By Aliza Feldman, Opinions Editor
There’s a billboard for the NYC Marathon that reads “Running is awful I love it.” I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why that’s true.
Walk around campus early in the morning and you’ll see people in athletic wear, racing to their 6 AM workout classes. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll find hundreds of posts of gym selfies, marathon medals and before-and-after weight loss photos. Friends compete over who can endure the most intense workout, who pushed themselves the hardest or who’s the most sore the next day. Early morning classes where instructors yell at you like drill sergeants. CrossFit gyms that celebrate exercising until failure. Ultramarathons, triathlons, Tough Mudders, the more extreme and punishing, the better.
This isn’t about staying healthy or active. It’s about something else entirely.
Last year, a group of my friends attended a Bikram Yoga class together. The instructor heated the room, shut the door and announced that no one was allowed to leave until the class was over. No one was allowed to drink water unless she gave permission. When one woman, overheating and desperate, tried to exit, the instructor physically blocked the door with her body. Most of my friends came back from the class outraged, accusing the woman of endangering their lives. But one of my friends had a different reaction. Having never been held against her will like that before, she experienced something she described as an awakening, a new sense of purpose and achievement.
This reaction is not unusual. More and more people my age have developed an obsession with pushing themselves to their physical limits. The fitness industry has figured something out about us and capitalized on it brilliantly. Boutique studios don’t just sell exercise, they sell transformation through suffering. Peloton instructors deliver speeches about warriors and battles. The message is always the same: your worth is measured by how much you can endure.
I started to understand this firsthand when I joined Yeshiva University’s cross country team this past semester. I watched myself shave minutes off my 5K time — 27 minutes became 25 and then 23. These little accomplishments filled me with a certain pride, a reassurance of my abilities. I became addicted to the idea of improvement and wondered if it could truly be endless.
As much as I loved chasing new personal records, each race felt like hell — the type of hell no one was responsible for putting me through but myself. As I ran, I heard two distinct voices. One was reasonable: Listen to your body. Slow down. You feel like you’re going to die. The other was persistent and harsh, almost like an abusive coach yelling at me that there was no excuse to stop. If you want to consider yourself great, you need to push yourself to your max. Depending on the day, one voice might sound louder than the other, but the second voice usually won. There was something exhilarating about pushing past what felt possible and proving the reasonable voice wrong.
Running can feel amazing. There’s a moment during some runs when I experience an exhilarating thrill. Some people call it a runner’s high. It’s this feeling that comes when I realize I’m flying, when I realize this is it, the max output of my body. At that moment, it feels like I could keep running forever. The ripping of air in my ears, the warmth of my heart in my chest, the brief moments of weightlessness. It makes me feel invincible. That feeling is intoxicating enough to make me ignore what my body is trying to tell me.
One day after practice, I went to the gym to stretch, laid down on the floor and couldn’t get up. It was clear that my body was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear it. Or maybe I didn’t want to. I kept training with the same intensity, sometimes pushing myself to the point of vomiting. Eventually, my body forced me to listen. Pains in my ankle that I’d ignored turned out to be a stress reaction, which turned into a fracture in a matter of weeks. The doctor delivered the news over the phone in a regretful tone: You need to stop. I would need to be in a boot until the bone healed.
Sitting with my injury, unable to run, I started asking myself: Why was I pushing myself like that? What was I trying to prove, and to whom? And more importantly, why does this kind of voluntary suffering appeal to so many of us?
I believe that what lies at the center of this cultural shift is that our generation is not accustomed to doing anything against our will. We were told since we were young that we could do anything we wanted to do. We were told to listen to our bodies and to take mental health breaks when things get unmanageable. I’m not saying these are negative sentiments — living in a generation where you’re beaten for misbehaving has its own set of problems. But I think that we feel, deep down, that we’re lacking something. We want to be given the opportunity to fight for what we believe in, to resist forces of evil and to battle for the truth. But for a lot of us, life is stale in that regard. For the most part, no one is out to get us. There’s no personal war to fight or bad guy to punch, so we place ourselves in a hot yoga room with a locked door, a cycle class or a triathlon because it makes us feel like we’re fighting for something, even if that something is just our own ability to endure pain.
There is something deeply satisfying about testing your limits and finding out what you’re made of. Pushing past the point where your body is begging you to stop and discovering you can keep going makes you feel powerful. It makes you feel human and it makes you feel alive. And it does build something real. Resilience, confidence and discipline are valuable life skills. Running taught me how to push through difficult things and it taught me that I am capable of more than I think. There is nothing quite like the feeling of crossing a finish line and hitting a personal record.
The problem isn’t that we challenge ourselves physically — it’s that we’ve started to confuse suffering with strength. When does a productive challenge become self-destructive compulsion? When does testing your limits become ignoring your body’s legitimate warnings?
My stress fracture didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual. I felt pain that I ignored, assuming that it was nothing more than a sore muscle. I refused to rest because my routine didn’t allow for it. I walked fast everywhere, took the stairs instead of elevators and schlepped groceries on my back. The constant stress made me crack. Literally. And I’m not alone in this pattern. I see it in friends who work out through injuries, who wear their exhaustion like a badge of honor, who feel guilty for taking a day off. The cultural narrative around fitness has become almost abusive in its intensity. There’s always that voice demanding more — another mile, another rep, another class. Listening to your body’s signals to stop gets reframed as weakness, and rest becomes failure.
I’m not saying everyone who works out intensely is heading for a stress fracture or that pushing yourself hard is inherently wrong. I’ll probably go back to running once my leg heals because I love it. But I do think it’s worth asking: Why do we do this? What are we really chasing when we push ourselves to the point of breaking? The fitness industry wants us to believe that if we’re not pushing ourselves to the absolute edge, we’re not trying hard enough. But maybe knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing how to push.
Maybe we’re running from something. Or maybe we’re running toward something. And maybe we’re moving too fast to figure out which one it is.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Aliza Feldman