TEN YEARS LATER

I RUN ACROSS ONE OF THE MARSHES on the slopes beyond the forest behind our house. It’s like running in soft butter; I sink down to my midriff in the deepest hollows. Gentle on the calves. I am wearing only shoes and a pair of running shorts and feel the warm evening sun against my back.

When I arrive at our little beach at Helgesjön, my daughters, Signe and Helga, run naked along the water, their bottoms as brown as the rest of their bodies. I am happy the longer they remain unselfconscious about their bodies.

I jump in the water and Helga climbs up on my back. With her hanging there, I swim out with Signe to the swimming platform. The water is 24C. It’s been a great summer in Jämtland. I know that this is a memory that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. It will stay in my body as something wonderful, and it will still be there when I am old.

SOMETIMES I GET VISITORS to our place in the mountain pastures. They come from all around the world and spend a few days in a guest house that I built a little bit away from our own.

Together we live the simple life – making fires, preparing food outside and washing ourselves in the sauna after several hours of running. Living the life that helped me to make my head connect with my body – a life that can benefit everyone. A few days without stress, where running becomes a way of opening up your heart.

Of course, those who come here are keen to know about training and a lot of practical things, but sooner or later I’m also asked the same questions that I used to ask myself, questions that are still with me: What is it that makes us feel well? What is it that makes life worth living?

I know how tempting it is to come up with an answer. It would be so simple to be black and white, to point emphatically and send people off in one direction. To heaven or hell.

But I don’t know how others should live their lives. I know only that the forest and running happened to help me to find my way. So I can talk only about myself and then answer with another question: What do you yourself feel, what do you think your way looks like?

For many, running becomes a matter of consumption, a matter that has to be accounted for and be superseded. Just another achievement in a life that is all about achieving things on every level. I believe that sort of thinking is mistaken. Freedom in movement disappears if it is reduced to something comparative. It becomes bureaucracy, running in ordered rows along a fixed, predetermined path.

Running is the movement of a free human being. It doesn’t demand any special premises or machines. You only need to put on your shoes and get going. Let the blood circulate. Then everything becomes much clearer. A FEW YEARS AGO, I RAN the big race around Gothenburg. When I collected my number the day before the race, the building was jam-packed with people. The atmosphere was great, there was so much energy in the air – the way there always is when tens of thousands of people with the same goal are gathered together in the same place.

The sports hall was full of entrepreneurs who were seizing the opportunity to sell their products: long tights, short tights, spring clothes, summer clothes, winter clothes and autumn clothes; black clothes, white clothes and clothes in colourful synthetic material that is visible from far off; shoes that breathe and shoes that don’t, shoes with and without shock absorbers, shoes with icespikes, ‘barefoot shoes’ and ‘African Masai shoes’; watches with inbuilt GPS and altitude gauges, watches with pulse monitors, watches that can be connected to your computer so that your run can be automatically registered and entered on a digital chart. Everything produced with the help of the very latest super-duper technology.

So much stuff in order to practise something that is so simple.

Around the tables were crowds of runners waiting for the next day’s start. Who were being geed up by the mass of people and who wanted to experience running alongside other people. Who used this race as their motivation to train for the rest of the year.

I understood the festive atmosphere while at the same time I felt that what I am about is something quite different. There and then, it became so clear to me. Running is something that I want to do on my own, in worn-out clothes. I don’t want to run with other people, as part of a procession.

I run because I want to. Not in order to achieve. I’ve already been there and I’m beyond that.

I meet so many people who want to run fast. It is their only goal. And then they get panicky when they don’t measure up – because there is always something to improve, seconds to be shaved off. I know what it’s like.

My salvation was when I skipped all that stuff and removed everything that could be measured: distances, speeds and times. Things that inspire some people but hold back many more.

I think that the challenge of our time is to just call a halt to all that. Whose thoughts are in my head if I never have time to think? If I never look at my life from outside, if it’s never silent?

Not mine, anyway.

THE NEXT DAY I STOOD behind the tape in the first group of runners. Lots of people in Slottsskogen, and the smell of grilled sausages in the air. Relaxed African runners next to me, which reminded me of my friends in Tanzania, Mama Gwandu’s chicken, the lightning over Kilimanjaro. Another life, another time.

We were off. I disappeared into myself. I felt my heart. I saw the mountains in the late summer sun, and my back was naked and tanned. Everything was clear: my head, the air, my thoughts.