[Editor’s Note: This month’s Community Voices article was written by Jerry Dunn, who has been running for just over 50 years — from early marathons in the 1980s through decades of ultras and long projects — and now, at 80, as an octogenarian. He is the founder of the Lean Horse Ultras in South Dakota and has run countless marathons, including setting a world record in 1993 by running 104 marathons in a year.]
For a long time, I believed distance changed a person.
Marathons made you serious. Ultras made you different. Hundreds made you something else entirely. I spent decades testing that idea. Now, at 80, distance no longer changes who I am. It only changes how clearly I see.
Jerry Dunn: Long-time runner, octogenarian, and founder of the Lean Horse Ultras. All photos courtesy of Jerry Dunn.
When Running Stops Adding
In the early years, running adds things. Confidence, structure, community, identity. Later, it adds fewer things and preserves more things — mobility, routine, a way to order the day. Eventually, it stops adding or preserving. It clarifies.
I finish runs now with less noise than I started with. Not accomplishment. Not relief. Just a quieter mind. Running used to expand my life. Now it edits it.
The Quiet Phase of Endurance
There’s a phase of running that rarely gets written about. You are no longer chasing times. You are no longer building mileage. You are not proving toughness. You are simply participating in motion. The run becomes a place where thought reorganizes itself without effort. Problems return to actual size. Memories settle into order. Physically, nothing really improves. Nor does it decline. Things become accurate.
After Competition
Most runners know the moment they stop racing other people. Later comes the moment you stop racing the clock. The final shift is quieter — you stop racing your former self. What replaces it isn’t acceptance. It’s the absence of negotiation. You run the way weather happens — not because you decided to, but because the day arrived and movement came with it.
Jerry Dunn spent many years running marathons and chasing records before accepting running as simply movement.
What Endurance Leaves Behind
We often say endurance sports build resilience. What they really build is familiarity with change. Fitness arrives and leaves. Events come and go. Bodies cooperate, and then they don’t. Over time, the point of running moves away from achievement and toward participation — not in sport, but in being alive while moving through space under your own power. Running becomes less about finishing and more about noticing.
The Only Distance That Remains
After 50 years, I no longer measure runs in miles. I measure them by how little I need from them. When running stops giving meaning, it begins revealing it. Presence turns out to be the only distance that can actually be completed.
After 50 years of running, Jerry Dunn has learned to appreciate what running reveals.
Call for Comments
- How has running changed for you as you’ve gotten older?
- What do you seek from your running today?
