Meeting Yourself

"I read about the deep mystique of road running, the soul searching and the fact that you meet yourself out on the road - I've never met myself anywhere, let alone on a stretch of road in the middle of Brighton."
(Ovett: An Autobiography, Steve Ovett with John Rodda, Willow Books, 1984, pg 35)

I picked up Steve Ovett's very entertaining autobiography in the Cats Protection charity shop recently. A quid for pure gold. As I remember from his occasional television interviews at the time, he comes across in the book as knowing exactly who he is and exactly what he is capable of. His bloody-minded refusal to 'play the game' that was English Athletics back in the 1970s and '80s made him appear arrogant, but also gave him his victories, his records and his gold medals. Unfortunately, such fierce independence can also blind you to other possibilities, as the quote from Ovett's autobiography shows. It may be that he was so self-sufficient that he needed no one else, not even another version of himself.

I'm no hippy, but I disagree with Steve. It is possible to 'meet yourself' when out for a run, insofar as human beings have always experienced new facets to themselves whenever they have put themselves to the test, and sought out new experiences and explored new regions. The men who walked on the moon came back different people; those who partake of social revolutions also feel transformed. Running can sometimes give you a taste of the same.

I'm not talking about the mere act of putting one foot in front of the other. Nor do I think that running simply 'to get away from it all' necessarily puts you in touch with your inner self. You don't get privileged access to yourself just by trying to escape from the real world. But you can see a new side to yourself when you're wrestling with a new object, never before encountered. In some cases that new object is the moon; in others it might be society itself; in the case of running it is your own body.

Unless we are ill or exercising hard we rarely think of our bodies. To the sedentary, academic intellectual our bodies are simply a precondition for having grand and abstract ideas, which may or may not be true. It's amazing what the mind can think up when not physically tethered. But the mind can be more creative when it is tethered to something real, out there, objective. And when the runner begins to push himself or herself beyond previous limits we have a situation in which a mind is grappling with an object under wholly novel conditions. Under such conditions our inner selves need to be able to 'read' our bodies and interpret their messages; we need to be able to place our bodies in the positions we want them to be in, and try to work out why when this proves not to be possible. When Hamlet coined the phrase 'the undiscovered country' he would have been better applying this to the final furlong of a 5k road race than to the afterlife.

Running round the block without breaking a sweat is not going to do this for you. But enter a race, and I guarantee you'll meet yourself.

The Runner's Moral Sense

This morning marked the beginning of my 2013 road racing season with the Weston Run. I'd not trained specifically for it, but in recent months I have done a few longer runs in preparation for a half-marathon in May, and I've now got a good few cross-country races in my legs, so I was hopeful of a good time over its 5 mile course.

We all like a good time but runners are quite specific about what they mean by "a good time". As it turned out my good time was 35:14 minutes - about 30 seconds faster than my previous best over this distance. I was very pleased with this. Not because it was a personal best, but because I knew that, given who I was at 11am this morning, I couldn't have run it any faster.

Many a time over the last year since I started running seriously I have crossed the line and felt, once the breathlessness has passed, that I had not given it 100%. This is a judgement you pass on yourself, and is not based on your time; it is based on your moral sense. Somehow you know that, though you achieved a PB, you could have gone faster. Or, though you didn't achieve a PB, you gave the race everything. I think it debatable which one of these options is the better. But today I was lucky: I gave it my all and got the PB.

And what is your all? It's easy enough to declare, before the race starts, that this is what you will give it. But what does it mean after you start? I don't think it means sprinting off in front of the leading pack (for some it does, but not - perhaps never - for me). Neither is it something you can measure physiologically: your 'all' is not easily expressed in terms of minutes per mile or maximum heart rate.

Rather, your 'all' is what you give when your moral sense is delicately poised between pushing too hard and cruising along. I don't know about you but my body has a natural tendency to cruise, perhaps in someone's slipstream, perhaps at a 'reasonable' pace determined by stopwatch and mile-markers (I don't own a Garmin), or perhaps a polite distance behind a fellow club-runner whom you 'know' is faster than you. Cruising isn't easy. It certainly isn't conversational. So pushing harder than this requires a moral decision to make yourself slightly less comfortable ('comfort' being a relative concept in racing), to be slightly dissatisfied with who you currently are, to commit to gaining on the person in front. And how many times need you make this decision? I would say in a 35 minute race about 1,050 times. About every 2 seconds.

Pushing hard is mentally as well as physically exhausting. The runner's moral sense can oscillate between body and soul like an up-tempo metronome from the moment the gun goes off to the moment the finish funnel is entered. But unlike your body, your soul is ready to go out again almost immediately, in the knowledge that you're a slightly bigger person than you thought you were.

Kant's Weekly Mileage

Kant was the type of runner known as a walker. I read on this website that every day at 3.30pm he would emerge from his lodging, wearing his cocked hat and a long-coat and carrying a rattan cane and would walk up and down his street exactly 8 times, covering a distance of 4 miles. That makes 28 miles per week, further - I would hazard - than many present-day runners.

Let's not discuss Kant's heart rate while he racked up the miles. For the sake of argument let's assume that he wasn't going at 90% MHR, but that it was raised by his exertions. He might well have chosen to cover 4 miles because it took him around an hour, which would make him a 15 minute miler. Respectable for a 5 footer with a bad back and a non-wicking long-coat.

Read any biography of Kant and it will mention his walking as a quirk, a remarkable feature in an otherwise unremarkable life, by which the citizens of Königsberg could set their clocks. With few exceptions, Kant's biographers have never been able to reconcile his sheltered existence with his revolutionary philosophical works. It is interesting, they say, that the life of the philosopher who effected a 'Copernican Revolution' and totally reshaped modern thought should be so dull in comparison.

But is Kant's commitment to 28 mpw merely a comparative dullness? Is his mileage not, rather, the key to his entire transcendental philosophy? What else could have constantly reminded him, as he broke into a sweat and increased his breathing rate, that there was more to being than abstract thinking, and more to philosophy than Wolffian rationalism. David Hume may have awoken Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, but I'll wager it was his daily exertion that kept Kant alive to the possibility of human thought transcending itself and grasping the empirical world.

Of course, as runners we know that thinking is bound to the respiration process, and that the noblest of theoretical enterprises is tied - somehow - to the acts of moving and breathing. As runners we are philosophers. Each time we lace up we take the first few steps along the Kantian road.

Making your Move

Earlier this month I ran in the Derby Runner League's two lap, 5 mile cross-country race at Foremark Reservoir. The thing about a two lap race is that you know exactly where to make your move. The first lap should have revealed as much of the course as you need to know: the turns, the chicanes, the hills, the mud baths and the finish funnel. So on the second lap you've no excuses. You cannot blame the finish for coming too quick, before you had a chance to kick for home. Nor can you accuse it of coming too late, after all your energy is spent.

On a two lap cross country race you know exactly who your opponent is. I'm not talking about the race favourite - not all of us can consider ourselves potential race winners; nor am I talking about your friendly club rival - all that goes out the window after the starter pistol goes off. Your true opponent is the runner in front when it comes to make your move. Or the runner who is breathing down your ear at that same moment.

This is a runner whom you have probably never met before, and to whom you will probably never introduce yourself. You might never see their face. But you'll recognise their breathing and their gait, and you'll know that, with only so many seconds before the finish funnel swallows you both, it's either them or you.

But wait just a minute. This is what you know. But what do you actually want? The rational mind - either before or after the race - knows that victory is preferable to defeat. But in the race itself, at the very moment when you must make your move, what is your heart's desire? Is it to win?

Perhaps if I asked what is your heart and lungs' desire, the question would not be so straightforward. At that particular point in the race they have their own agenda, and can be quite eloquent about it too. Sure, they can scream in pain, but they can also express complex ideas. Like little devils on your shoulder they can say "You've done enough today. Your final position doesn't matter as much as an even pace all round. Save yourself for the next race. Let the other guy kill himself if he wants. Don't give him the satisfaction of a sprint finish". Believe me, I have heard these voices. They are reason's last gasp.

When it comes to the moment of truth, your heart's desire can become a matter of sheer indifference. When it lies within reach, as a result of your own superhuman effort, the simple matter of plucking it seems the last thing you want to do. But 'twas ever thus. If it became easier to fulfill your desires the nearer to them you got, then mankind would have  succumbed to and died of sloth several thousand years ago. The truth is, the nearer we get to them the harder they are to reach. But the final challenge is no mere exercise in problem-solving - it is a moral test of human will. In the final few seconds of a race, if you are to go up against your opponent, your will must go up against your reason's siren-like ability to bring it down. When the funnel is in sight, my advice is to stop up your ears with beeswax and kick harder.