The Backward Law of Running: Why Pursuing Joy on the Road Leads You Away from It

February 24, 2025 | By DLake

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You know the feeling — That hunger for a new best time and the general excitement of pushing yourself harder. But somewhere along the way, that thrill turns into a weird frustration.

Why do you think that is?

Alan Watts might say it’s because you’re chasing too hard. The backward law says that the more you strive for happiness, the less you feel it. You push to beat your best time, and the joy that was once there slowly fades into pressure and expectations.

He also said, “The purposeful (focused) life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless (unfocused/going with the flow) life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

If you don’t know, Alan Wilson Watts was a “philosophical entertainer” known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy to a Western audience. Sounds right up my alley!

I did this by chasing my 15:59 5k a few years back. I have been sitting at low 17 minutes for a few years and thought 40 seconds would be easy. That’s 10 seconds a year, 2.5 seconds per financial quarter. HOW HARD COULD IT BE?! Well, I caught a case of overtraining syndrome (It’s not a virus — I just ran stupidly) and had to back down my training to easy workouts for three months. I then had a conversation with myself that I didn’t really love the 5k distance and took a year off racing.

Mark Manson, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, puts it even more bluntly: “When we care too much about something, we give it power over us.”

We want to feel good on the run, so we focus on the end goal, lagging measure—miles, pace, and finish times. But all this does is make us hyper-aware of how far away that happiness seems. It’s ironic, isn’t it?

After the year-off of racing, I realized that I still didn’t love the 5k, but I surprisingly missed it. I did a 3k track race and trained differently for that. I had no pressure and was doing more top end high aerobic, speedy stuff in my training. I loved it and was excited to train again. I’m now okay with doing a 5k here and there and am looking forward to pacing a runner I coach to a sub-3-hour marathon in the next few months.

Challenge the notion of finish times and metrics. Run just to see how it feels when no one’s keeping track, not even you.