What a mountain runner taught me about progress
Run or Die — Kilian Jornet
What a mountain runner taught me about progress
Jean-Louis gave me this book for Christmas. He knows I’ve been running. I think he thought it would motivate me. He was right, but not in the way either of us expected.
I started reading it slowly after the holidays, the way you approach a book you’re not quite sure you deserve yet. Because Kilian Jornet — if you don’t know him — is not just a runner. He runs up and down mountains. He runs across entire countries. He set the record for the Everest summit and back. In the world he describes, a bad day is still something I couldn’t physically fathom. And here I was, a guy who, less than a year before, had been out of breath after his first kilometer in 35° heat on the Gold Coast.
But somewhere over the Middle East, mid-flight, I stopped feeling like an impostor and started really listening to him.
I came to running late, and sideways. It started in London in early 2023, half to keep up with someone dear to me, half out of curiosity. Then I left the UK to travel Asia and running just… dissolved into the backpack weight problem. You can’t carry everything, and running shoes are among the first casualties.
It was Nathan who brought me back to it. January 2025, Gold Coast, his parents’ place. He was picking it up again and something in me said now. That first run, I made it about a kilometer before stopping. The air felt thick. My lungs were doing something theatrical. My single motivation — the one thing that got me out the door — was a coffee shop about two kilometers away. That was the finish line. Run there. Drink coffee. Run back. That was the whole vision.
By December 2025, I was running 5km under 5 minutes per kilometer. My average heart rate had dropped from 170bpm to 160 avg. My muscles, built more for power than endurance from my teenage years of skateboarding and snowboarding, were slowly learning a different language.
I had been measuring everything. BPM. Pace. Distance. Personal bests. The numbers were the proof that something was happening, that all those zone-2 runs through European autumn (zone “roughly”, as I prefer to call it) had actually meant something.
Then I opened this book, and Jornet quietly dismantled all of that.
Not aggressively. He doesn’t preach. But there’s a passage that stopped me cold:
The strongest isn’t the one who arrives first — it’s the one who enjoys most what they’re doing.
I read it twice. Then again. Because I had been thinking about this completely backwards.
Progress, to me, had become a graph. A line moving in one direction. Numbers shrinking or growing in the right ways. It felt good, that kind of progress. It felt like evidence. And maybe that’s the trap — when you’ve never thought of yourself as athletic, when sport was never part of your identity, you cling to the metrics because they’re the only way you can convince yourself it’s real.
But Jornet describes competition — even at the highest level — as something closer to art. He writes about a race the way you’d describe a painting that only exists once:
A race is like a work of art. It needs inspiration to be accomplished with satisfaction. It is ephemeral — like a Buddhist mandala, it is savoured during its creation, and at the moment it reaches perfection, it disappears forever.
A mandala. You spend hours, days constructing it in coloured sand, grain by grain, and then you sweep it away. The point was never the object. The point was the making.
I thought about my runs differently after that. Not the 24:30 5k in December. Not the BPM charts. But the morning in Borneo when I ran through a humid forest and the air smelled like something ancient. The runs in Malaysia where I didn’t know the route and just followed streets until I recognised something. The strange meditative state you reach around kilometer three when your body stops complaining and just… moves.
Those moments don’t show up in Strava.
There’s another thread running through the book — about confidence. Not the loud kind, not the kind that needs to be performed for others. Jornet talks about a quieter internal certainty:
I don’t need rage or ferocity, or the need to feel superior to others. I need to feel that I am myself — that during this crossing, I don’t lose who I was, nor my confidence in myself.
I’ve been sitting with an injury for four months now. Metatarsal pain from running in the wrong shoes — Columbia Outdry hiking shoes I was wearing to save weight in my backpack. Bangkok heat, same pace as before, wrong shoes. A slow accumulation of small compressions until something said enough. I’ve been doing test runs every few weeks, watching the progress, getting frustrated when the pain comes back during the run and last for days.
For a while, that injury felt like an interruption. Like time stolen from the graph. Like I had been building something and it got knocked down. Hmmm, what I just wrote brings me back to April 2023 when everything in my life collapsed like a house of cards.
But Jornet has a different relationship with time:
From the moment something happens — whether it’s a problem we’d have liked to avoid or a joy we’d like to keep forever — it already belongs to the past. I can’t stay lamenting what I did wrong or what I should have done. Those minutes lost to lamentation cost you dearly in a race.
And maybe in life too.
The injury happened. The shoes were wrong. The metatarsal needs more time. None of that changes by replaying it. The only question that matters is: what does the next run feel like, when it comes? In the meantime, I’ll just be using the time I’d use for running to do something else. I picked up yoga recently because of my friends Ellie and Mali.
There’s a line near the end of the book — the one I keep mentioning to people around me:
Happiness is not a destination, it’s the path itself — and I lose time on this path by treating its end as the only thing that matters.
That’s the reframe, I think. Progress isn’t the gap closing between where you are and some imagined finish line. Progress is the quality of attention you bring to the path. To the coffee run in the heat. To the slow Tuesday kilometres. To the patience of a recovering metatarsal.
Jornet runs up mountains I’ll never see. He has lungs and legs I’ll never have. But the thing he’s describing — that capacity to be present inside the movement, to treat each run as its own complete thing — that’s available at any pace.
I’m not sure when I’ll be back to running properly. But I know the next time I lace up, I’ll be thinking less about the BPM and more about what the air smells like.
Thanks, Jean-Louis. Good book.
Run or Die — Kilian Jornet, 2013. Read in January 2026, mid-flight.