Running through depression

I have a friend -- let's call him Jed -- with depression. As depressives go, he's fairly high-functioning. He is successful in his marriage and his career. He has routines and tapes that run in his head that allow him to function, and so he gets done what needs doing. To look at him, apart from his rather vacant expression and deadpan manner, you'd never know what a sad robot he was inside. Behind his mask of normalcy is a desire to hide away, like Gollum, alone, in a damp cave at the roots of a mountain. Behind the mask, you don't see the self-loathing, fear, joylessness, and pain he suffers much of the time.  All that misery is tucked behind 40 years of adaptations created to keep away the chirping birds asking whether he has a case of the Mondays.

"Yes," he'd say, "Every day feels like Monday."  And then he'd hate himself because he hates Morrisey.

But, curiously, Jed is also a runner. "It's how I self-medicate," Jed says, "when I'm not drinking, that is."  Running helps him.  Running doesn't cure Jed's blues, but he says it helps keep things in check.  "When I run, life is bearable, and the more I run, the better everything else is.  As hard as the peak weeks of marathon season are physically, that's when my depression is easiest."

So why is it that he sometimes takes a week off for no reason?  Why does he just fall out of the patterns that work for him, that make him function?  If it makes him feel so good, you'd think he'd never skip a workout.  "It only takes one," he says, "to kick off that negative feedback loop.  I skip the workout, and then I feel bad about it, and so I skip another. Then I feel worse, and it compounds and builds.  Before I know it, a week's gone by."

So how does Jed get out of this cycle?  How does a depressed person help himself?  "Sheer willpower," Jed says.  "I force myself. Everything inside is shouting at me to crawl into bed and stay there. Every atom of me screams to do nothing.  I have to push through that.  Running taught me how to push  that hard.  Running a marathons gets bad, but you have to push through that despair at mile 18 or 20 to get your medal."

In short, to run through depression, Jed says:

1. Run anyway, now matter how bad you feel
2. Slavishly obey your routines/plans
3. Forgive yourself when you fail because you will fail
4. Reward yourself when you succeed

What are your suggestions?  Anyone else run through their depression? How do you do it?