Six runners. Six relationships with the road shaped by pain, obsession, defiance and something close to devotion. Their stories, in photos.
NO NOISE: Stories from Running Obsessives is our series that explores what happens when runners strip everything back – no music, no metrics, no distractions. Just the run.
Imagine leaving the house with nothing but your house keys. No phone in your pocket, no music in your ears, no smart watch on your wrist – no noise. You start running, and soon it’s just you and the rhythm of your breathing, the thun thun thun of your shoes hitting pavement, and some wild force propelling you forward.
Across Europe, a group of obsessives are pushing that idea to its limit: building rituals, chasing flow states and returning to the same effort, day after day.
A cultural shift is occurring as die-hard runners reject noise, notifications, and disruptions, instead channeling obsessive energy into fully-consuming running practices. For 28-year-old Vincent Reimann, digital distractions block the flow state he’s doggedly chasing on his Berlin runs. Whether he’s crowd-weaving in the city centre or running uninterrupted on the outskirts, he’s looking for the moment when “suddenly it clicks.” He says, “I run for as long as it takes until I reach that flow state […] even when I really don’t feel like it. Because I know that afterwards I might have a breakthrough.”
Reimann finds that creativity cascades through him on these hours-long NO NOISE runs. Imran Naaji, on the other hand, views running as a mystery to unlock. “I know I’m obsessed with running,” the Paris-based 23-year-old says, “but I don’t know why. That’s why I keep running – to find the answer.” The son of a two-time French track and field champion, Naaji is redefining what running means to him, the sport now consuming him. “Before, I rejected running. Now I can’t go a day without it. It feels like my destiny, like something I was meant to find,” he says.
Naaji isn’t alone in his obsessions. London-based 39-year-old Lois Haruna-Cooper was warned by doctors to cut down on her multiple daily runs. “You expect me to wake up one morning and not run?” she recalls rebutting. “That’s not sustainable.” For her, the practice isn’t optional – it’s as ingrained as brushing her teeth, so much so that her heart chambers have physically changed in response to her ritual early morning runs on the quiet streets of Luton. “I don’t know how fast I’m going, or how far I’ve come,” she says. “I just want to run for the sake of running.”
When Rowan Keech’s endometriosis symptoms began at the age of 15, she didn’t know what was causing the pain. When the 24-year-old was finally diagnosed four years ago, rather than succumbing to her condition, Keech began running – her first marathon-distance run a Saharan ultramarathon. “The pain that you endure is so intense, but it translates from what I’ve already experienced. I can grow with the pain now rather than feel held back by it,” she says. “Nothing gives me the same sort of mental freedom as running does. Nothing compares.”
Like Keech, Habiba Halimi’s resiliency mindset was shaped by her drive to run. “Running is having freedom,” says the Afghanistan-native. At 24 years old, Halimi has experienced forced migration, the loss of her father, and the barriers facing Afghan women runners. “The endurance that I have [from] these long runs – that is a mindset I use for everything,” she says. “I wish that one day, girls and women there will be able to run freely without any distractions or any sort of worries.”
86-year-old Barbara Humbert is no stranger to the flow state. “You put one foot after the other. It’s a meditation. You are somewhere else.” Again and again, Humbert rejects outside noise and returns to pure running. Nearing 90, her devotion to the practice remains lifelong. “Nobody tells me what to do, what to make, what to feel,” she says. “I belong to myself when I’m running.”
NO NOISE: Stories from Running Obsessives is our series that explores what happens when runners strip everything back – no music, no metrics, no distractions. Just the run.
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