on running for nothing

i went to dhaka to run a half marathon in january 2023. i had to take a day off from tutoring. that's how my students first found out i was running races. i was twenty-four, training in secret for three months, and the bangabandhu international marathon was the first time anyone outside my family knew about it.

when i came back, a few of them asked to see the medal. i showed it to them. one of them looked at it and said it was useless — that it couldn't get me a job or any money. some of the others wondered the same thing more politely: why spend the money? why spend the time? what's the point of a 21-kilometer run that pays nothing? don't you feel embarrassed running on an open road?

i didn't reply. i remember him — i remember all of them — to this day.

this wasn't the only time i'd be asked some version of this question. it became a recurring pattern in my life.

the question assumes that time and money are valuable only insofar as they convert into career-shaped outcomes. it's not a stupid premise. in bangladesh, where economic security is fragile for most families and the gap between a good job and a bad one can decide whether your parents ever rest, it's a survival heuristic. you don't waste resources on things that don't ladder up. that's how you survive.

but it's a heuristic, not a truth. and at some point — usually somewhere between food on the table and the third smartphone — it stops protecting you and starts narrowing you. you become someone who can only do things that pay. who can only enjoy things that produce. for whom the question "what's the point?" has exactly one acceptable answer: money or status.

i don't care about the medal. it's a piece of metal on a ribbon — looks nice if it's well-made, but that's about it. i've won seventeen of them as of now and it wouldn't break my heart not to have received them.

what the medal is, is a receipt. it's proof that on a particular morning, in a particular city, i went outside and ran twenty-one kilometers. or forty-two. or fifty-two with a damaged knee, walking the last twenty-six with a stick. the medal isn't the value. the doing is the value. the medal is just how i prove it happened.

people who think the medal is the point have already missed it.

i don't run for fitness. fitness happens alongside.

the truth is i think marathons are extremely hard. and when something is that hard, i want to know if i can do it. that's the whole reason. not health. not status. not even the idea that hard things build character. just — this thing looks impossible. let me find out.

everything doesn't need to have a worldly meaning. some things are worth doing because they're hard and you wanted to see.

paul graham wrote an essay called the bus ticket theory of genius. his argument is that the sign of someone who's going to do real work is that they care about something obsessively, without any career outcome in mind, just because the thing itself is interesting to them. he was writing about scientists and writers, but the frame generalizes.

i'm not a genius. but i recognize the pattern. the people who do significant things — in any field — almost always started by doing some version of that thing for free, badly, in private, when nobody was watching and there was no medal at the end. running ultras isn't significant work. but the capacity to do hard things without an outcome is, i think, the same capacity that lets people eventually do significant work. you build the muscle by using it.

i'd rather have that muscle than not.

i didn't tell my students any of this. it would have come out wrong, or angry, or superior — and i didn't want to argue with kids who were honestly asking, in the only language they had, the question their whole environment had taught them was the right one to ask.

but the page they saw the medal on — the page where the running lives, the log of every race i've finished and the ones i didn't — that's all i had to say. they can read this if they want. or not.