Born To Run —
Eamonn Sweeney escapes the chatter of modern life
THERE is nothing in this life which gives me more pleasure than running. Because . . .
Hang on. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in a bit. Talk among yourselves. Smoke them if you have them.
Right, we’ll continue. I thought it would be best to actually go out and do a couple of miles before I wrote this. Just to see if that first sentence is true. It’s true.
On the face of it I’m a fairly unlikely runner. My shape is what you could call Falstaffian if you were in a pretentious mood or fat if you weren’t. The old abs are more six-pint than six-pack. I can’t claim to be svelte. I can’t even claim to be svelte’s second cousin from the next fjord over.
But then I don’t run to lose weight. I don’t even run for the good of my health. I run without any ulterior motive. I run for the best reason of all — because I love to run.
I always have done. I was one of those kids who’d win races at parish sports and go to as many of those sports as possible. I’d thumb 10 miles to run a hundred metres. In my last couple of years in school I did athletics reasonably seriously, I ran for Connacht against Ulster a couple of times in the O’Duffy Cup, made All-Irelands in Santry, won a few county titles. But what I loved even more than the races was the training. I was the kind of kid you couldn’t tell to rest. I’d go out for a six-mile run at lunchbreak and then do a hard training session after school. I had no sense. It was bliss.
I should have kept it up really, but I didn’t. Like my Leaving Cert French, running was a language I gradually forgot. Until about eight years ago when one of my kids won a race at a local sports and I heard myself telling them I used to be a good runner. Kids are not very diplomatic when it comes to masking disbelief.
Reading is one of the other great pleasures of my life. I’m always convinced that anything can be mastered if you have the right book. For some reason my gaze lit on Running is Easy by Bruce Tulloh. Perhaps because I remembered my father telling me about Bruce, who’d been a bit of a sensation in the 1960s, winning major long-distance track races while running barefoot.
True Grit by Charles Portis is my favourite book. But Running is
Easy probably comes second. It’s certainly the book I’ve read most.
IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW SLOWLY YOU GO SO LONG AS YOU DO NOT STOP CONFUCIUS
The combination of common sense and kindness which animates its pages did the trick for me. Bruce is a believer in the gradual build-up. The first day I took to the road I struggled to run for a minute. In less than two years I was up to 30-plus miles a week and feeling wonderful.
There then followed a period of personal upheaval. In the words of my native South Sligo, “I didn’t be well.” Running took a back seat. In fact it fell out the back of the car.
But I got back and then, like a bollocks, decided to add some unsupervised weight training to the mix. Beware the Turkish Get Up and the Goblet Squat is all I’ll say. I ended up with a knee so banjaxed that for a while I had to crawl up the steps of the stairs on my hands and knees. Getting in and out of a car became a militarystyle operation. If I lay back on the couch I had to get out of it sideways.
Worst of all, I couldn’t run. The pain in the knee eased but running on it proved impossible. I’d do some very light jogging for a couple of weeks and then the knee would go again. On the last occasion this happened I was on the verge of tears as I hopped home in the knowledge that running and me had just completed a painful divorce. I got a dog and walked him four miles every day.
A couple of months ago it struck me that the pain in the knee, which had been there for so long, wasn’t there anymore. Surely that meant . . . No, don’t be daft . . . No harm in trying all the same. So I’m back on the road and there isn’t a twinge out of the knee. In fact the legs feel as good as they did in the 30-mile-plus days, even if the gut I’m carrying occasionally makes me feel like an Irish horse unjustly handicapped with a huge weight in an English steeplechase.
I am overjoyed because when I run, I feel like myself. Most of the time in my life I’m not entirely sure who I am or who I want to be. But out on the road, plodding away, I have a feeling that this is the real me in action. Most of us have something that makes us feel like this. For some people it’s gardening, for others it’s cooking or motorbiking or golf or cycling. We all need something.
Running seems to be filling that place in the lives of an increasing number of Irish people. The evidence of my own eyes tells me there’s a bit of a running boom going on. It also tells me that most people, despite the advice of the books to find a group to run with, run on their own. I think the two facts are connected and that the solitude integral to running is perhaps its greatest attribute and attraction.
In a world filled with chatter, running provides the opportunity to be alone with your thoughts. Or with your fantasies. I used to run listening to an MP3 player and felt it greatly enhanced the experience. Led Zeppelin doing Kashmir was a great help when you had to blast up a hill, a bit of Sly and the Family Stone lent an unmistakably funky cadence to the stride, the wise and resigned mood of John Prine or Steve Earle seemed entirely appropriate for that last tired but fulfilled mile home.
The last couple of months, though, I’ve ditched the music so it’s just me. I’m agnostic about the benefits of Mindfulness but if that’s your bag, running is the boy for you. It really does put you in the moment. When I’m panting up the hill from the garden centre to the graveyard, worries about Trump, global warming, Brexit and Dublin dominating the football championship disappear. All my attention is focussed on the business of surviving the next minute and getting back to level ground.
Running appeals to the individualist. I joined the athletic club in school because I found team sports a bit regimented, and they’ve got an awful lot more regimented since. There are people who like team spirit and there are people with a bit of the loner about them. What I liked about athletics as a kid was that no-one told you what to do. That still holds. On the road you’re your own personal trainer. There is a breed of people who like this very much.
The simplicity of running is one of its great joys. You do not need equipment, you do not need to buy gym membership, you just need to put on the runners and go out the door. One of the key lines of the Tulloh book for me was when he observed that you might not look very dignified when you’re running but that this doesn’t matter. No-one’s going to laugh at your speed or your shape. There is a great inherent dignity about getting out there on the road. Over the years so many people have said to me, “I saw you running,” it’s been like having a conversation with Maura O’Connell. Some of these lads are world-class piss-takers in other respects but they’ve never been anything other than encouraging about this subject. The pedestrian or motorist you meet on the way will more than likely have a word or a wave of encouragement. And if they don’t, what do you care about them? Also, dogs are never the problem you think they’ll be. I’ve never been chased by a dog when running.
The me who runs is not the rotund 49-year-old trundler seen by dogs, motorists and pedestrians. Sometimes he’s a teenager again, re-running a road race he should have won back then but for a tactical misjudgement. Sometimes he’s representing Ireland in the Olympic Marathon and realising that he’s just about to break the Kenyans. Always he’s happy.
When I run I am doing something I love and which, touch wood, I can do any time I want to. I don’t want to run a marathon, I’m not even sure if I want to run a 10k, I just want to have a few times a week when I can say to myself, “I’m running. How great is that?” Money couldn’t buy me that feeling.
As I come within sight of home, two pieces of writing always bubble up in my mind. One is from a Thomas Kinsella poem we did for the Leaving. “I fold my towel with what grace I can/not new and not renewable, but Man.” The other is from The Big Lebowski, “The dude abides.”
When I run I tell myself that when I can do this, there’s not much wrong with my life. Isn’t that what it’s all about really?