There is a 1998 movie that I hope you have seen. If you have, you’ll know why I’m recommending it: Billy Crudup as Steve Prefontaine, Donald Sutherland as Bill Bowerman, directed by the Robert Towne behind Chinatown; a convertible the color of butterscotch, Elton John on the soundtrack; geopolitics; Eugene, Oregon, shoes, gravel, sweat and track. You don’t have to be a runner. If you haven’t seen Without Limits, stop reading now. Go watch it. Let’s talk later.
The movie is all about heart – running with it and living with it – and I return to it now in the wake of Alexander Zverev’s US Open win on 13 September 2026. The movie reruns in my head and I return to the place inside myself that was once fascinated by it. This is a place I haven’t visited for some time.
The place inside myself is around 14, uncertain about the big things – because where was I going and what was it all for? – and resolute in my belief in others. Running was conviction and identity, discipline and happiness. Running took the shape of a form of faith, not just in myself but in life, because, “if you’re young and talented,” as Haruki Murakami writes in his memoir on running, “it’s like you have wings.” Running was a portal to flight.
To try to explain how and why running meant so much to me is an exercise in writing within the tight boundaries of poor words, because what explains what it actually feels like to fly?
Flight requires a surprising amount of being tethered. For a runner, this is training, but not only. The tethers can be dull, like choosing pasta over steak, sleep over party, water over all liquids, to sit in a bucket of ice.
You would be forgiven for thinking the training, also, is dull. Because what are the tactics? Where is the grace? There are lots of good jokes. Variations on Run Forrest Run, your sport is our sport’s punishment, run like you stole something (though the best ones come from a runner I will call BM). You would be forgiven for laughing at anyone’s seriousness of dedication to a sport in which the supposed skill is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The secret is that this can require no less than everything you have to give, which is the place of aliveness from which it is possible to fly.
Committing to distance running is the athletic equivalent of checking yourself into a monastery for a meditation retreat from which you’ll never come out.
Like this. Overcome suffering by harnessing your body, which requires you to observe and also harness your mind. Do not latch on to any thought, because it will be dramatic. Think, and you will sabotage. You will quit a track workout, drop out of the race, take a taxi back halfway through a long run. Instead, meditate like this. Take your mind to one anchor. Your breath. Place one foot in front of the other and keep doing it as fast as you can as long as you need to.
The task is not to think, which means there is no space for narrative. Wings.
This is what Steve Prefontaine (“Pre”, from the movie now on your watch list) called racing with pure guts.
Pure guts will expose you. Also, it will free you. Where else do you get to move without the baggage of story?
Pure guts is a sophisticated mental state that costs no less than everything.
One foot in front of the other
My 14-year-old runner self was not yet diagnosed with diabetes, but because I was running, I was in training for the self I would later become. By putting one foot in front of the other even when it was hard, I was learning the skills I’d need to get through a future day: needles, insulin and the things that people would go on to say about people who need these. These realities had nothing on me, because I knew how to put one foot in front of the other.
More to come on this.
But let me first return to Zverev.
The stories a diagnosis brings
After winning his second grand slam title this year, he acknowledged his condition of type 1 diabetes, which he kept hidden for the majority of his career. (Ask yourself why someone would be compelled to do this – I have done the same – it is the desire to not let a preconceived notion become your story).
Zverev thanked his mother for believing from his diagnosis as a young child that he could and would do and be whatever he set out to.
This is Pre’s pure guts. I am not referring to the win, but to the mental framework that created a reality in which an insulin-dependent child could and would and perhaps most importantly, should, continue putting one foot in front of the other in pursuit of that thing in life that gives you wings.
These can be clipped without your consent. His could have been at 4, when he was diagnosed. The doctors told his mother that sports, and life, would be curtailed.
Which is exactly, when I was diagnosed, what medical staff told me.
There are things I didn’t get to do, when I was getting sick and after my diagnosis. These were things that had once meant everything to me. I never won a state championship and was not good enough to run for Stanford and I never broke 11:00 for the two-mile, but I got close, and these things were not the point, and that I never did them is not really a story about diabetes.
There were other miracles along the way, the greatest of which has been tending to the thing that gives you wings in the repetitive, committed act of belief beyond narrative: just another lap, only one more corner to turn, it’s the final mile, it’s the finished race.
Do what you can as much as you can without attachment to an outcome, a friend told me of a workshop she did with the physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté. This is also a way to describe pure guts living.
“This illness will not define us,” Zverev said, and this is pure guts more than any championship win could be. Because, as Johanna Hedva argues in Sick Woman Theory, capitalism measures wellness by the capacity to work, leaving those who cannot work without a guarantee of care.
I know this. Getting a diagnosis with type 1 diabetes has the quality of someone informing you your flight has been cancelled. The place you were going to (your bright future) is no longer available to you, so now you are required to inhabit a new place, which is initially uncomfortable, very-to-extremely-to prohibitively expensive (depending importantly on the health care system in question) and rife with accommodations, adaptations, demanding routines, steep learning curves and needles. It is what Zverev described to Reuters as “two games happening at the same time.” Which, I can say, after 23 years of living with type 1, is not the hardest part.
The flight is still there
The hardest part is dismantling the narratives about your body that have you falsely convinced the flight has actually been canceled. I am writing specifically about narratives in illness, but I could also be referring to narratives of gender, femininity, sexuality, wealth, ability and disability, appearance, and so on. This is something worth doing.
Pure guts living will get you there. It will rebook you on a flight to the place you’d always hoped to go to. Modeling this, as Zverev did in his victory speech, is an act of service.
“Over the years,” Pre is quoted to have said, “I’ve given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement.”
In other words, the reason to chase the thing that gives you wings is the very method that allows you to do so. Take a step, breathe, take a step, breathe, and the longer you stay in your body, the more you are able to get out of your head and fly.
The flight is still there for you to take. Maybe a different airline. Maybe your luggage gets repacked. Maybe you have switched seats. But also, maybe some things get upgraded.
Get on the flight. Forget the story. One foot, in front of the other.
More from Valk Fisher: valkfisher.com.
Adapted from Pure Guts and Wings, first published on Valk Fisher’s blog on 21 September 2026.
