping because continuing no longer makes sense.

I am still figuring out that difference.

But the night left me with a reference point.

Not for how far I can run.

For what it feels like to choose something difficult, stay with it after the excitement disappears, and finish without anyone being there to tell you what the experience was supposed to mean.