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This is the Colin Potter 10k venue

Social Running

Social running - it is possible...just

Every Friday evening my running club - the Shelton Striders - organises what it calls a social run. It's a great opportunity to relax (if that can be done while moving under your own steam) before the weekend - which invariably means either a race or a long training run in the build-up to a race - and to chat with one's fellow runners as we cover 3 or 4 miles at what is called a 'conversational pace'. But the sociability of this social run varies somewhat over the distance covered.

Before the run starts there is the usual milling around the community centre where we all meet. Friends find each other out and talk about the previous weekend's race, or the race yet to come; then there are various announcements about races further afield or about other social events the club is involved in; then we have the more serious chat among the groups that the runners seem to have spontaneously organised themselves into, about the route they will take that evening, about rival runners from other clubs who might pose a threat in upcoming races, about any of a hundred running sub-topics that serious runners seem quite easily to be able to define. All of which is punctuated by laughter.

Then we're off. But the conversations and the laughter continue because we're at conversational pace. At this pace the heart and lungs, after an initial brief period as they change up a gear, find themselves well within normal tolerances, and find they can cope with running, thinking and talking just fine. So, as well as running in a linear fashion along the evening's route, the runners also enjoy moving around the group to strike up new conversations, and when these run dry they move on or drop back to strike up another (there is nothing wrong with a bit of speeding up and slowing down when you're training). Chat rooms aside, running doesn't get more sociable than this.

But after a couple of miles, something happens. The end of the run is only a mile or so away and the collective mind of the pack begins to fragment. Conversations trail off. Some runners even bid each other a temporary farewell, as thoughts turn to the notional finish line back at the community centre. Of course, this is not a race, but for many it's still part of the training regime and a strong finish is a useful way of reminding the heart and lungs what will soon be required of them. So the pack falls silent and falls apart, each runner now finding him or herself in relative isolation. The other runners are seen no longer as a social network but as mock rivals to be picked off and defeated in the final few hundred metres. The social run has suddenly become the mock life and death struggle known as a race.

There is a logic to running which leads inexorably to the race. The ultimate purpose of the social run is not to be social (otherwise we'd sit around and drink coffee) but to breathe hard, sweat and put our bodies to the test. When the test is over we test again, each time raising the stakes as high as we can afford. During a social run our fellow runners are gradually transformed from fellows to rivals. And in a real race our aim would not be to share the glory with our rivals but to deprive them of it. Strictly speaking in a real race they might even disappear as rivals (countless interviews with athletes reveal them to have felt quite alone after the bell sounding the final lap). As the finish line approaches and as the heart begins pounding and the head begins rolling, the runner finds himself running not against others but only against the part of him or herself that would rather settle for being an also-ran.

The act of running can begin for all sort of social reasons but there is an inherent logic to it which is necessarily anti-social. The very act of putting on a pair of shoes designed to cushion the impact of one's own body weight travelling up the leg demands running, and then demands a faster sort of running. The questions “How much breathlessness and pain can I take? How much do I want?” then become entirely reasonable. From this inward-looking seed eventually grows that moment in a race when only your own body exists, and the entire world's problems and conflicts are not 'out there' but seem to be expressed in the two sides of your own tormented spirit.

Those who think that social running is a great way to meet people are not wrong, but those who think that running is ultimately social are wrong. To run is to put oneself - and no one else - to the test.

Heading for the Undiscovered Country? Take water

Hamlet described death, or rather the place after death, as "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns". (Let's not go into the fact that Hamlet's murdered father actually does return, albeit briefly, from such a place and gives a pretty hair-raising eye-witness account of it.) I myself used the term somewhat inaccurately in my "Meeting Yourself" blog entry in February to describe the experience of running beyond your limits and getting to know a new aspect of yourself.

Well, yesterday I felt as if I really were venturing into the undiscovered country, as I neared the end of my third ever 12 mile training run (in preparation for my first half-marathon - the Lichfield Half Marathon in May) and felt as close to weary death as I've ever got. The cause? Undoubtedly dehydration, stemming from:
(a) the 'dodgy tummy' (for want of a better euphemism) I had suffered off and on all morning prior to the run.
(b) the steadily increasing heat of the day (hardly the heat of late summer but I was slightly overdressed for the occasion).
(c) my stupidity in not carrying any fluids with me for drinking en route.

As a type-1 diabetic I always carry plenty of glucose tablets with me when running. I can just about stuff what I consider to be a life-saving amount into my belt before undertaking a long run. However, I hate carrying extra weight, especially in my hands. Also, as I'm now so used to running shorter 10ks, wherein fluid replacement is not usually necessary, I unthinkingly figure that a drink can wait till I get home. And yesterday's run must certainly go down as "unthinking".

I still maintain that long runs, fast runs, and races are ideal for 'meeting yourself', but I have no desire to meet myself as I was yesterday, especially at the Lichfield Half (luckily, at such events drinks are almost invariably provided). One's dehydrated self is no fun to be with. He or she takes no interest in the surrounding area; seeing only a pair of plodding feet and experiencing the outside world only as a distance to be traversed in order to get home. Conversationally, even with yourself, you're a write-off. All interesting problems and moral dilemmas are reduced to the desire to reach home.

If it happens to you, just get home and learn your lesson: next time you venture to the undiscovered country, take water.

Morality After Boston

I don’t know whether, in the aftermath of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, our sense of morality becomes clearer or not. My initial reaction of revulsion - both at the human cost and at the very idea that someone somewhere thought this was the way forward – seemed to present morality in clear black and white terms: the bombing was about as wrong as you can get morally. It was indiscriminately destructive of human life, and young life at that. It was so incredibly sad. It was pointless. It was evil.

And those runners, organisers and spectators who instantly thought of others and who helped and comforted the wounded, despite the immediate risk of further bombings, deserve our total moral approbation. These are good men and women, showing true humanity, whom I hope I might emulate if ever I am placed in similar circumstances.

But morality cannot rest there. At its core morality is not about our yesterdays but what we should do right now, this moment. And right this moment, to use Obama’s words, there is a need to understand why. Yet the reason why is not clear at all.

Kant - we should remember - never asked why. His most important question, underpinning even his highest moral philosophy, was how ("How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?"). ‘How’ gives us a clearer object to investigate. In the confusion ‘how’ gives us focus. 'How' allows means to be assessed relative to ends, but also subjects those ends to a fair bit of questioning too. "How", we must ask, "is your goal valid?" "It just is" is no answer.

So perhaps we too should ask how instead of why. Not just in the detailed forensic investigation now underway (and certainly not in the brow-beating sense of "How could we have allowed this?"), but much more fundamentally. We should ask how the perpetrator(s) came to view ordinary, everyday people as somehow being legitimate targets. To plant a bomb is an evil act, but the seed of such evil germinates in the failure to appreciate other people as real individuals, and instead dismiss them merely as an undifferentiated mass under the heading of ‘Americans’ or ‘Bostonians’ or 'Runners' or whatever category your cod philosophy suggests. Behind such indiscriminate evil there is always a superiority complex that pathetically employs such categories.

When it comes to questions of morality ‘how’ is more significant than ‘why’. In the end ‘why’ can only come from the mouth(es) of the perpetrator(s) and, to be honest, I do not want to hear their irrational rationalisations of why they did what they did. Naturally they will have their superficial reasons but nothing they could say would make their actions any less evil; it would only add stupidity to their enormity.

‘How’ stands a better chance of telling us what we want to know. 'How' might get us to the point of seeing how such people are created. 'How' might help us see how certain ideas can be used to reduce whole masses of real, individual people to subhuman categories ready to be slaughtered. Asking ‘how’ is what we need to do right now. And of course keep running.

Filling the Unforgiving Minute

Continuing the theme from my previous post - The Kinesthetic Life - I am reminded of how Rudyard Kipling described in his poem "If-" the effort of "filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run" and how this contrasts with how my children move around the game of Minecraft which they so adore.

In Minecraft my children seem able to traverse immense distances in the briefest times, pretty much by sprinting through the air, as the character above left is so helpfully illustrating. They inform me that this luxury is only usually available in 'creative' mode, and that in 'survival' mode their characters must cross computer-generated terrain, and might even become 'hungry' if they use up too much energy. Notwithstanding this, I feel that the game offers little resistance to their efforts. Unlike a piece of marble ready for sculpting it has no 'grain' with which they are forced to work, as Michelangelo was forced with his statue of David (above right). They want to build a castle in the air? The only thing stopping them is boredom, and possibly other on-line players who might want to destroy the castle because they too are suffering from the very same boredom.

The unforgiving minute, however, offers resistance every step of the way, and you know by the end whether you really have filled it with sixty seconds' worth of distance run. There is a 'grain' in the muscles that can be felt, and you must respect its contours and work with it if you want to achieve your aim during this minute and throughout your life.

At a low point during the Minecraft session today I switched the Xbox 360 off at the wall-socket and got my children into their trainers for a 1 lap run round the block - a distance of 0.8 miles but an 'ultra' for them. By the end my youngest complained of "two stitches" and also of coming last. I'm not cruel but I smiled and told him there's a valuable lesson concerning effort and result to be learned there, something that Minecraft certainly will not teach him in 'creative' mode. Indeed, for true artistic creativity there needs to be a resistant grain to work both with and against. If you don't believe me, just ask Michelangelo...

The Kinesthetic Life

Like many parents I find I have feelings of guilt because of the amount of time my children spend on their Xbox 360, not so much because of the lack of cardio-vascular exercise that this implies but more because of the bad kinesthetics they are picking up from it. And what is kinesthetics? It is the body's sixth sense (forget 'seeing dead people'). Kinesthetics is "the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body" or, as the great intellectual Jacob Bronowski put it in his 1965 essay The Identity of Man, "the kinesthetic sense is an inner signal that runs parallel with our own outward action". Bronowski, for anyone who hasn't seen The Ascent of Man, was intent on unifying both art and science - the world of meaning and the world of mechanics - in the whole man (or woman), and kinesthetics was central to his task.

So kinesthetics is the sense responsible for our desire to play the air guitar or air drums, or to tap our feet or dance on hearing music (or, more specifically, rhythm), or to punch the air or make a clenched fist on experiencing victory. It's what makes us squirm when witnessing someone else struggle through Total Wipeout. It puts us in readiness on the edge of our seats when watching a 'thriller'. And ultimately it's what teaches us the meaning of effort.

My children not only lack cardio-vascular exercise, but the bad kinesthetics they are picking up means they are inevitably learning to associate actions that require physical effort with simpler feelings in the thumbs and index fingers only. Want to sprint across that compound and throw a grenade? That's push left thumb forward and pull right index finger back. Want to skateboard down that near vertical incline in a crouch and hit the horizontal at max speed? That's right thumb and left index finger. Want to go pee? Ah, that's a bit trickier...

In recent years makers of such 'toys' have recognised a problem here and injected some kinesthetic content into the technology. I quite enjoy playing Ten-Pin Bowling on the Wii because in the swing of the arm and the flick of the wrist I get a sensation that almost corresponds with the result. (If only the Wii remote weighed as much as a bowling ball!) The Xbox 360 Kinect has tried to take this a step further with its whole-body motion-sensing, but there still seems a dis-Kinect between the effort required of the body and the effort required on the Xbox. More often than not you'll bash into your living room walls before you bash into an object on screen.

The lack of kinesthetics is a problem in schools as well. I am convinced that children are learning to read slower than they did in the past because they are not learning to write in quite the same way. The letters that children must sound out are not being associated with the kinesthetic sensation of pushing and pulling a pencil along a piece of paper. Each letter written has its own kinesthetic feeling, which is lost when children use keyboards to write, and so children must rely on sight alone to identify the letter before them, making it all the harder. But that's a topic for someone else's blog...

This somewhat chilling article in the Daily Telegraph highlights a more dangerous consequence of the world losing its kinesthetic sense. Controls in some Airbus planes are now so computerised and simplified that pilots can no longer feel the manoeuvres (literally, 'the work of the hand') they are initiating. "Pilots cannot sense the power setting by touching or glancing at the throttle levers. Instead, they have to check their computer screens." In other words, they have to rely on one of the five traditional senses. But in using only these senses we are essentially passive receivers of information. Man and his five senses are made active through the kinesthetic sense.

The crucial element of kinesthetics is the feeling of using our muscles to overcome the resistance offered by the external world. To traverse distance we must move the legs, overcoming friction on the ground, in the air and even in our legs themselves. As the world pushes back against our will we are able to moderate our effort, to increase or decrease it accordingly, so that the resultant net movement is both smooth and controlled. If we did not have the world pushing back at us in this way we would be quite unable to calibrate our own self-consciousness, and we'd be unable to distinguish our waking from our dreaming. Everything would be either impossible or impossibly easy. So the harder the world pushes back, the greater the kinesthetic sense and the greater the sense of being alive to the earthly possibilities that exist.

The next time you run, my advice is this: feel your feet in your shoes, feel your legs, feel the ground, feel the incline, feel the wind, feel your breathing, feel the cold, feel the sweat, feel the beat, feel everything that is working with you and at the same time against you. What you are feeling is yourself in the world but changing the world. That's life; that's kinesthetics.

Man v. Gravity

Wirksworth Incline

Man is at his noblest when fighting against and overcoming the laws of nature, and there ain't no law tougher or more unforgiving than gravity. Just ask the people at NASA.

This morning saw me arrive in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, for Wirksworth Running Club's annual 4 mile Incline race - which consists of 2 miles up and 2 miles back down. The total climb is approximately 550 feet, but the most testing part is a half-mile section of the High Peak Trail that has a 1 in 10 gradient.

Most days it's possible when you're running on the level to give yourself the impression that running is a sort of freedom: your workaday cares seem to fade when you bounce along the road; you can calmly take in the views you miss when you're hurrying along in a car; you can almost philosophize. But all it usually takes is a slight incline to bring you back down to earth. And the Wirksworth Incline will certainly knock the philosopher out of you for a good half-hour.

In any case, while philosophy is perhaps not best conducted while ascending a 1 in 10, any philosophy that ignores man's being confined to the low points and dark places by gravity is not going to be able to truly celebrate those times when man (and within this concept I include every woman) has scaled the heights, be they the summit of Everest, the surface of the Moon, or even that pinnacle of intellectual effort the Critique of Pure Reason. You don't necessarily have to be sitting in a leather armchair, surrounded by books, to express an idea. Actions speak as loud as words, and the refusal to be pinned down by gravity, to instead chase down the summit of a hill, to lift in turn each leg while feeding oxygen to the blood like a grimy engineer feeding coal into a boiler, these express an idea of man's nobility and greatness.

Personally I love the climb - that's where I make up a few places by a judicious and well timed swinging of the arms. Coming down is harder. On the decline my legs, which feel like they are running too fast, are never quite running fast enough. If I'm lucky I don't lose as many places I gained on the climb. Today I was lucky. I lost only one place on the downhill, to a heavy breather whom I couldn't shake. But right this minute I can't be sure whether that place was taken from me fair and square or whether I simply gave it away. The 'nobility and greatness' I expressed on the uphill was not easily retained on the down. Never mind. I'll get it and keep it next year.