The Freedom of the Long Distance Runner (running viral day 8)

Last night the prime minister sent the UK into lockdown, but provided us with a pressure-release valve, of one physical activity outing per day. I had been planning one anyway, but chose something slightly shorter than my original 20 miler because my toes are bit sore from last week's 80+ miles (20 miles of which was completed in my tight Salomon trail shoes).

Despite its sometimes grim tone, the Sillitoe book The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (its first story) is much more playful that it would initially suggest.  Thus my recent reading of this, and a commentary upon it in a chapter in Running and Philosophy (Austin, ed.), is actually in keeping with the spirit of previous Perec-posts (attempts to exhaust a local space, etc).

What I'm getting at here is that today I went for a long-distance run (approx. 13 miles) in a time when many are taking up running for the first time, or are discovering the fact that running is intimately tied to questions of FREEDOM!

I know that the very literary Boris Johnson knows this too (he himself is a bit of a jogger): that deep down each and every Brit is a a bit Smith, the protagonist of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

I'm not saying all Brits are runners; I'm saying that Brits are overall a bit more non-conformist and individualist than other herds of people roped into national boundaries.

One thing I am saying: after this whole Coronavirus thing is done, or at least settled down a bit, there might be more runners than ever before, regardless of country, because when I was out there today running through the countryside south of Wokingham, I saw loads of people who were either new to the sport, or getting back to after some time away.

They have this 'touched' look of slight religiosity about them.  They run for a bit, then stop, and run again, and the visage appears to glow slightly, a bit surprised. Some have ridiculous outfits, like they haven't had time to make it to Sports Direct before it shut its doors for good.

The chapter I read this morning in Running & Philosophy, just after finishing my run through Gorrick Wood/Wokingham, was called "The Freedom of the Long Distance Runner" riffing off the Sillitoe title.  The chapter invokes Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger, and is is a short/sweet little number, loaded with choice quotes from Sillitoe.

This is my second go through the philosophy/running book (the first time was in Montreal), and I should really highly recommend it. Because once you're done running, in the end you realise it was just a couple of hours out of the day, and some of the remaining parts of the day that aren't taken up by work, sleep, TV, and eating might need filling in. You could do worse than read a book. You could do much worse than read either of these two.