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.

The Fitness Concept

Holly Hayes Wood

"Conceptions without perceptions are empty". That was the nagging idea circulating round my head as I pushed hard during last Sunday’s cross country run (the last of the season) at Holly Hayes Wood near Coalville. It’s funny how the body does that when you run. At your run-all-day pace you can be creative and think up solutions to your problems. But when you’re pushing hard the higher faculties shut down, and your body does the 'thinking', concentrating just on the important stuff like breathing, lifting the knees, and swinging the arms. At this pace you’re mind is left only with the remnants of a thought: a half-remembered phrase that becomes a mental chant to be repeated in time with your stride.

Why that particular phrase at Holly Hayes? Well, Kant says something like it in the Critique of Pure Reason to imply that the rationalist philosophy is unable from its own resources to arrive at knowledge - it needs the content provided by experience to make its concept meaningful. I’m perfectly sure that Kant did not have running in mind when he wrote those words, but for a moment last Sunday I thought they might apply: tackling an incline through the trees whilst listening to the heavy gasps of a fellow runner on my tail I became desperate to inject some perceptions into my conception of fitness.

It seems that we are all increasingly concerned with physical fitness, and the world seems divided sometimes between those who are ‘fit’ and those who are not. But does the concept of fitness neatly divide into an either/or condition like that? Is the concept meaningful at all without a set of circumstances to which it can be applied? In other words, we must ask "Fit for what?" This is where the race comes in. Before Sunday's race I would have replied “Fit enough to run” if asked. But during the race I, like every runner, was given the opportunity to fine tune my pre-race fitness assessment. As I kicked up the incline with the heavy breather ready to take my place at a split second’s notice I knew, at that moment, that I was at least fitter than him, but not quite as fit as the runner just ahead who had already reached the crest.

As my position fluctuated during the remainder of the race so did my assessment. And so did my view of who was doing the assessing (viz. me). I was not simply measuring my fitness, I was playing with the concept. At various points in the race I was deciding that "I don't fit in here, I'd fit better over there, just the other side of the runner in front". And just behind me many others were 'playing with the concept' in the same way (I'm not bloody Superman).

Kant was right: for any concept to apply it needs to be filled with intuitions that we actively provide for ourselves. The race is the perfect place to get them.