When Effort Needs Proof

The ponies, Auckland, New Zealand, Dec 2025

I laced up my shoes and headed down the hill onto the countryside road, my eyes adjusting to the evening light. My headphones had no battery, which unsettled me more than I expected. Somewhere along the way, I’d conditioned myself to reach a running mood only once my alt-rock playlist started, as if the music was what gave me permission to begin. 

Now, I was forced to run to the world, unfiltered. And my thoughts, unfortunately.

At first, there was only my breath, my footsteps on concrete, and the occasional car rushing past. Then I started noticing everything else — the impossibly green paddocks, the trees rising beside the road, flowers swaying with grass in front of a house like an impressionist painting, and the mountains rolling toward a distant strip of blue ocean. Even the smell of cow pat felt oddly sharper. The lack of sound turned everything else up.

A little further on, I came across a handful of ponies grazing by the roadside. I slowed, then instinctively pulled out my phone and hit pause on my run tracking; this couldn’t bring down my time.

I fed them grass over the fence, laughing as one with a cow-like pattern kept nudging forward for more. Another pony looked up and ambled over. They looked so natural against the backdrop of pine trees. I wondered why I'd never seen them before.

As time passed, it tugged at the back of my mind that my total run time was still being tracked. I gave one pony a quick pat and rejoined the road. Pressing “start” again, I felt a small twinge of guilt for pausing anyway, like I was cheating the system.

Running further along, birds rustled in the bamboo while the sun began descending. My thoughts drifted more freely than usual, and I thought of the old question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If I didn’t record the run, did it even count?

Of course it counted. My lungs didn’t know what phones were.

Still, the thought bothered me. I’d lose my streak. I wouldn’t know my pace or distance. There’d be nothing to show for it — no neat map, no numbers, no small bit of approval later in the day. Pausing felt like cheating, but stopping the tracking felt worse, like opting out of proof.

Somewhere along the road, I realised, I wasn’t using metrics to improve, I was using them to approve. It was a quiet way of telling myself I’d done enough, that this version of effort was acceptable.

I kept running. I kept the tracker on. I didn’t resolve anything. 

But I noticed the difference between what stayed with me and what didn’t. The numbers faded almost immediately. The ponies didn’t. The pine trees didn’t. The way the light softened everything stayed.

Although I still track my runs and still care about consistency, I don’t want the evidence to be the point.

I want to make room for future ponies and pine trees.