John Darnielle had never really been able to stick with a fitness routine until he watched his wife try a Couch to 5K program in 2017. It inspired him to try running himself. “I'm an old dope addict. I don't take care of my body. I actually punish my body,” he says. “But it felt amazing.”

It took him two years to actually get to the 5K mark, but now the Mountain Goats frontman runs every other day, often sharing photos along the way to his Twitter followers. Darnielle averages 15 to 25 miles a week, rewarding himself with a long run every two weeks. “For me, the long run, that's the prize,” he tells me. “I love being over the two hour mark on a run. It's just sort of amazing territory for me.”

Darnielle wakes up between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., along with his oldest son, and tries to hit the pavement before 6:00 a.m. to outpace the North Carolina heat. Afterwards, he fuels himself with oatmeal. “I like my oatmeal savory and not sweet,” he says. “People don't know about this, but it's really good.” Standard toppings include cashews, pumpkin seeds, green chili or mango pickle, and tomatoes when they’re in season. 

This week, the Mountain Goats are releasing Dark in Here, their 20th studio album. Soon, they’ll head out on tour for the first time since the pandemic put live music to a halt. Ahead of that, GQ caught up with Darnielle to talk about the art of making a running playlist and getting his miles in on tour. 

For Real-Life Diet, GQ talks to high-performing people about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.

GQ: What are some of the main benefits you've noticed from running, both physically and mentally?

John Darnielle: Physically I'm in good shape, which is unusual for me. I'm also a person who doesn't think people have to be fit or anything like that. People should look however they want to look and nobody knows how anybody else's body works. But for me, I was uncomfortable in the body I had by 2017. I feel like men's metabolism slows down in a certain way and the weight starts to gather, especially if you've been touring and killing six to eight beers a night for several years. I just was not liking the way I was looking. I especially didn't like the fact that I was getting tired.

I'm more comfortable in my body than I have been in a lot of years. I've always had a somewhat adversarial relationship with my body. To actually be pursuing normal health, for me, is kind of novel in a really satisfying way. Emotionally, it feels really healthy for me.

I obviously want to know about the music you listen to when you run. I saw that you tweeted about programming an entire string quartet section for the final leg of your run. What’s your process like creating a running playlist?

As you probably know ... do you run?

Mhmm.

Okay, so you can get pretty obsessive about what am I going to need at what point in the run? Especially once you're over an hour.

I needed a long playlist. I needed like two and a half hours. So, I just looked at the stuff that I had saved on Spotify, and I just made a playlist of everything I had put a heart on, two and a half hours worth of stuff. That worked real well. It was like, "Oh, you already like all these songs. This is good." That said, it goes in patterns. I go through seasons with music. Sometimes you're listening to more jazz. Sometimes you listen to whatever you're into. At one point, it was long Keith Jarrett pieces.

After I got the Garmin music watch, you can put your own MP3s on that. Then you're sort of not beholden to the selection of Spotify or Apple Music. You can have whatever. So, you throw a bunch of stuff from Bandcamp on there. That's really cool.

These days, if I'm doing a super long one, I'll use a Spotify playlist. The last 45 minutes will be stuff I love from between when I was 11 years old and 21 years old. So I will put in Chaka Khan stuff, Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament, Heart, Boston, Foghat, all this classic rock and soul stuff. Also what they call the second golden age of hip hop, stuff like Digital Underground and X Clan. It’s stuff with a good hook that's going to take your mind off of thinking about whether you're going to finish the run.

I was talking to my editor on this story about how I end up putting Mountain Goats songs on a lot of my running playlists and he pointed out that you guys have a lot of “underrated jock jams.” What are the top three Mountain Goats songs you’d recommend for a run?

I'm guessing that people mainly would run to “This Year,” which is our most popular song. That is for sure a motivating song.

Forgive me, and please note to your readers that I know citing something from the recent album is going to feel like trying to push the restyle, but that's not what I'm doing. It's this song called “As Many Candles as Possible” on Getting Into Knives. I think beat-wise, it's a short song, but I think it'd be very good for that last push. In all seriousness, it's like a weightlifting song.

One of my short-lived forays into a gym was actually pushing weight at a muscle gym, and I did that for several months. It was really fun, but I was a heavy smoker at the time. Dumb. I was really stupid when I was younger.

Oh, maybe “Rain in Soho” off of Goths. That's got a driving beat.

Has running changed your creative process at all?

I don't think it changes my process except in so far as I did notice this on the last couple of records: normally I like to be the first guy in the studio, and I like to be there when stuff is going down in case somebody wants to add a bouzouki or some instrument that I don't think is going to fit on the track. I used to be much more controlling about like, "Well, don't do anything unless I'm watching." Once I had running to do, I let that go. It's like, "I'm going for my run. You guys do stuff. I'll listen to what you're doing when I get back."

Running has become so important to me. It’s become such a big focus for me that, even in the studio, I can find a better balance. Here's the thing, if you grow up hearing about writing and hearing about making art and having these ideas sold to you about the monomania that necessarily goes with writing or making art…the idea is leading a balanced life and making art, they feel like they have to be at odds. But actually, that's a pretty toxic myth. You can actually be healthy and make even better stuff.

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It does feel sort of like a paradox, because you make some of your best art from pain. We all know this, but that does not mean that you have to be suffering to make it. It just means you have to locate your suffering, whatever it was, and transform it. Actually, the better shape you're in, the more angles you're going to be able to get on that.

I'm not the only artist who's been sort of afraid of getting healthy, afraid that maybe it would take the muse away. I've been talking shit about this tendency my whole career, but I don't think I actually have really shed myself of it until the last 10 years or so.

That’s a great point. I'm a person who had a very adversarial relationship with fitness through much of my life. As a younger, creative person I had always internalized that it “wasn’t for me.” Then once I got into running, I realized it was the best thing in the world.

It’s so creative. In the late 90s, I got this CD of brain entrainment stuff. It's a thing where it's binaural beats that play. It was done by one of these very new-agey therapist people who would do a guided meditation at the top of it.

In it, he talked a lot about creativity, but he wasn't talking about the product of creativity. He was talking about the mindset. Whereas for me, creativity has always been what are you making. Where is the creativity going? Not about the state of being, but that thing really informed me. Your creativity is something that sits in you. It's not what you make with it.

On runs, I can't take notes and I'm not going to retain the ideas I have. It's just not going to happen. They're going to go away and you learn to let them occur and let them go back to the source they came from. That's a really amazing process.

Do you have any advice for people who want to get into running but are having trouble starting?

I like to be very conscious of not saying things like “anyone can do it.” There are a number of reasons why people can't do the stuff that they want to do, and I've always wanted to be super conscious of that.

Developing a practice, it's hard. It's very hard as a grownup to start doing anything routinely. You have to shed any worrying about self image stuff, because I know when you first start running, for me all I could think was, "People are going to see John running around and I must look awful." You're haunted by this self image of yourself exercising in public. You really have to say, "No, I don't care what anyone thinks if they see me. I don't care, because what does it mean to me if somebody thinks I look funny out there? There's no reason for that to matter to me." I'd say to do a lot of work with that sort of thing, because I think that does hold a lot of people back from getting into stuff.

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Then, clothes. Nobody ever looked at a pair of bicycle shorts and went, "Oh, I'd like great in those." I felt so funny when I started putting on running shorts. The first time I ran across the Williamsburg Bridge, I'm pretty sure I'm running past people who know The Mountain Goats. You start to own it, and you go, "This is how I look when I'm taking care of myself."

Do you do any cross-training?

I was doing nothing but running. I think that's why I have had some knee issues. So I did some strength training after going to see a doctor about the knee stuff.

Everybody has told me to do yoga. There's a yoga studio nearby and I went and enjoyed it. I said, "Why don't you go on off days for a week or so?" So, I did yoga three or four times in the space of a week.

You've been a vegetarian since the nineties. What’s a typical day of eating like for you?

I have the regimented savory oatmeal breakfast, which I have never been a regimented meal guy. Lunch, I don't really worry about it, because we have two kids, so there's always leftovers. I have a modest plate of leftovers most days. Whether that's a pasta bake or whatever we happened to have last night, that's what I'll have for lunch. I'll try and keep it modest.

For snacks, I snack on nuts. I actually special order these nuts from Lebanon, a company called Al Rifai. Nut roasting in the Middle East is its own sort of thing. I first got familiar with this while passing through the Dubai airport, and there was a big crowd of dudes around this nut stand. I bought a pound. It was so good.

Then, dinner, I let myself have whatever we're having. I try not to be too big a cop with myself about what I'm eating. The main thing for me is to not keep eating after dinner. When I go back out on tour, it's going to be challenging. Touring poses real challenges to eating in a consistent, patterned way.

You’re heading out on tour soon for the first time in a minute. Do you have a plan to stay consistent?

I do. One of the times I knew I was serious about the running was when we were opening for Jason Isbell on tour. Jason plays in amphitheaters. These would be places where to get from the bus to the street was a three-quarter mile walk to the parking lot. Well, I think it was somewhere in Missouri where I was like, "You know what? I'm doing my run here in the parking lot," and I did. I felt like a million bucks for it. I was like, "Wow, okay."

At a certain point, it's how much do you mean it? How much does it mean to you? I ran in Belfast in December 2019 in sideways rain, feet going into icy puddles. It was gnarly, but I did it, and that's what I do on tours. Wherever I wake up, if it's a run day, I suit up and I go. We don't have a shower on the bus most of the time, so maybe that means I'm going to stink for about six more hours after that until we get some place with a shower. Then that's how it is. I just prioritize the run, because it's changed me in ways that a guy my age doesn't expect changing.

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Gabriella Paiella is a senior staff writer at GQ, where she covers culture in the form of features, profiles, and Q&As. She’s profiled Nicolas Cage, Jeremy Strong, and Zoë Kravitz for the cover of the magazine, explored why men are so obsessed with the 2003 nautical drama Master and Commander,... Read moreSenior Staff WriterXInstagramRelated Stories for GQReal Life DietRock and RollRunningFoodWorking Out