Like a lot of runners, Adam Devine uses exercise as stress relief. He got sober in 2013, and picking up running a couple of years later helped him keep at it, he said.
But in 2020, Devine, a lawyer, thinks, he took it too far. He was living in Brooklyn, trying to stay alive in a global pandemic while surrounded by mass death. He was also getting divorced. He didn’t want to lose his sobriety, so he ran 5,000 miles that year—about a half-marathon a day—instead.
He doesn’t see what he did as something virtuous or worthy of praise. Instead, he replaced one addiction with something else that made him hurt.
“You get used to being in pain,” he said about addiction. “You get used to being in a dark place, and sometimes the running can be a way that you can feel that familiarity with being in a dark place and being in pain but not having it be done to you.”