Going for a Run While the Rule of Law Collapses

Is it immoral to train for a marathon right now?

Midjourney generation

This past Monday, two days after Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs, was killed by Border Patrol agents, I went to work.

In the office, there was no discussion of the killing. No mention at all, in fact. Instead, I had a relatively banal day shifting text around in Figma, debating strategy in meetings, responding to Jira tickets, chatting with product managers and devs on Slack.

Later that week, immigration enforcement agencies kept up their deportation quotas in violation of the 4th Amendment. And I woke up early to get in a quick run before my 7 a.m. meeting.

Life rolled on while heavily-armed men smashed into the homes of U.S. citizens or dragged them from cars. My wife ran our daughter to daycare in the stroller. I did a workout on a treadmill. On Thursday, my team at work demoed a new feature. We gave each other high fives afterwards.

How do we reconcile the American experience of 2026? Jackbooted, masked government agents shoot Americans in the street and then you go to work and wonder what marathon you should train for this year.

This ambiguity gap—between normal life and sanctioned violence—keeps me up at night.

I used to think that the rise of authoritarianism was an escalation of boundaries pushed further and further. Like that quote from Martin Niemöller (“First they came for the Communists…”).

It seems, however, that the reality is one of two parallel worlds. In the first, normal life continues—the rule of law holds; we think about work, family, and the little things that make life tolerable.

Meanwhile, a separate zone grows, one where decisions are made arbitrarily by those with the guns.

In a recent Atlantic piece, Aziz Huq described the recent American experience as similar to the Nazi-era Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of “the dual state,” where much of 1930s German society operated under stable laws, even as the Nazi regime established a domain of lawless state violence.

“Fraenkel insisted it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws,” writes Huq. Instead the process was insidious.

The key was that the “normative state” was not immediately overrun by the zone of violence unchecked by legal protection, what Fraenkel called a “prerogative state” where ordinary laws don’t apply—prerogative power being the right of a monarch to act without regard to laws.

The normative state is where you and I are probably spending our time. Right now I’m thinking about my tax returns. About whether we should move into a different apartment. About some design reviews next week.

Maybe you are like me: you have bills to pay, a vacation planned for the spring, maybe a few playdates on the calendar. In this normative state, the fire department comes if your cat gets stuck in a tree. You think about your hobbies, goals, and dreams. Maybe you’re training for a half marathon.

In the normative state, one looks around and thinks, “Huh, feels fine here.”

At least for now. David French points out in a recent NY Times piece that these zones are shifting. “In the normative state,” writes French, “your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.” Renee Good thought she was acting within the normative state, but had unwittingly entered the prerogative zone. Facing her was a masked agent unconstrained by law. He shot her dead.

In the prerogative state, violence on behalf of the regime does not face consequences. Far from it; the agent’s cheerleaders have raised over one million dollars on his behalf. In the prerogative state, killing people in the street might make you rich.

Fraenkel’s framework might help explain why folks who write about sports or fitness culture have struggled to say much of substance in this moment: writing about sport, running, or fitness might only make sense within the normative state.

The conversation I’ve seen in these circles has largely centered around whether athletes and fitness influencers are obliged to post about politics on social media. Paramilitaries are gunning down citizens down in the street and the debate is whether people should share their disapproval on Instagram?

Very normative coded.

This isn’t to throw shade on people processing the deterioration of liberal democracy in real time. Rather to point out the difficulty of trying to straddle the ambiguity between these two zones—between normality and the abyss.

Here is where the newsletter author usually makes recommendations—call your Senator, support such-and-such mutual aid group, join a non-violent protest.

OK. I’ve done that for ten years now. I’ll try to do more. Like you, thirty years from now when my daughter when she asks what I did in the fight against illiberal autocracy, I don’t want to answer with: “Well, I marginally increased shareholder value.”

Yet we still live in normative space. We still harbor dreams that didn’t count on a global wave of populist authoritarianism.

Is it immoral to train for a marathon while the brownshirts gain power? Is it inappropriate to consider the mundanity of your body while other bodies are gunned down in the street? Are we, to paraphrase Mario Savio, obliged to put our own bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus of the machine so that it stops?

I don’t know. God forbid I have the hubris to tell you how to live in such a moment.

Midjourney generation.

Here’s what I do know: that we must avoid the temptation of thinking this an aberration. That it all ends when the Executive finally leaves the White House. That once he’s gone, things will swing back to normal.

This is a fantasy. This is America now.¹

All this reminds me of a children’s song that Spotify often serves up when I’m making dinner for my daughter. It’s called “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. Maybe you’ve heard it.

The song’s conceit is that the narrators hunting the bear keep encountering obstacles—tall grass, a river, thick mud, a cave. At each encounter, they reason how they’ll move forward:

“We can’t go over it
We can’t go under it
We’re just gonna have to go through it”

That is, I think, the sad reality of history. We can’t dodge the circumstances of our times or any horrors to come. We have the beautiful burden of mere humanity, souls yanked out of non-existence and forced to confront the meat thresher of life.

We’re just gonna have to go through it.

More from Footnotes

Politicians In Public Exercising Badly

The Internet Radicalization Engine is Coming for Sport

My Oura Ring Says Everything Will Be Fine

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Things I loved this week:

• “What kind of art is needed at a time like this? Art that shows love in the midst of devastation. Art that insists joy is still here, in the very spaces that are being terrorized. Art that reminds us beauty and humanity still exist, even while news feeds show otherwise.” — Ariana Wolf

  Today we march. Tomorrow we dance.

• “Dozens of students from my daughters’ school lined the sidewalks and medians, holding their signs. Cars and trucks honked as they went by, and the teens erupted in cheers. On and on this went, such a beautiful, hopeful cacophony!” — Katie Arnold

  mad as hell

• “It seemed that was the right thing to do—offer that group run, a safe place for people to gather and have their normalcy for the day, and then if they want to protest or strike or go march, they could do that.” (“How Runners are Responding in Minnesota” in Outside)

• “The Targets, the Gaps, the Sports Basements of the world aren’t closing but your small independent bookstore is. Your local running store is. These small businesses are closing because they recognize it’s the right thing to do.” — Katherine Douglas

  Thoughts While Running #34

• Hat tip to my wife who stumbled upon a wonderful rendition of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” by Jon Batiste. It’s the perfect tune for a cozy winter evening. We’ve been listening on repeat all week.

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Parting thought

“Damn it, I happen to love this country.”
— J. Robert Oppenheimer

1. And perhaps soon to be be the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.