Ginger Zee Has Been Living With Depression Her Entire Career. Running Is How She Beats It.

The Smile That Hid Everything

Every weekday morning, Ginger Zee stands in front of a camera on Good Morning America and tells millions of people what the weather will be. She smiles. She’s warm and funny and completely at ease. She looks, by every measure, like someone who has it together.

For the better part of a decade, that smile was hiding something. Depression. An eating disorder that started when she was ten years old. Two suicide attempts. A mental health hospitalization she checked herself into ten days before the biggest job of her career began.

“I was a master at hiding my mental health issues. Especially from myself.”

Zee has spent years working to close that gap — between what people see on screen and what they couldn’t see. Two bestselling memoirs. Interviews that went places TV personalities almost never go. A commitment to saying the quiet part out loud: the hospitalization, the attempts, the diagnosis she received at 21 and has been managing ever since.

“The stigma of mental illness had a lot to do with that silence,” she’s written. “To be vulnerable and share my imperfections was an impossibility while I was in my twenties. The last thing I would ever do was tell people I had attempted suicide… If I smiled, they might never even suspect it.”

They didn’t. And that’s exactly the problem she’s been trying to fix ever since.

source: Ginger Zee / IG

What She Found in the Miles

Running entered her life not as a strategy but as an accident. She started, kept going, and somewhere in the accumulation of miles realized something was different. The mood lifted differently after a run. The darkness didn’t disappear — it never does — but it thinned. Over time, running became what she’s called the “crown jewel” of her physical and mental connection.

“In my darkest times personally, as my career was ramping up and everything was going, running was the therapy I didn’t realize I had. I believe that running kept me above rock bottom many times.”

There’s a particular cruelty to depression that Zee has described better than almost anyone: it doesn’t care that things are going well. Her career was ascending. She was on national television. By every external measure, life was working. And still the disease showed up, because that’s what it does. Running didn’t solve that. But it helped her stay in the fight.

She ran for years without making it a public statement. Then, in early 2024, she decided to make it one.

13.1 Miles, and What They Meant

Zee signed up for the United Airlines NYC Half Marathon with Team Still I Run — a nonprofit running community built specifically around mental health — and did the work: early mornings, long training runs, the slow and unsexy accumulation of miles that race preparation requires. No shortcuts, no exceptions. A demanding schedule, two kids, a mental health condition managed daily. She trained anyway.

On race day, she ran through Brooklyn and Manhattan and, around mile ten, spotted her husband Ben Aaron and their sons on the sideline. Ben was holding a sign. The sign read: ‘Mommy’s Got the Runs.‘ She ran over to them. She cried.

“I cried tears of joy as I ran to mile 11 after feeling all the love and remembering how fortunate I am to have been able to treat and maintain my mental health.”

She finished. Went on GMA the next morning to talk about it. Sat down with Sasha Wolff, the founder of Still I Run, who had her own version of the same story — hospitalization, running, recovery, and a community built from what she learned. Two women with the same essential arc, standing on the other side of it, telling people it’s possible.

What She Wants You to Know

The thing Zee keeps coming back to, across years of interviews and two books, is something deceptively simple: that the person smiling in front of you can be in serious pain at the same time. That the two things are not mutually exclusive. That this is happening constantly, in all kinds of people, and the cost of not knowing that is real.

“I hope that me talking about it can help distinguish for people that just because you look bright and sunny does not mean that that is what’s happening on the inside. All of us are complex human beings.”

She’s said she doesn’t know if her message reaches the people who need it most. She says it anyway, because she was lucky — lucky to have survived, lucky to have had access to treatment, lucky to still be here. Not everyone is. That awareness sits underneath everything she does publicly, including the running.

The half marathon is not a cure. It’s not a before-and-after. Depression doesn’t resolve, and Zee has never pretended it does. What the race is, instead, is evidence of something harder to name: the ongoing, daily, sometimes exhausting work of continuing to choose the things that keep you going. Therapy. Medication. Community. Miles.

She ran 13.1 miles through New York City. She cried at mile ten. She finished. She talked about it on television the next morning, smiling — and this time, the smile was real.