Inside the minds of running obsessives with Dr Peter Olusoga

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. 

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. 

Dr Peter Olusoga is a sports psychologist with a PhD in stress and coping in high-performance environments. Through his work and podcast Eighty Percent Mental, he examines how athletes adapt to pressure, build resilience and sustain performance over time. Through our runner’s stories, Dr Olusoga helps unpack what’s really happening inside the NO NOISE running mindset – and explains why choosing hard work might be the point. 

“Run until it clicks”: Chasing the flow state

7am on the dot, every day – for over 2,200 days. Doctor Lois Haruna-Cooper has a simple rule when it comes to her daily run: make no exceptions. For four years straight, she’s never broken it, stacking up the miles alongside her work as a GP in London, and even through the physical demands of pregnancy. By removing obstacles (“I reduce anything that could get in the way of me leaving”) and disabling all notifications, her runs have become automatic. ​“Sometimes I come home and I can’t even recall the run. It’s as instinctive as brushing my teeth.” 

Discomfort as power: Learning to take it with you

“The famous sports psychologist, Ken Ravizza, used to say, ​‘What kind of athlete are you if you can’t perform when things aren’t going well?’” says Dr Olusoga. ​“We think we need the perfect conditions to perform – I have to feel good, I have to feel confident, the weather has to be right. But it’s not really true. We need to become more psychologically flexible.” That means learning to sit with discomfort, rather than avoid it: ​“Can I take that discomfort with me on the run, instead of trying to get rid of it?”

It’s a mindset that 24-year-old Rowan Keech has got to know intimately, through not just devouring countless ultramarathons, but completing them in the Sahara desert. Every year. Despite experiencing unexplained pain and fatigue for years – later diagnosed as Stage 3 endometriosis – Rowan’s never stepped back. In fact, she leaned in – harnessing her pain and using it as fuel. ​“The pain that you endure on those ultramarathons is so intense,” she says. ​“I have total tunnel vision and my only thought is: ​‘just survive.’” This physical and mental intensity mirrors what Rowan’s already been through. But with running, she’s in control. ​“When I’m running, I’m in control of my suffering. It’s how I push myself to see what I can do. Pain doesn’t hold me back anymore; it’s something I can grow with.”

For Parisian Imran Naaji pushing his own limits on cobbled Seine-side streets, the pull is less about pain and more about uncertainty. The 23-year-old son of French athletics champion Atiq Naaji, Imran defiantly resisted running until he found his own way into it: ​“Running was always there, like a shadow behind me,” he says, ​“Then one day, I turned around and faced it. I realised it was a part of my identity: I just had to make it my own”. Now, running half marathons in 1hr 06mins and eating up over 100km of road a week, it’s the unknown that keeps him hooked. ​“In Arabic we call it ​‘maktub’: my destiny,” Imran says. ​“I’m still trying to understand the hold running has on me. I don’t have the answer yet, but I keep going because I trust that something is waiting for me. I just have to be ready.”

“I’m going to take this as far as I can”: Choosing the hard way

For Dr Olusoga, it comes down to this: ​“We need challenge in order to grow and develop our capacity to manage it – to build resilience. If we remove those challenges, we remove the opportunity for that growth.” 

No one embodies that mindset more clearly than Rowan. When she was finally able to move again, she didn’t ease back in – she pushed forward. ​“I just grabbed it with both hands, and thought, ​‘I’m going to take this as far as I can.’” Noticing that much of the conversation around the often misunderstood condition of endometriosis was focussed on limitation, Rowan took it upon herself to fill the gap. ​“So much content is focused on the suffering – how you couldn’t carry on. So I became the person who says, ​‘Look how far you can go.’” Running became not only her way of building resilience, but empowering others to do the same. 

“No matter what”: Where resilience is made

24-year-old Habiba Halimi’s relationship to running was shaped under entirely different conditions. Growing up in Kabul, running wasn’t a given. It was a risk. ​“Running in Kabul, there was a lot of pressure,” she says. ​“But it helped me understand my capabilities when the world around me told me otherwise.” After rebuilding her life in Europe, that mindset stayed with her. Running shifted from an act of freedom to a source of stability – something she could return to, no matter what changed around her. 

“Resilience is the capacity to withstand pressure,” says Dr Olusoga. ​“And we build that through experience by putting ourselves in difficult situations, like challenging runs and learning how we respond.” For Habiba, that lesson extends far beyond running. ​“It doesn’t matter where you come from or what your story is or what your struggles are. If you have the mindset to overcome them, you can move forward.”

For some, that mindset lasts a lifetime. At 86 years old and with over 150 races, over 60 marathons and a 24 hour, 125km race under her belt, Barbara Humbert is still returning to the same simple formula. ​“You put one foot after the other. It’s a meditation. I belong to myself when I’m running.” Decades on, Barbara proves that the principle holds: strip it back, and keep going. 

Across the lives of each runner, obsession takes a different form. Ritual. Curiosity. Defiance. Endurance. But the pattern is the same: a repeated return to effort, noise stripped away. 

Not to escape the difficulty, but to find something in it.

Dr Peter Olusoga is a sports psychologist with a PhD in stress and coping in high-performance environments and host of podcast Eighty Percent Mental, where he discusses the role of the mind in peak performance. His wider work examines how athletes adapt to pressure, build resilience and sustain performance over time.

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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