The Joy of Running Outside

The American poet Mary Oliver wasn’t a runner, but she understood well one of the things that makes runners run: our capacity for joy in nature

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it .” Against ordinary and extraordinary hardship and heartbreak, the late American poet Mary Oliver (in her poem “Don’t Hesitate,” from her book, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems) counselled us to seize moments of joy. This is not because the world is easy, she emphasized. But it’s one reason that running (and, i n particular, running outside) feels worthy as a regular and frequent, and not just an occasional, pursuit.

Not every run is equal. Some days are more painful or tedious than others. Lifelong runners run through moments of elation, but also through times of grief and sadness.

But running outside and feeling part of the natural world makes us smaller – just a tiny part of the earth, lakes, river, skies, and animal life that surround us – and at the same time bigger, because we are participating in these relationships, knitting together our persons within this larger fabric of being. This is a joyful feeling.

For those of us who (normally) work in offices, running outside is joyfully unpredictable, and this unpredictability requires us to embrace whatever the time of year and moment give us.

When we run outside, we experience days of sunshine, the grass bright green against high blue skies. Running in the silence of night, the sky is a deep shade of blue against the black outline of trees, like the poem “Evening” by

Rainer Maria Rilke: “The sky puts on the darkening blue coat/held for it by a row of ancient trees”

In light rains, we run through a landscape blurred by raindrops. The world becomes an impressionist painting, the edges of path and tree softened into smears of colour.

While everyone else stays indoors, we may venture out to run through torrential downpours. High over the ravines, waterfalls pour off the iron bridges that carry trains across the city. For a few hours, normally quiet streams become raging whitewater, overf lowing the banks and f lattening the grass on either side.

In the summer months, we run along shady dirt trails and then turn home, sweaty and tired, into sunsets made lurid red through a humid, nearly tropical heat. In the autumn, we run through forests with psychedelic leaves, intense yellows and reds transforming a single tree into a band of colour. In the early dusk, ginkgo leaves form puddles of light in the gathering darkness. In the winter, our running paths follow the river valleys that wend through the cityscape. On days of heavy snowfall, there is wonderful quiet. Snowf lakes muff le every sound, creating a special kind of peace. As we run into spring, the sound of water under the ice on the river is thrilling – a return to life after weeks and months of frozen stillness.

Running has a very specific sense of aliveness – the sounds of our footfalls, our inhalations and exhalations. Running outside enhances this feeling of participating in the vital natural world. Despite unkindness on a global scale and the hardships in our own lives, running in nature opens up spaces for joy. When it does, we might follow Mary Oliver’s advice and simply give in to it.