There’s a curious phenomenon that occurs deep into an endurance run. Time begins to warp. Minutes stretch like taffy, yet hours somehow compress into moments of suspended reality. Your watch continues its mechanical march, but your experience dissolves into something more fluid—something that challenges our conventional understanding of time.

This same phenomenon appears in recovery. In early sobriety, days can feel eternal. Later, you wonder where years have gone. Both running and sobriety reveal an uncomfortable truth: our neat chronological understanding of time is largely illusory.

We organize our existence around the steady progression of seconds, minutes, hours. We segment our journeys into past achievements and future goals. This linear perspective serves practical purposes, but it masks a more complex reality. The separate past and future we imagine exist primarily as constructions within our present consciousness.

We need these constructions to function in society, to plan training blocks, to navigate recovery programs. But mistaking these useful fictions for fundamental reality leads to unnecessary suffering.

When I run long distances, I experience firsthand how malleable time truly is. After crossing a certain threshold—usually when discomfort has settled into the background—I access a state where chronological time becomes increasingly irrelevant.

In this space, I’m neither dwelling on yesterday’s training nor fixating on the finish line. I’m simply moving through space, breathing, present. Each footfall happens now. Each breath happens now. The trail unfolds now. This isn’t spiritual poetry—it’s a direct experience that reveals something about time’s true nature.

The watch may record hours passing, but experientially, something very different is happening. The neat boundaries between past, present, and future blur. All that exists is this continuous unfolding.

Recovery offers similar insights, though often through more difficult lessons. When I first stopped drinking, I tormented myself with regrets about the past and anxieties about a future without alcohol. “How have I wasted so much time?” “How will I endure future social events?” I was living anywhere but the present moment.

Recovery wisdom cuts through this with its emphasis on present-moment action: one day at a time. This isn’t just a motivational slogan—it’s a recognition of time’s illusory nature. We never actually live in tomorrow. We never actually return to yesterday. We only ever experience this moment.

This recognition doesn’t magically dissolve all difficulty. The present moment isn’t always pleasant. Sometimes it’s filled with craving, discomfort, or uncertainty. But it does offer a sturdy foundation—the only one that truly exists.

Both running and recovery are, in essence, practices in confronting our limited perception of time. They train us to recognize the constructs we’ve built around experience and the suffering those constructs often create.

Here’s what I’ve observed in these parallel journeys:

1. The body knows only now. Physical sensations—whether muscle fatigue or the clarity of an unclouded mind—exist only in the present. They can anchor us when time perception distorts.
2. Progress is rarely linear. Neither recovery nor training follows a straight trajectory. The narrative of constant improvement we impose betrays the cyclical, undulating nature of actual experience.
3. Presence enhances performance. When fully immersed in the act of running—not replaying past mistakes or visualizing future outcomes—we access deeper reserves of energy and resolve.
4. Milestones are arbitrary. Race finishes or sobriety anniversaries aren’t endpoints but moments of reflection within a continuous process that has no true beginning or end.

There’s an uncomfortable freedom in recognizing time’s constructed nature. Uncomfortable because it challenges our narrative identity. Freeing because it offers new possibilities:

• Regret loses some power when we recognize that the “past” exists only as present memory
• Anxiety shifts when we understand that the “future” exists only as present imagination
• Recovery happens not in some distant tomorrow but in each choice we make now
• Performance emerges not from yesterday’s training but from today’s presence

This perspective doesn’t negate the value of preparation or planning. Rather, it places them in proper context. We prepare not to reach some hypothetical future state but to more fully inhabit each moment as it unfolds

The recognition of time’s illusion doesn’t guarantee happiness or success. The present moment can contain pain, failure, or disappointment. The runner still bonks. The person in recovery still encounters triggers.

But this perspective offers a tempered, realistic hope. If time isn’t a linear march toward either improvement or decay but a continuous unfolding of now, then:

• No mistake completely defines us
• No single choice determines everything
• No recovery is ever absolute
• No run represents the sum total of who we are as athletes

When I was drinking, I felt trapped in a narrative of inevitable deterioration. When injured, I saw myself losing irretrievable ground. Both perspectives assumed time was a straight line carrying me away from what mattered.

But what if time is more like a path that doubles back on itself, continuously revealing new aspects of the same terrain? What if, as philosophers suggest, “linear time” is just one limited way of experiencing a more complex reality?

During particularly challenging runs, I’ve experienced moments where time’s conventional structure seems to fall away entirely. Not in some mystical sense, but in the direct recognition that “past” and “future” are concepts arising in this moment, not separate realms I’m moving between.

Similarly, in difficult moments of recovery, I’ve found that focusing on the actual sensations of the present—rather than narratives about how long I’ve been sober or how far I have to go—provides the most reliable ground.

This isn’t about achieving some permanent enlightened state. It’s about recognizing, again and again, how much of our suffering comes from fighting against what is by living in constructed pasts and futures.

The run, like recovery, happens only now. The training effect, like healing, unfolds in its own time. Our arbitrary measurements and milestones can guide us, but they aren’t the territory itself.

There’s no guarantee that recognizing time’s illusory nature will make either running or recovery easier. But it might make both more honest. And honesty, however uncomfortable, offers firmer ground than comforting illusions.

In the end, both the trail and sobriety teach us that time isn’t something we move through, but something we continuously create and experience. The milestones we reach aren’t points on a fixed timeline but moments of clarity within a continuous present.

And perhaps that’s enough—not perfect, not transcendent, but real. Not optimism exactly, but a clear-eyed recognition that beyond our constructed narratives of past and future lies the only moment we ever truly inhabit.