In Praise of Doing it The Hard Way

I miss friction.

Not the kind that Body Glide is made for, but the kind that’s increasingly absent from modern life.

You can order a high-protein meal without talking to anyone. Start a relationship without leaving the couch. AI will write your emails, plan your training, and summarize this very essay so you don’t have to experience the friction of actually reading it. Everything is optimized for ease, speed, and the removal of maximum inconvenience.

And I hate it.

Without friction, life starts to take on the qualities of tapioca pudding: beige, flavorless, and vaguely lumpy. The real world increasingly feels like life online, an infinite scroll of shiny objects, none of which feel particularly real. I think that’s because friction is what keeps you in contact with your actual experience. It’s what forces you to feel something instead of just gliding past it.

Which is maybe why I fell in love with the most inconvenient sport on earth.

Trail running was born from maximum friction. Sisyphean by nature, except Sisyphus didn’t have to pay a registration fee, and at least his boulder didn’t require a drop bag. It is the path of most resistance, built by people who looked at a perfectly good road and thought, nah, I’ll take the mountain. It’s friction we’ve figured out how to score, compete in, and (for some of us) base our entire personalities around.

And for the potentially addicted among us, trail running delivers. Steep trails whose construction laughs in the face of a switchback. Singletrack so choked with rocks and roots that the actual “trail” is more suggestion than reality. Races that carry runners hundreds of miles just to deposit them right back where they started, hours, days, and several blisters later. A sport so full of friction, it can support multiple active lubricant brands.

I love that friction, because it forces me to feel the spiky, uneven contours that make life worth living. The whip of wind on a ridgeline that no shell can fully deflect. A trail so steep I have to decide which hand to climb with and which one gets to hold my smushed Oreos. I love feeling cold, and tired, and sore, and hungry, and blistered, because I’m feeling something. That’s a rarity I don’t take for granted in a world that seems increasingly bent on my physical and emotional comfort. Getting to choose the path of most resistance, especially when it comes with a killer view, is such a privilege.

👉 Read Zoë’s Love Letter to Running

A caveat, because I think it matters: this isn’t an argument for glorifying suffering. I’m not talking about sleeping on the floor like an Ancient Spartan to prove something, or running through an injury because stopping feels like weakness, or using physical discomfort as a way to avoid the emotional kind. That’s not friction. That’s avoidance wearing a hydration vest. The friction I’m talking about isn’t an escape from feeling. It’s a way back to it.

Friction demands presence. You will not run an ultra and not feel something. Even if that something costs you a few bucks in KT tape or therapy down the road, it’s something. The silly, extraneous, deeply optional difficulty of trail running takes us off autopilot and puts us back in the front seat of our own lives. Not because hard things are inherently virtuous, but because the things worth feeling have never been particularly easy to get to.

I get the pull of a more frictionless existence. I, too, have Door Dashed myself a giant burrito after a training run. I’ve caught myself scrolling through Strava instead of just sitting with how a run made me feel. The drift toward frictionlessness is easy, because that’s literally the point of it. It’s designed to be easy.

But then I’ll have a day where everything goes slightly wrong in the best possible way. Last week, I missed a turn on a route I’d run dozens of times, ended up on a trail I didn’t recognize, before pulling out my phone only to realize I was practically on the border of Utah and Colorado, almost a full zipcode away from my intended destination. I then spent forty minutes backtracking before bushwhacking through scrub oak with scratched-up shins and no cell service, slightly panicked and completely, electrically alive. I came home with a mediocre GPS track and a story I’ve told fifteen times.

Love is friction. Care is not convenient. The things that really matter ask something of you, your time, your comfort, your willingness to be a little wrecked by the end of it. But what you get in return is feeling the rough, uneven contours of being in genuine reciprocity with something. A relationship where both sides leave a mark.

It would be a lot easier to not care about trail running. I’d have a few more toenails, a lot more money in my bank account, and laundry that doesn’t always smell like sweat and stale electrolyte mix. I wouldn’t know what it feels like to cry at an unsuspecting ham radio operator at an aid station, or to be so tired that a stranger’s encouragement at mile 80 rewires something in your chest (thanks, Jerry). I’d have my weekends back. I’d smell better. But I was never much of a sandal gal anyway.

That’s the thing about friction. It never looks good on paper. But it’s the only thing I’ve found that reliably cuts through the haze. That pulls me out of the scroll and back into the world where things are cold and steep and uncertain and real.

I’ll take that over tapioca pudding every time.

Read More from Zoë Rom

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  Women Are Getting Faster in Ultras. Here’s Why.April 6, 2026

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