What Would Marcus Aurelius Do?

Why I practice Stoic philosophy as a runner, and why I recommend it to any runner seeking to master the sport

There was a time in the 1980s and early ‘90s when post-impressionist art became quite trendy. It seemed every middle-class home you entered in those days had a print of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” hanging on a living room wall, “Sunflowers” above the toilet in the main guest bathroom. I like Van Gogh as much as anyone, but I hate following trends, and for this reason alone, I would not have hung “Starry Night” in my living room if I’d had a living room at that time of my life.

Something similar is happening today with Stoic philosophy. The most famous Stoic book, the 1,900-year-old Meditations of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, suddenly became a national bestseller in 2019 and has been a prime moneymaker for its various publishers ever since. Popular and lucrative YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, and Substacks are devoted entirely to repackaging Stoic thought for a lay audience. Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of contemporary Stoic influencers are young males with strong ties to the manosphere, leading some who were into Stoicism before it was cool to label the new version of the tradition “broicism”.

Still, a philosophy should be judged by its merits, not by its adherents, and the original Stoic writings are good shit. The ultimate test of any philosophy is how it affects you personally, and stoicism has done more for me as an athlete than any other discipline, including modern sport psychology. As regular readers of this blog know, I’m all about mastery, a state that is reached only by those who have gained full control over their thoughts, emotions, and actions in the sporting arena. And do you know who is also about mastery? The Stoics! “No man is free who is not master of himself,” wrote Epictetus, who rose from slavery to become a leading teacher of Stoic principles in the city of Nicopolis.

It’s Just Information

The first Stoic was Zeno of Citium, born in 334 B.C. According to legend, Zeno shipwrecked on a voyage from Phoenicia to Peiraeus as a young adult, after which he is purported to have said, “Now that I’ve shipwrecked, I’m on a good journey.” Though apocryphal, these words perfectly encapsulate the Stoic attitude of nonattachment to external circumstances.

Epictetus put it this way: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.”

Nonattachment is not the natural state of the human mind. We are born as emotional puppets, twitching automatically as our strings are pulled by events around us. If we are praised, we smile, and when we’re criticized, we frown. If we lose we cry, and when win, we laugh. Utterly predictable, we always react the same way everyone else does in every circumstance, lacking even a scintilla of self-determination- trend followers to the core.

Through maturation and socialization, some of us do eventually gain a measure of internal control of our emotions, but only a tiny fraction of us make a conscious effort to embrace Stoic principles and cut the strings between “uncontrollable externals” and our emotions. Having coached and hosted scores of endurance athletes over the past thirty years, I can tell you that we our kind is no exception.

---

🔔 Want to dive deeper and get even more exclusive content like this? Upgrade to a paid subscription and experience all the benefits of Endurance Mastery be MarathonGuide.

➡️ For a limited time only, grab an exclusive 20% early-subscriber discount before this offer disappears

---

Puppetry in Action

Most runners in most situations tacitly assume they have no choice but to react emotionally in a particular way. An example is Emilio, a runner who contacted me about one of my 80/20 Endurance training plans, which he was following with a friend. The process had gone well, but Emilio was concerned about the last big workout: a 16.1-mile marathon-pace effort I call (with a nod to Keith and Kevin Hansen) “the simulator”. “We are both a bit afraid of this one,” he wrote, “as there is a chance it could throw us off (especially mentally) if we weren’t able to run our intended marathon pace.”

Let me see if I have this straight. A marathon is 26.2 miles; the simulator ten miles less. This runner had set his mind on running a particular pace in the marathon that he highly doubted he could sustain for 38.5 percent less distance in training, and if he couldn’t sustain it, there was “a good chance” he’d be thrown off mentally. Emilio thought the workout was the problem, and the purpose of his email was to request a substitute. I told him his mind was the problem and he should go ahead and do the simulator with a more realistic goal and a refusal to be thrown off emotionally by any outcome.

Don’t look down on Emilio. If you’ve ever obsessively checked a race-day weather forecast, hoping for good conditions and feeling chagrined when the updated forecast was worse than the previous one, then you, too, are an emotional puppet who lacks the self-determination required to become an endurance master. Like I said, stoicism does not come naturally to humans, and its antithesis is almost universal.

I’m as human as anyone. When things I can’t control go against me in training or competition, I have the same initial reaction—fear, dismay, self-pity, etc. But because I’ve trained myself to fall back on Stoic principles in adverse situations, I’m able to quickly let go of negative emotions and use the control I have to make the best of it.

The Only Safe Harbor

An example is the Flagstaff Marathon, which I ran in October as a sort of dress rehearsal for the Javelina Jundred three weeks later. Two miles from the finish, I was hunting down the guy in second place when my lower left leg exploded in pain. I was able to gut out the final miles, but although I didn’t yet know I’d broken my leg, I knew the injury was bad and would threaten my chances of winning my age group and making the top fifty overall at Javelina. For about as long as it took me to drive home from the race (and no, I didn’t catch the guy in second place), I felt devastated. My training had gone so well. I’d trained hard for months and attained a level of fitness that was almost shocking to me after years of being sidelined by long COVID. I knew I had a chance to achieve something special at Javelina, and now all that hard work was in jeopardy.

Then I remembered the words of Seneca the Younger: “For the only safe harbor in this life’s tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.” And that’s what I did. Instead of pouting about the injury, I threw myself into cross-training to stay fit while my leg healed. A week after the injury, I rode an ElliptiGO for three hours, and a week after that I completed a five-hour incline treadmill walk.

Five days after that, which was two days before the Javelina Jundred, my MRI results came back and I learned I’d fractured my fibula and would be unable to race. That was a bitter pill to swallow, given the lengths I’d gone to stay on track after the Flagstaff Marathon, but then I remembered the words of Epictetus: “Don’t seek for things to happen as you wish but wish for things to happen as they do - then your life will flow well.”

So that’s what I did. Instead of canceling my trip to Fountain Hills, where the Javelina Jundred is held, I turned it into a romantic weekend getaway for my wife and me, then spent the next six weeks drinking eggnog and putting on weight while I threw myself into my writing projects and didn’t exercise a lick, not because I was depressed but because I wasn’t. Yesterday the orthopedist gave me the green light to start easing back into training, and I promptly signed up for next year’s duathlon national championship, refreshed and hungry.

Whereas the puppet marathoner who wrote to me about the simulator workout because he knew he couldn’t recover emotionally if he ran a few seconds per kilometer slower than the goal pace he’d allowed himself to become dependent on, I recovered quickly and easily from a broken leg that obliterated my goal thanks to the Stoic ideas I used to guide myself as an athlete. It takes a lot of work to turn these ideas into second nature, but I’m living proof that it’s possible, and worth it.

Here are some resources to get started:

Stoic Running Substack

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Daily Stoic podcast

---

💬 If you had to choose one Stoic principle to guide your training or racing this year, which would it be and why?

---

Catch up on past Monday Musing posts ⬇️

---

🤍 Thanks for reading,
Matt Fitzgerald and MarathonGuide Team