Firstly, it’s less than three weeks until my book is released (!!), so please, please, please get your pre-orders in if you have been meaning to but haven’t gotten around to it! The answer to the incredibly thoughtful question of, “What’s the best place to buy your book from… for you.” It’s Amazon.
I’m going to go into a bit more depth about what’s in the book over the next few newsletters, but in the meantime, get your orders in.
Get your copy of This is Running
USA - Amazon US | Bookshop US | Barnes & Noble
UK - Amazon UK | Bookshop UK | Waterstones
Canada - Amazon CA | Indigo
And if you have any questions about the book — any at all — fire away, and I’ll answer them all, either below in a comment or in the coming weeks.
Running & Creativity
For those who read right down to the end of last Monday’s newsletter, you will know that I had a US spring tour to announce with Salomon.
They sent the massively talented Brian Galdamez and Kevin Cruz to my house to capture my creative process, which is exactly the topic that I’ll be speaking about at these in-person events. I’ll be outlining the deep relationship between running and creativity. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know it’s something I’ve been exploring.
You can watch the video clip on my IG here. I’ll be posting more updates about the book tour, book release, and all the regular stuff on there, so follow along if you aren’t already.
Come see me on the Off Track Gravel Tour if you can. And if you do, don’t be shy – come say hi. It’ll be lovely to chat.
March
3.18 San Diego, CA - Milestone Running REGISTER
3.28 Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Running Company REGISTER
May
5.12 Twin Cities, MN - TC Running Company REGISTER
5.16 Portland, OR - Fleet Feet PDX REGISTER
5.20 San Francisco, CA - Fleet Feet Menlo Pk REGISTER
5.25 Columbus, OH - Fleet Feet Columbus REGISTER
5.30 Denver, CO - Runners Roost Lakewood REGISTER
I’m very much looking forward to visiting Minnesota and Ohio for the first time, which will be US states 17 and 18 for me. Maybe I’ll hit 20 states visited by the end of 2026. That would be nice.
On another very personal note, I’ve written about the lack of representation of South Asian faces in the running world for the past three years, so actually being platformed to be that visible face (especially in the trail world) is very, very cool to me, and hopefully to many others.
If you work at a brand and you want to figure out a way of working with me, either on the newsletter or IRL, you can always drop me a line raz@runningsucks101.com.
O is for Offline
A trend that I’ve been noticing more and more frequently is a desire from the terminally online to be online… less.
Maybe it’s related to what’s going on in the world at the moment, and wanting less exposure to it, or maybe it’s because it’s not even been 19 years since smartphones have existed in the wild. Such a huge, swingeing change in our media consumption habits is difficult to get used to, especially if it’s bad for us. Millennials – my generation – were the canaries down the coalmine.
We increasingly understand that short-form content is bad for us, and younger generations thankfully learnt from us to never post a 100-photo album on Facebook. But now, the doomscrolling of clip after reel is addictive by design, and it’s ruining our attention spans by relentlessly dosing us up with dopamine hit after hit.
The negative results on our mental health is astounding. Anxiety, depression, poor sleep, FOMO and loneliness, we’re less engaged in human relationships because we’re watching other people on our phones.
On a day-to-day technology front, I’ve seen action manifest with people turning their phones grayscale to make them less appealing and manually restricting app usage on their phones, to the point of purchasing a digital wellness tool in BRICK.
In the running world, I’ve seen organized group runs that actively eschew the running watch. “No metrics!” they implore! And it’s a great way to think, in my opinion. Just as with smartphones, our running watches, with all the biometric data that they provide us in real-time is a really new way for us to (over)think about our running.
For goal-oriented people like us, the ability to spend more time on thinking about how far and how fast we are going, and then being able to compare that to our peers on those little screens that are just so capable (and enabling)… it’s maybe not the healthiest direction.
I’ve spoken a lot about how I started running again as an adult because I was spending every waking hour of my 20s listening to music for work, so the time I spent running outside was necessary solace from that. It was a time to untangle my thoughts. It was active rest, and it helped me so much.
Getting out for a run without a watch, or without music or podcasts, is a fantastically straightforward way of getting offline. I never quite manage to go phone-free because I love to take a photo or two of the things I see on my run, but actively residing in the difficulty of what I’m putting my body through when I go for a run is one of the most rewarding parts of my running practice.
Running sucks, after all, but I love it.
Thanks for reading this longform work. It’s more than just an IG caption, and my goal is that you’re suitably enriched by it. You know what else is a fantastically straightforward way of getting offline? Reading a book, and I have a fantastic option for you.
My debut book, This is Running is released on 2nd April in the UK and April 7th in the US. Please pre-order it if you haven’t yet!
USA - Amazon US | Bookshop US | Barnes & Noble
UK - Amazon UK | Bookshop UK | Waterstones
Canada - Amazon CA | Indigo
And for those of you in Los Angeles, my launch party will be in Pasadena and I’m cooking up something very silly with my friends Jinghuan and Ezra. Come if you can!
Wed 08 Apr - Launch party at Vroman’s, Pasadena - REGISTER
Thanks for reading
Raz x