Lately, I’ve been hearing a phrase echoing more and more across the endurance world: “I’ll die before I quit.” It’s worn like a badge of honor—a declaration of toughness, grit, and absolute commitment. When I first started taking running seriously, I adopted this mindset without question. I wanted to take myself to the absolute edge—break myself down and then push even further. At the time, it felt empowering, even noble. But as I’ve grown—not just as a runner, but as a person—that mindset has started to feel less like strength and more like a wound disguised as willpower.

Endurance sports are, by nature, about testing limits. There’s something undeniably powerful about facing down suffering and continuing anyway. But I’ve come to believe that true endurance isn’t about self-destruction—it’s about learning to navigate difficulty with intention and care. It’s about knowing when to push and when to pull back.

For those of us who’ve struggled with addiction, endurance sports can offer a seductive outlet. They allow us to channel chaos into something structured, even celebrated. Pushing ourselves to the brink can feel like healing—or at least like control. And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with going deep, with seeing what we’re made of. But when that mindset becomes the only way we define our worth, or when suffering becomes a requirement for feeling alive, we risk replicating the same harmful patterns we’re trying to leave behind—just in a different costume.

As I continue to run and grow, I’ve started to ask myself harder questions: Am I doing this to connect—or to escape? Am I chasing resilience—or punishment? These questions don’t have easy answers, but they’ve helped me shift my focus. Endurance, I’m learning, isn’t just about how far we can go—it’s about how fully we can show up for the journey without losing ourselves along the way

What I’ve come to realize is that endurance sports should not be a place to lose yourself—they should be a place to find yourself. And not just the version of you that grits their teeth through pain, but the version that learns how to care, to listen, to be in right relationship with your own body and mind.

For a long time, I thought suffering was the point. I believed the longer I could go without food, sleep, or rest, the stronger I was becoming. I wore underfueling like it was discipline, skipped recovery like it was weakness, and treated rest days like a personal failure. I believed burnout meant I was doing something right. And inevitably, I would crash. Every time. Hard.

I’d go all in on training, riding the high of focus and pain tolerance, and then I’d flame out—injured, mentally drained, or just completely disinterested. I confused recklessness for commitment. But there’s a fine line between devotion and self-destruction, and I had to learn that the hard way.

Eventually, I had to stop. Not just from injury or exhaustion, but from an honest recognition that I was repeating the same cycle I’d known in addiction: all or nothing, extremes, intensity as identity. I was using endurance not as a healing tool, but as another way to punish myself.

What changed wasn’t a dramatic moment—it was a slow unfolding. I began to see that real endurance isn’t about how much damage you can take. It’s about how much care you’re willing to give. It’s about training not just to push harder, but to live more fully—fueling your body properly, sleeping enough, listening when something hurts, pulling back when you need to, saying no when your ego says go.

I started eating more, sleeping more, structuring my weeks not around chaos and heroic efforts, but around sustainable movement and real recovery. I started to honor the long game. I found new joy in the process—not in proving something, but in showing up consistently and honestly. That’s when endurance began to feel like freedom, not punishment.

Because the truth is, endurance sports can teach us how to love ourselves. They can be a laboratory for learning trust, patience, discipline, and compassion—if we let them. But that requires shifting the story. It’s not about being the last one standing at all costs. It’s about being able to show up again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next—healthy, whole, and rooted in something deeper than pride.

We don’t need to take ourselves to the brink to prove we’re worthy. We need to build practices that allow us to stay. To stay in our bodies. To stay in our communities. To stay sober, grounded, and growing. That’s the endurance I’m chasing now. Not just finishing races, but building a life I don’t need to run from.

The beautiful thing about endurance is that, if you stay with it long enough, it starts to teach you what it truly needs from you. At first, you might show up with force—fueled by ego, urgency, or unresolved pain—but the longer you stay, the more the sport reveals its quiet wisdom. It doesn’t reward burnout. It rewards consistency. It doesn’t ask for punishment. It asks for patience. The body, like the trail, keeps score—and if you listen closely, it will tell you exactly how to take care of it.

There’s a kind of reciprocity that emerges with time. The more respect and intention you bring to the sport, the more it gives back. Endurance starts to feel less like something you’re fighting through and more like something you’re building with. A relationship. A practice. A way of life. And when you approach it with care—through proper training, fueling, rest, and self-awareness—it meets you there. It becomes something sustainable, something that doesn’t just challenge you, but also sustains you.

That’s the version of the endurance world I’m learning to love—the one that teaches you not how to burn out, but how to stay. The one that says yes, push your limits, but do so in a way that honors your whole self. Because the more you give to this pursuit with honesty and balance, the more it gives you in return: clarity, resilience, joy, and the deep, grounded satisfaction of showing up again and again—not just to the start line, but to your own life.