“Running takes faith,” journalist Bella Mackie writes in her memoir JOG ON. “You’re a runner and you weren’t one before. How fucking brilliant is that?”

She is preaching to the choir with me. I’ve believed in the transcendent power of running for decades – but I’ve never had it articulated to me quite this clearly. And there’s the twist; the most brilliant thing about the power of running, as articulated by Mackie, is that it transcends language.

Mental illness takes faith, too, Mackie goes on, “faith that you’ll feel better, that you won’t sink into the abyss.” The core of the book is her story of getting out of a lifelong cycle of anxiety and depression by adding running to her life.

From her, I’ve:

• Absorbed a new understanding of the depths, seriousness and prevalence of mental illness, and the many forms it can take,
• Reaffirmed the power of running – this very physical endeavor – to address all variety of very in-the-head conundrums, from garden variety over-thinking to deep depression, and
• Realized that the connection between running and hope goes deeper than words can reach.

Mackie does brilliant work of expanding her personal story with testimony from others (she interviewed hundreds of people) and well-researched background. But all the facts and anecdotes in the world do not add up to change in themselves; at the end of the day, you can only truly grasp the healing potential of running by doing it yourself.

Or by doing your version of running: swimming, walking, cycling, kickboxing. The point is: MOVE in a way that, for you, every day, builds bodily strength, derails destructive cycles and breaks open false “safe” spaces. For Mackie, that meant physically getting out of her apartment despite debilitating anxiety. For me, that means getting away from the voice in my head that says “you can’t you can’t you can’t” by inhabiting a body that says, “yes, you can.”

“Running is my relief,” Mackie writes. “Your relief might come in a different form, but please do try to find it and don’t stop until you do. Demand it, because you shouldn’t spend another day in misery.”

Both Bella and I love running, but we are different in that she discovered it, while I’ve had it to draw on my whole adult life. Her first run coincided with and is corelated with her ascent out of anxiety, whereas I’ve evolved significantly within the practice – often thanks to the practice.

We are also different in approach. Learning to compete with myself and with others has given me my biggest running boosts. Mackie eschews races and times, all while making it clear there are as many ways to approach running as there are runners.

A great many of us can say along with Mackie, “every time I run I get something out of it.”