by Jonathan van Geuns, May 27, 2025
There’s a moment in every run when the mind starts to drift, into future miles, unfinished conversations, race goals, and the weight of everything left undone. I check my pace. I wonder how far until the next aid station. While I replay that email I haven’t answered, that deadline I missed. Just like that, I’ve left my body behind.
Modern running mirrors modern life: relentless, quantified, goal-driven. We often think of running as a means to an end: a faster time, a longer distance, a finish line, better rankings. Those future-oriented goals can rob us of the only thing that’s real: the now. The real terrain isn’t just the trail beneath our feet, but the sensation of each step. Not the GPS stats, but the lived reality of being in motion. Metrics are not the run itself; they are shadows of it. What matters is the run as it happens, not how it compares to yesterday or forecasts tomorrow.
Is this the paradox? The more we chase performance, the more we forfeit presence? The more we grasp for progress, the more the moment slips through our hands? What if the real power of running isn’t in where it gets us; but in how fully we inhabit where we are?
“To hold your breath is to lose your breath.” Alan Watts
What is presence? To talk about presence is to talk about returning. To the body, to breath, to now. Presence isn’t a technique or an achievement. It’s a state of attention: undivided, unmeasured, and unforced. It’s not about controlling the run, but about experiencing it. For runners, it sometimes happens mid-run, uninvited. The chatter quiets. The striving stops. The boundary between self and surroundings dissolves. This flash of unfiltered awareness is called Satori: a brief, luminous moment of pure presence.
You’re cresting a ridge or picking up the pace descending. The wind cuts through you, but you feel no resistance. Your legs are moving, but you’re not pushing them. There’s no thought about pace, no worry about what’s ahead. You’re not behind your breath; you are your breath. For Thich Nhat Hanh, presence isn’t a lofty state; it’s a practice rooted in the simplest of acts: breathing in, knowing you are breathing in. Breathing out, knowing you are breathing out. You’re not running through the landscape; you are the landscape.
You may not recognize it in the moment. That would require stepping outside of it. You might realize it only after. Then these moments remind me why I run. These moments are why many of us run. For the invitation, to arrive fully, even if just for a flicker. Maybe that’s the quiet lesson: presence doesn’t mean perfection. It means participation. Full, undivided, unmeasured being: with the body, the breath, the now.
Presence is not a goal you strive for. It’s not the reward for training harder or meditating longer. It’s a moment when the mind stops narrating and simply witnesses. It can be described as a flash of awakening, an unfiltered glimpse into the suchness of now. As Eckhart Tolle wrote, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.” It isn’t perfection. It’s not enlightenment, and it’s not sustainable. It is an act of love: for the body, the land, the breath, the moment. Not just a physical act; it’s a relational one. Running can become such an act of attention. Not the striving kind, but the quiet, devotional kind that notices without grasping. When I run without trying to fix the run it becomes something like an offering, of my awareness not to results, but to reality.
Presence ends the chase and brings us back to the experience.
We brace ourselves through life, discomfort, every mile we think we need to conquer. In many ways, our obsession with progress turns running into a breath-retention contest. We brace against the miles, against discomfort, against uncertainty. Maybe the point isn’t to brace; it’s to breathe. To listen more closely to our surroundings and ourselves.
The Carrot and the Chase. We often wait for some imagined future—a breakthrough, a finish line, a better version of ourselves—before we allow joy or ease. There is no such assurance. We demand future assurances before allowing ourselves to enjoy the present. No split time, no race registration, no polished Strava graph can offer the security we crave. All we truly have is the run we’re in.
The mind, always calculating and anticipating, pulls us away. It clings to the past, predicts the future, and measures the moment against imagined ideals. Presence becomes conditional: we’ll enjoy the moment once we’ve earned it. Once we’ve hit the target. Once we’ve proved our worth. But if joy is tied to the next peak or PR, we are like the donkey chasing the carrot. The run becomes not a journey, but a chase. The body doesn’t do this. It only ever lives in the now. So, presence begins where thought ends: in movement, sensation, breath. In running, this can turn a meaningful practice into a transactional one. The run becomes not a journey, but a chase.
The more we chase the future, the more we forfeit the present.
We train. We track. We push for the next goal, race, personal best. In a culture steeped in metrics, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that progress is purpose. That if we can just run faster, farther, longer, we’ll finally arrive at satisfaction. Our addiction to control. Our refusal to just be, is not a minor distraction, but a fundamental barrier to truly running. Running, like life, is rhythm and not schedule. A mile isn’t a unit of time, but a sequence of felt moments. Presence means running not by the clock, but by connection. When you stop measuring every mile, you start living it.
Holding onto a bad mile, a stumble, or early fatigue is like grasping at water. Yet “muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” The more I force a pace or resist discomfort, the harder the run becomes. If we run from pain, it owns us. If we label every ache or drop in pace as “bad,” we resist what is. Presence doesn’t mean escaping difficulty; it means showing up for all of it.
“So long as the mind believes in escape, there is no freedom.” True freedom doesn’t come from chasing a pace; it comes from surrendering to the experience. From not resisting fatigue, weather, or discomfort, but integrating with it fully. Noticing, rather than fighting. Accepting, rather than evaluating. When we simply notice it, without naming or fleeing, it shifts. Running becomes not avoidance, but arrival. Presence emerges when we simply see, without naming, analyzing, or reacting. On the run, this means letting go of the need to evaluate the experience as good or bad, fast or slow, successful or lacking.
Presence transforms running from obligation into radical play.
Running while present asks us to abandon metrics, ego, competition, and return to what is. The more we try to separate ourselves from life, the more isolated and anxious we might become. Not to escape from life, but to drop fully into it; to stop trying to master the moment and instead enter it, no longer a test of control—but an invitation to connection. As in life, wholeness lies in joining the play. A task into a dance.
For author Annie Dillard, presence is bound to wonder, and wonder is bound to precision. The more closely we look, the more astonishing the world becomes. That’s how it feels sometimes, mid-run, when the mind quiets and the world sharpens. A single leaf fluttering. The smell of pine. The rawness of lungs pulling in cold air. In those moments, running is not a detour from life—it’s a magnification of it. As Dillard insists, this is not a dress rehearsal. The moment is urgent. The present is everything. And the run—if I’m paying attention—is where I remember that.
Presence vs. Performance. Presence doesn’t mean abandoning effort. It means releasing grasp, feeling the run; not interpreting, fixing, or escaping it. When we stop resisting what is, release judgment, the run begins to open; not just as performance, but as experience. To run presently is not simply to move; it’s to feel movement. The rhythm. The crunch of gravel. The shift of sunlight. Presence isn’t just a technique; it’s a reclamation of the body from the tyranny of the mind.
I don’t need to carry the last mile into the next. Each step is a reset. Presence isn’t built on endurance, but on starting again, moment after moment. Trusting the flow—I breath, stride, terrain—allows for grace and adaptability. This is how presence becomes performance. That’s the kind of running that feels like flying to me.
Next time you lace up, try not to chase miles. Chase presence. Notice the wind. Feel the ground. Let go of arrival and return to where you are. This is my secret of running. Don’t wait for the perfect day, the perfect pace, the perfect version of yourself. The invitation is already here.. Run, not to get somewhere, but to be somewhere. In that, we find not just movement, but meaning.
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