From the album Perverts
This is a song about someone who accidentally builds a life while trying to destroy one. He picks suicide-by-cardio because it lets him pretend effort equals commitment, then discovers the method itself was the escape he needed all along.
So he decided the best way to end his life was to have a heart attack / He thought he could induce the heart attack by running a very fast way for a sizable distance
He's choosing the only form of suicide that requires peak physical health to execute. That contradiction suggests he was never actually trying to die—he was looking for a reason to run until something changed.
So he set out to run as hard as he could / He ran and he ran until he was exhausted and he collapsed / But he didn't die
The collapse reads like success—he did exactly what he planned—but the fact that he didn't die gets framed as failure. He's grading himself on dying, not on whether running made him feel different.
So the next night he tried the same thing and he ran again / And he still didn't die / So he tried again the third night / And then the fourth and the fifth
The repetition that was supposed to guarantee death is literally cardiovascular conditioning. He's treating stamina-building as proof of determination, not realizing the process is solving the problem he thought required dying to fix.
And after this had been going on for a week / He felt so good that he didn't want to kill himself anymore
The story presents this as a surprise ending, but the whole structure was designed to arrive here. A healthy person cannot run themselves to death—the body adapts. He chose the one method guaranteed to fail, which might mean he knew what he needed before he started.
The narrator tells this like a parable about accidental recovery, but the whole setup suggests the character knew running wouldn't kill him. He needed permission to keep going, and suicide gave him that—turns out the permission was the cure, not the goal.