Why Brendan Leonard doesn't listen to anything when he runs

Brendan Leonard, who most people know as Semi-Rad, started drawing his now-recognizable pie charts almost by accident. He was at a diner in New York with a friend who'd finished fourteen marathons, and after the host asked if they'd prefer a table or a booth, his friend deadpanned that zero percent of people actually prefer a table. Brendan sketched it as a pie chart on a napkin, posted it, and kept going. He calls it "emotional data visualization," borrowed loosely from XKCD, and it's grown into illustration work for running brands alongside the freelance writing he's done since 2004 and the newsletter he now sends to around sixteen thousand subscribers every week.

Running wasn't always part of the plan. His first marathon in 2006 was a way to quit a six-year, pack-a-day smoking habit, and by his own account it was miserable. He didn't run again for nine years. What pulled him back in wasn't running itself but rock climbing, which he'd gotten into after getting sober in his early twenties, following years of freelance writing for climbing and outdoor magazines. That changed around 2013 or 2014, when a climber fell twenty-five feet and landed on a ledge next to him, seizing on impact. After nearly a decade of climbing without seeing anything like it, the accident was enough to push him toward trail running instead, a way to still get into the mountains without the same risk. "In ultra running, you just kind of feel like you're gonna die," he says. "You don't actually die."

These days he doesn't run with headphones, podcasts, or notifications of any kind. Having a kid pushed him into becoming a morning runner, and somewhere in that shift, running became the one part of his day nothing else is allowed into. He brings up a line from Murakami that's stuck with him for years: I don't run in a void, I run to acquire a void. Some runs produce real ideas, the kind he'll stop mid-run to voice-note into his phone. Other times he gets home and can't remember thinking about anything at all. Either way, that's the point.

That same instinct shapes how he talks about the sport more broadly. He's not particularly interested in conversations about where trail running or ultrarunning is headed as an industry, because to him, that's really a conversation about marketing and products, not about the actual experience of being out there. Most of the miles a person runs in a year have nothing to do with a race. If the only reason to run is to prepare for one, he says, that's a waste of time, given how much comes out of the ordinary, unglamorous days of just doing it.

He's run several hundred milers, including one where he and a film crew tried to document his first attempt, which he now considers a mistake that only added stress to an already brutal thirty-five hours. These days, with a four-year-old at home, he's less interested in signing up for anything that pulls him away for a full weekend, and he suspects he could finish a hundred miler in noticeably less time now, mostly by spending less time sitting around at aid stations.

What he has signed up for next is a twenty-four hour race two miles from his house, repeating a mile-and-seven-tenths loop from noon to noon. It plays to essentially none of his strengths: he's not fast, he doesn't love overnight running, and short repetitive loops make it easy to talk yourself into quitting. He's not sure why he's drawn to it, only that repeating the same kind of race over and over stops teaching you anything new, and he'd rather find out what a totally different kind of hard day looks like.

Hear the full conversation on the Maybe Running Will Help? Podcast here.