Why I Ran A 50K Through Rome Alone (And What It Taught Me)

In the middle of Rome, there stands one of the great trophies of history, the Column of Marcus Aurelius.

The nearly 100-foot monument was put up to commemorate Marcus’ victories during the Marcomannic Wars. It is covered in carvings depicting scenes of his armies marching, crossing rivers, laying siege to cities, fighting battles.

It’s a towering celebration of Marcus’ achievements, literally carved in stone.

But you know what? Marcus didn’t get to bask in all this glory. He died before the column was finished.

And then, in the sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V had the monument restored and put Saint Paul on top instead. They even added a new inscription at the bottom, attributing all of the victories to the wrong emperor.

I was thinking about all of this a couple months ago, standing beneath the very monument. It was a little over 5 kilometers into what would be the furthest I’ve ever run in my life—50 kilometers (31 miles) through the streets of Rome, stopping at some of the most important Stoic sites in the world along the way.

Why did I run a 50K by myself through the streets of a foreign city during the hottest part of the year—literally the hottest it has ever been in Europe?

Because it’s hard.

And doing hard things is good for you. That was the whole point. Do we do hard things because we want to impress people? Because we want to beat other people? Because we want a medal or a trophy?

No. As Marcus’ victory column is a pretty good reminder, doing things for a trophy is a terrible reason to do things.

That’s why I like doing challenges like this, more than races or competitions. There was no starting gun for this run, no official course, no medal waiting for me at the end. I picked the start time. I picked whether it would start at all…and certainly whether I would finish. I like things where the victory is what I get out of it.

A few kilometers after the column, I got lost. I did a one-mile loop in completely the wrong direction. I was already trying to run farther than I had ever run before and now I’d added an extra mile. But I knew something like this was going to happen. When we do hard things, we have to be prepared for them to be harder than we’re anticipating. If you go into something thinking, This is all the gas I have in the tank. This is all I’m capable of doing. I need everything to go right, you’re in a really vulnerable position. Everything is not going to go right. As Seneca said, the unexpected blow lands heaviest. If I was lost and disoriented and mad at myself right then, this would have been harder than it was.

Instead, I figured out where I screwed up, turned around and kept going. What else are you going to do? From there, I ran up to the Campidoglio and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, past the Colosseum, through Circus Maximus and eventually out toward the Appian Way.

Almost thirteen miles in, I stopped at what is supposedly Seneca’s tomb. We don’t know for certain. There are no inscriptions identifying it, and two thousand years is a long time and stuff starts to disappear. The last time I had been there was about thirteen years earlier. I had a picture of myself from that trip.

We see ourselves every day, so the passing of time can be invisible to us. Then you come back to a place you haven’t been in a long time. I looked at that old picture of myself. I feel the same. I feel great. I feel better than I did then. But you look at it and you go, Oh, I have more gray hairs now. I have more wrinkles. I can see the last ten years. Marcus Aurelius talks about time being this vicious, unrelenting, ceaseless, almost merciless flow of events, faster and faster and faster, taking us with it.

Standing there at Seneca’s tomb, I wondered if he knew that his plays would still be read two thousand years later. I wondered if he knew that his grave would get worn down by events and eventually forgotten.

By the time I got to the turnaround point, I was 15.64 miles in. I felt pretty good. I was hydrated (Rome is filled with little fountains of fresh drinking water). The shade had been nice. But it was getting hot and I was way behind schedule. It was already 8:40 in the morning, three hours and forty minutes after I’d started.

I hadn’t quite budgeted for how long all the stopping and filming was going to take. Whenever I’m preparing to do something challenging, I like to try to talk to and learn from someone who has done something similar before. Googling around before this run, I found a guy named Luke Tuttle who had run 53 kilometers into Rome and written about it on his blog. So I reached out. I had a million questions for him, and the conversation was so great that we turned it into an episode of the podcast.  He gave me some really good advice: Just let it take however long it takes. You’re not gonna be glad you rushed through it. Take your time. Stop. Admire the sights. Soak it in. If you have to walk, you have to walk.

The point isn’t to win at your hobbies. The point is to do it, to have fun doing it, to experience it, to be there for it. You don’t rush through other things that are pleasurable, and then for some reason, physical activity we try to get done as fast as possible.

It was funny: I wasn’t racing anyone. There wasn’t even a race. Other than trying to beat the full heat of the sun it was impossible to be “behind schedule.” So I took a break, turned around and started running back.

Eventually I got to the point where there were seven miles left. You know you’re doing something hard when you think, only seven miles left. That’s one of the great things about doing hard things. You push yourself, you raise your threshold higher and higher until what used to seem like a lot now only seems like a little.

A few miles later, I’d officially done a marathon. I still had five-ish miles to go. At that point I was thinking about something Epictetus said: Whatever difficulties you face, understand what resources you have inside you. How was I going to get through the last five miles? With the same willpower and strength and training that got me through the first twenty-six.

Honestly, this is my favorite part. They say you’re not really pushing yourself until you get to your limits. It’s after you get tired and keep going that the muscle and strength and fortitude are earned.

It’s a little like working on a book. The first two-thirds, sometimes even the first 80 percent, is the really hard part. You don’t know if you’re going to make it. You don’t know if the thing is going to work. Then you reach a point where you know you’re going to make it as long as you don’t quit. You’ve crossed most of the difficulties off. You have some momentum. You’re in a rhythm.

You have this sense of what you’re capable of because of what you’ve just done. You just gotta see it through.

Somewhere around mile 29.5, I lost it. That was apparently my limit. I was fucking dying at the end. Whatever graceful ideas I had about finishing strong disappeared. I staggered into this little restaurant stand alongside the Tiber and asked if they had water and took Apple Pay. They were incredibly confused about this person stumbling about and slurring his words. I drank two water bottles and then basically  limped the rest of the way.

The whole thing took much longer than I thought. It was much harder than I thought. I got lost. I stopped more than expected. The last couple miles took everything I had.

And then my son popped out from an alleyway and spontaneously joined me, which was just the best. Some thirteen years earlier, somewhere along the Appian Way, I had asked my wife to marry me. And now I was back, finishing this run on that same ancient road with my nine year old son jogging along for the last couple hundred yards.

That’s why we do hard things.

I started the morning knowing I was going to try to run further than I ever had in my life.

Six and a half hours later, I knew a little bit more about myself.

About where my limits are.

About what I’m capable of.

About what I’ve got in the tank.

That was the trophy.

And that one I get to keep.