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| 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.
