For most runners, the appeal of movement has very little to do with distance.

It’s about space.

Space from meetings that leak into evenings. From inboxes that refill overnight. From the low hum of responsibility that never quite switches off. You don’t have to be fast to understand that. You just have to be tired in a particular way.

So when Richard and David talk about completing one of the most famous long-distance mountain trails in the world, they don’t begin with elevation or terrain. They begin with permission.

The Tour du Mont Blanc (often called the TMB) is a 200km circular hiking route that goes all the way around Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. The trail passes through the countries of France, Italy and Switzerland.

“The hardest part wasn’t the walking,” Richard said. “It was convincing ourselves we could be away for three weeks.”

That sentence lands quietly, but it carries weight. Because every runner knows what he means.

Both men are runners. Not in the curated, single-identity sense. They run around work. Around school runs. Around marriages and calendars that don’t bend easily.

Running fits. It’s modular.

“You can run for an hour and still make it home for dinner,” Richard said. “Hiking doesn’t work like that.”

David agreed. “Running fits into the cracks. Hiking asks you to move things around.”

Before the trail, their weeks looked familiar. Early mornings. Long days. Evenings split between family time and whatever energy remained. Running was the one thing that felt like theirs. A way to clear the head without asking too much of the people around them.

The idea of leaving—properly leaving—felt different.

“It wasn’t just work,” David said. “It was family. You start and stop the planning many times.”

That stopping matters. It’s where fear hides.

They didn’t name it as fear at first.

It sounded more reasonable than that. Sensible, even. “Is this the right time?” “Can we really be unavailable?” “What if something happens at home?”

Richard put it more plainly later. “Fear is seductive. It pretends it’s protecting you.”

The trail stayed in the background for months. A floating idea. Mentioned mid-run. Joked about. Then quietly written down.

“There’s power in writing it down,” he said. “Once it’s there, you have to look at it.”

And then something shifted. Conversations became more specific. Dates appeared. Other people were told.

“Public accountability,” David laughed. “Once people know, you can’t pretend it was just a thought.”

The decision didn’t arrive with confidence. It arrived with acceptance.

Leaving was harder than expected.

Not because of logistics, though those mattered. But because of the emotional weight of absence. Three weeks is long enough for routines to break and reform without you.

“Our spouses were supportive,” David said. “But of course there were concerns.”

Safety. Distance. The simple reality of being unreachable for stretches of time.

What made it possible, in the end, was trust—and something harder to articulate.

“They could see it mattered,” Richard said. “They could see what running already does for us.”

This wasn’t about getting away. It was about making room.

Once on the trail, life simplified quickly.

Wake. Walk. Climb. Descend. Eat. Sleep.

Repeat.

“The first few days, your body is loud,” David said. “Everything complains.”

Fatigue sharpened awareness. The weight of the pack. The repetition of effort. The quiet stretches where no one spoke because there was nothing left to say.

Then something else took over.

“You stop thinking in paragraphs,” Richard said. “It’s more like sentences. Sometimes just words.”

Meals were shared at long tables with strangers. People from different countries, different lives, drawn together by the same daily rhythm.

“You talk differently,” David said. “You don’t have the usual armour.”

Stories surfaced naturally. About family. About why people had come. About what they were hoping the trail would give them, even if they couldn’t name it clearly.

Not every day was dramatic.

“There were days where there was nothing spectacular to see,” Richard said.

And that, unexpectedly, became the point.

“When there’s nothing obvious, you start noticing other things.”

The way fear loosens its grip when you don’t feed it. How silence can feel companionable instead of empty. How walking for hours strips problems down to their true size.

David felt it too. “You’re drawn into yourself. But not in a heavy way. More like clarity.”

The trail didn’t explain anything. It just made some things harder to ignore.

They returned to full calendars and familiar pressures.

But something had shifted.

“When I got home, my kids wanted to go hiking immediately,” Richard said. He laughed, but there was pride there too.

The trail hadn’t taken him away from family. It had given him something back to bring home—presence, patience, perspective.

David noticed it in smaller ways. Less urgency. More attention. A willingness to sit with discomfort rather than outrun it.

You don’t need a multi-day trail to understand this story.

If you run, you already do.

Every run is a small act of stepping away. Of choosing attention over noise. Of carving out space that doesn’t need to justify itself with productivity.

“The trail just stretched that practice,” David said. “Made it unavoidable.”

In the end, it wasn’t about the mountain.

It was about remembering that movement can be a way back to yourself. That time away, taken intentionally, doesn’t weaken your life—it steadies it.

And that running, at its best, isn’t about speed at all.

It’s about noticing where you are. And choosing, again and again, to be present.

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