2011 Streak: Day 141/365: Run - 3.67 miles, Time - 34min 25sec, Weather - blue skies, white clouds
"… because the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life, I know - but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself - and I remember that after a lot of these runs I thought it didn't need much know-how to tell how a life was going to end once it had got well started." - 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'
The Loneliness of the Long Distance runner is not really a story about running. Running is used as a framing device for the interior monologue of a youth, locked up in Borstal, pitting his sense of life and who he is, against authority figures ("cops, governors, posh whores, penpushers, army officers, Members of Parliament") and social structures. It is the thinking of someone with little formal education but acute insight and a sense if inner freedom.
"I'll win in the end, even if I die in gaol at eighty-two, because I'll have more fun and fire out of my life than he'll (the governor) ever get out of his. He's read a thousand books I suppose and for all I know might even have written a few, but I know for a dead cert, as sure as I'm sitting here, that what I am scribbling down is worth a million to what he could eve scribble down."
Although not about running, the story uses that quality of running which frees the mind to follow its own course. The way a thread can be followed for a bit, be interrupted when something is observed, be returned to, and then be dropped without a conclusion because something else has taken its place. It is a clever structural device
But there are also a couple of passages that runners can read and nod at in agreement:
"Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare faced, big bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything's dead, but good, because it is dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That's how I look at it. Mind you, I often fell frozen stiff at first. I can't feel my hands, or feet or flesh at all, like a ghost who wouldn't know the earth was under him if he didn't see it now and again through the mist. But even though some people would call the frost pain suffering if they wrote about it to their mams in a letter, I don't, because I know that in half an hour I'm going to be warm, by the time i get to the main road and am turning on to the wheatfield footpath by the bus stop I'm going to feel as hot as a potbellied stove and as happy as a dog with a tin tail."
Nevertheless the isight I like the best is the one this post started with - that each run is like a life.
So what sort of life did today's run have? Well I'm afraid the poor little chap struggled a bit as things didn't come easily to him. He just had to battle on, which he did, and was so given some marks for effort. The life was moderately satisfactory
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