The Slow Runner's Nirvana

Get out of your head and live your life. 

What began as a suicide note to a close circle of family and friends has been transformed into an unflinching account of the author’s experience with suffering—both emotional and physical—and a snapshot of the strategies that helped him heal. The Slow Runner’s Nirvana captures how one man’s commitment to the grueling reality of the marathon brought clarity to the sources of human suffering and thereby revealed a path to finding joy.

As he approached age forty, Craig Grossman’s conventional family life, career, and friendships had all collapsed under the weight of a lifelong struggle with depression and a profound dissatisfaction in the success the world said he had achieved. Teetering on the brink after several suicide attempts, he found distance running at the unlikeliest of times and in the unlikeliest of ways. Running became his most valuable teacher, and its accompanying suffering became the vehicle to quiet his mind. Completing a marathon became his overriding purpose in life. To get to the finish, Grossman had to tread a very narrow emotional and physical path and do everything correctly every day. Errors had severe and immediate consequences. Every training run was a minefield. If he wanted to finish, there was no place for suicidal thoughts, depression, fear, anxiety—or anything else unrelated to moving his body from mile 0 to mile 26.2. With his focus solely on the road ahead, the path away from the traps of the American success story, mental illness, and chronic pain came into focus—and the doors to contentment opened.

The Slow Runner’s Nirvana is a story of the examined life that springs not from high-priced retreats but from the bruising milieu of Ivy League institutions, elite law firms, venture capital–backed companies, and psychiatric hospitals. With a punchy Buddhist perspective, author Craig Grossman shares his experience of finding his way through mental illness and physical pain through running. Very slow running.