When nothing else exists — running as a means to survive

Meditative, lonely and life-enhancing, running offers more than good health, says Greg Barns

“I COULDN’T see him anymore, and I couldn’t see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me.” That’s Alan Sillitoe’s young man in his short story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. This is what it feels like to run. It is you and only you. The world beyond and before is irrelevant.

Sillitoe’s early 1960s story had a greater theme — that of the narrator excelling at running and using it to buck the cruelty of the youth detention system in the UK. But to run is to sense control and power. It is a meditative exercise. To run from A to B or for 60 minutes or for 10km and to succeed is one of the rare times in our lives where we can experience a sense of self that is unambiguously positive.

Running is not everyone’s cup of tea. But for those who slip on their shoes and head out the door there is benefit, tangible and intangible. The meditation that is running means hurling the stones that are depression and its evil twin, anxiety, into the water to

sink to the bottom. At least for those minutes or hours there is sunlight and immersion in the rhythm of the body and soul. Loneliness but you wouldn’t have it any other way.

For the hero of the Loneliness of the Long Distance

Runner running was the therapy. The only positive experience in a bleak world. It gave him the sense he was worth something.

Scott Douglas, an American writer, has written recently about running and depression in Running is My

Therapy (The Experiment 2019). “Running is a daily way to break free from lassitude. Getting out the door changes the narrative and creates momentum,” Douglas writes. He quotes psychiatrist Brian Vasey who says he thinks of running “as helping depression through activation, through the improved energy that comes from running.” The feeling that Sillitoe’s young man felt when he ran on frosty mornings across the English countryside is not uncommon.

Psychologist Mihaly Csiksxentmihalyi, in his book

Running Flow (Human Kinetics 2017) describes the feeling when running of being “aloof to what others think of you as your self-consciousness recedes into the background. All that matters is mastering the moment.”

Running is a portal that allows you spiritual and psychological strength. But of course it also has undoubted broader health benefits. A paper last week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by Professor Zeljiko Pedisic from the Institute of Health and Sport at Melbourne’s Victoria University and colleagues from Australia, Asia and Europe, published results from a large scale review of previous

studies into the link between running and health outcomes.

The paper, Professor

Pedisic writes, “summarised the results of 14 individual studies on the association between running or jogging and the risk of death from all causes, heart disease and cancer.” The number of participants in the studies was 230,000, 10 per cent of whom were runners. The studies tracked participants’ health for between 5.5 and 35 years.

More than 25,000 participants died during this time. Pedisic writes that when he and his colleagues “pooled the data from the studies, [they] found runners had a 27 per cent lower risk of dying during the study period from any cause compared with non-runners. Specifically, running was associated with a 30 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease and a 23 per cent lower risk of death from cancer,” Pedisic wrote in The Conversation last week.

The paper made headlines with the emphasis being on the finding that “running just once a week, or for 50 minutes a week, reduces the risk of death at a given point in time. The benefits don’t seem to increase or decrease with higher amounts of running.”

But it is the sense of self that running, without compare, enhances. Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist, wrote wonderful series of essays describing why he runs. It is defining of one’s self. “First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am,” Murakami writes.

To run is to be one’s self in a true sense. It is up to the runner to climb the hill or not; to follow the path or not; to head out the door and run or not.

And as James McWilliams, writing in the Paris Review in 2016, said of runners like Sillitoe’s youth, running becomes “a weapon, the only means to survive a world that was intent on bending their backs to someone else’s whim.”

Next Saturday you can enter the Run for Palestine, starting at 9.30am at Parliament House Lawns.

Hobart barrister Greg Barns is a former adviser to state and federal Liberal governments.