I’ve been an athlete for as long as I can remember, though never a particularly serious one.
As a kid I spent five years in the pool, two doing karate, three in the gym. But the sport I loved most wasn’t organized at all. It was football with the other kids from my town. We ran proper neighborhood tournaments, one quarter against another, each of us convinced our corner of town was the strongest with a ball at its feet.
Those games, along with the volleyball matches in high school, taught me almost everything I understand about team sports. Shared sacrifice. Collaboration. Listening to the people next to you. Building strategies together to outplay the other side. I’m still convinced team sports matter enormously, because they develop something you can’t build alone: that sense of community every individual needs to function inside a society.
My relationship with sport is still here today. But it has changed completely.
When I was younger, the joy of playing came from outside. I needed friends to show up, a team to form, a tournament to win. Somewhere along the way that magic inverted. Sport stopped being something I did with other people and became a way of living, an internal pull that took up more and more space until it turned into a habit I can no longer do without.
The activity that completely cast its spell on me, from 2018 until now, is the simplest one in the world. Running. Put on your shoes, grab the first breathable shirt you can find, and go.
Then came the headphones (ideally the kind that don’t fall out when you run). Then the phone holder. Then the sports watch that measures your heart rate and your steps per minute and your cadence, and eventually the chest strap monitor for maximum accuracy on every beat your body produces.
It’s genuinely hard to describe the progression, because it happened so naturally. You go from foot-destroying shoes and barely breathable shirts to owning the most technological gear available and the best shoes on the market. Half of it just for the pleasure of having them, honestly.
I remember the exact moment running stopped being a pleasant activity for its own sake and became something more structured, with clear goals. It coincided with my move to Milan in 2021.
The impact of the city was overwhelming. Within a few months I’d already taken part in the first running event of my life: a team relay at the Milan Marathon, with the company I worked for at the time. I ran the longest leg, around fourteen kilometers, and finished with the best time of any corporate team at the event.
From there the playful challenge kept going. A series of ten-kilometer races. The bigger test of the half marathon in 2024. And finally, the real milestone in April 2026: my first marathon. Not my last of 2026, either.
So after all that, I still haven’t told you why I love to run. And since this piece is supposed to be about exactly that, you might feel a little cheated. I understand. But the honest answer is that I don’t know why I love it.
What I can tell you is why I’ll never stop, and how it became part of who I am.
As long as my legs let me, I’ll keep running, because running is a guarantee of mental clarity. Let me give you an example.
You decide to run on Sunday. For six days your brain has been soaking in problems, useless stimuli, situations to manage, constant cognitive load. You put on your shoes and start. Three kilometers in, the fatigue arrives. By six you’re spent. You push to eight, and then something shifts. I can’t quite explain it, but the running fades into the background and your brain locks onto two things: the rhythm of your run (or the rhythm of the music, if you’re wearing headphones) and the rhythm of your thoughts.
Maybe it’s some mix of dopamine and boredom. Either way, you start thinking, really thinking. Solutions appear. Ideas appear. The good kind, the ones that make you feel something. You catch yourself saying, that’s a great idea, or actually, that’s exactly how I should handle this.
But the magic doesn’t only happen while you run. It happens afterward too. Back home, after a long shower and eating half the kitchen, that’s when, muscle aches and all, you start to drift. You realize that from that moment until the end of the day a huge percentage of your mental fog has lifted. You see everything more clearly. You feel capable of making good decisions. You want to throw yourself at new challenges. And the most powerful sensation of all is that you’re calm. Whatever happens around you, directly or indirectly, slides right off. You’re ready to act or react, but always from a place of deep serenity.
To put it another way: it’s like a session with the best psychologist in the world, who somehow didn’t cure you but gave you that little bit extra to face the world without the frills, without the overthinking.
And then there are the sensations that stack on top of all this when you line up for an event, a ten-kilometer race, a half, a marathon. Lately these are the ones that motivate me most. I’d sum them up in two words.
Observation. At a big event you find an enormous variety of people, all there on the same day to do the same simple thing, something that looks pointless and a little stupid from the outside. But behind it sits an incredible range of reasons. The one running to push past their own limits. The competitive one who wants to win. The one running to work through grief. The one proving, first to themselves and then to everyone else, that even without a leg or a foot you can still run, that you’re still normal. The one who runs to watch the city go by. The one keeping a friend company. The one running for charity. The one who knows perfectly well that afterward, at the restaurant, they could eat the waiters too.
Humans. You’re surrounded by people from eighteen to seventy-plus, each dressed differently, each with their own running style, all charging each other up because, like soldiers, they share one objective to reach no matter the cost. Along the edges of the course there are people shouting, kids wanting high-fives, strangers applauding, random voices yelling your name and telling you not to give up. Part of me finds this embarrassing, like being a soldier in a fake war. But another part is genuinely moved, because I feel a kind of hope rising up, a sense that something beautiful is happening. That maybe, at least for forty-two kilometers, we get to live the beauty of irrationality. Outside any logic of productivity or economic utility. Driven by running just for the sake of running, by doing something for the simple pleasure of doing it.
By living Just a Normal Life.