Why We Run

‘I don’t know anyone who can run a marathon as fast as you’. The pause was unforgettable, and I lowered my head with bashfully pride. ‘And is so fat.’

There were 12 of us sat in the Red Lion pub on Whitehall, the first time we had got together since leaving school, and I had just finished my first London marathon. I had never been a distinguished athlete, and since I had come to London had given in to the inevitable girth of office life. As a teenager I had grown too quickly for my muscles to take hold of my body and had, in large part, been reduced to watching the sports I wished I could play from the sideline. While my friends competed against one another, I took to running in the hills above our school, at first as a kind of rebellion against an order I could not take part in, but later an act of liberation from the white lines that marked out the boundaries of convention that led to the lives our parents had.

After that first marathon I ran one almost every year. I watched the weight fall off, and then return, but it was not until I had finished the marathon in Paris, that I wondered how much further I could run. 5 miles? 10? Another marathon?

The Spartathlon is acknowledged as being the toughest footrace on earth. Following the trail of the Greek messenger Philippides, in whose memory we mistakenly run the marathon, it covers 152 miles, non-stop, from Athens to Sparta. During the day temperatures rise to 37 degrees, and the night is spent crossing two vast mountain ranges. Since its conception in 1984 fewer than 800 people have finished it. I wanted to do something extraordinary, something that no one I knew had ever done. I wanted to prove to myself and to those against whom I had never had the chance to compete.

10 days after I made my outrageous announcement my father-in-law died, suddenly and unexpectedly. His wife became locked into a depression and she lost all ability to communicate the most basic of emotional states leaving those of us around her completely impotent to relieve her pain. I returned home after the funeral, and drank an entire bottle of gin as I did not know what else to do with myself.

Long distance runners are, by their nature, solitary figures and to ask why they run such epic distances is usually met with the response that Chris Brasher, the founder of the London marathon, got when he asked the same question: ‘come on Chris, you know why’. Many who enter this world return with some kind of confession. Dean Karnazes, the most famous ultra-distance runner in the world, came to it as a way of flagellating himself over the grief of his dead sister. With good reason we do not ordinarily seek to indulge ourselves with the philosophical virtues that pain offers, but at least since the time of the anarchic Greek hero Alcibides we have embraced pain as a means to a greater good. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it most succinctly when he said that through pain the sufferer becomes a knower, and that through that knowledge we feel most alive to the world around us. It is amusing to wonder what this flute-playing opera lover knew about pain, but what he wrote was repeated by every ultra-distance runner I have met.

I had a year to train for the Spartathlon and in the beginning the 120 miles I ran a week expelled the frustration at not being able to do anything to help. In time that changed. The Latin verb cogito, ‘to think’ has its etymology in the idea of ‘shaking things together’, and when we run additional oxygen is pumped through our brain as our blood flow increases, feeding the imagination. When there is nothing more complicated to focus on than putting one foot in front of the other, the imagination goes to work on unresolved problems. In the incommunicability of my own pain I felt I understood better her grief, and in the numb exhaustion after a 30 mile run I would return more at peace, resolved that with time and patience we could help return my mother-in-law to health.

We returned to France every few weeks, and would take her out to walk in the countryside. In those moments a purpose returned to her step. The Roman poets had a saying ‘solvitru ambulando’ – anything could be worked out by walking, including one’s own emotional tangles. Those who have taken this logic to its extreme include Rosie Swale-Pope, who spent five years running around the world when her husband died. ‘My run around the world started as a journey of loneliness, grief and heartbreak.’ she said, but she knew that running was a way to find her way back to health.

For Spartathlon I enlisted the help of Rory Coleman, a reformed alcoholic and trainer who insisted that I needed to do at least two sessions a week in the gym. The emphasis in modern gyms, as opposed to their Greek or Victorian predecessors, is on comfort and luxury. Members are supplied with limitless soft, warm towels, hand cream and hair gel and we are confronted at every turn by floor to ceiling mirrors to satisfy our vanities. On the treadmill the very purpose of motion is reduced to a single, immovable point, and it caters for the sentimental athlete who wants to have the luxury of the experience of athletic exertion without having to pay the physical or mental price for it. I hated every minute of it. The only satisfaction came when I leg-pressed a quarter of a ton. But it worked. By the time I got to Athens I had lost 10 kilos and my legs had turned from flesh and blood into twisted steel, and my heart rate had dropped to 34 beats per minute.

On the start line I was befriended by Thierry, a veteran of 15 Spartathlon finishes. ‘90% of success is mental’, he said tapping his temple. ‘The legs are much easier to train and can always carry on. By once the mind starts to go, then you know you are finished.’ During the day none of this had any relevance. We passed through the heat untroubled and when we went through 50 miles, at 4pm, I felt better than I had done at the start, the junk of the carbohydrates I had loaded up with having been flushed out of my system.

By 10pm I was moving more slowly and my mind was starting to burn out. In his classic textbook, Dynamic Psychology, R. S. Woodworth wrote that ‘often we have to get away from speech to think more clearly’, and that seemed to be exactly what was happening. Words, fragments of sentences that had kept me occupied for the last few hours vanished altogether, like the fading image of a television being switched off.

It took another hour before I started to meander across the road, but the hallucinations did not start until the battery in my head torch faded, shapes appearing at the side of the road out of the moonlight. After 17 hours it all corroded in an instant. I could not breathe. There was blood and puss weeping out of my shoes. My head felt heavy and rolled onto my chest. My eyes started to close and I began to shiver as the heat left my body. It felt like the rapture of deep – l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs – as the diving pioneer Jacque Cousteau called it. I tried to stand, but my legs gave way beneath me as I vomited water all over my bloodied shoes. ‘That’s enough’, I heard a doctor said. The bus that took me to Sparta was full of those who had fallen before me. Legs were curled up and covered in dust, salt, vomit and blood. I had covered 85 miles and could not move another step.
*

For three months I slept for 14 hours a day, and sat through meetings at work in a dumb peacefulness. I had become more empathetic, more patient, a kinder person. But soon enough the silt of everyday life returned. I started to drink again, I put on weight, and started to feel that person evaporate. I remembered how I had seen the world before I had started out on this transformation, and I didn’t like it. In that year I also fell away from many people I had known nearly my whole life. Perhaps I was asking too much of them. I too should have been concentrating on saving up for a car, increasing my mortgage payments, but when we met up, after the first effusion there was an increased awkwardness between us.

In the end I asked too much of running as well. What I had really hoped for, and what I wish I could offer you, is the possibility of reaching an ascetic state in which you can rest calm for all eternity, forever transcended above the futile banalities of everyday life. I have to settle with another attempt at the race.

My father told me long ago that to become better people we needed to rid ourselves of all vanities. I had nodded when he said this, but I didn’t understand at all what he meant. Now I think I do. While my mother-in-law still suffers, we are now better equipped to listen to her. Running is not about fitness, or even other people. It is simply about becoming a more sentient person, living what the novelist Alice Munro called, a more authentic life.