I’m back where it all began, running laps of the local pitch. After weeks of neglecting running for no good reason, and with these hot summer days slipping lazily by, the soft decay in mental and physical terms calls for attention.
Not at the grass hockey pitch in Churchtown, on the grounds of the old Notre Dame secondary school, our original field of dreams, where running first became a sort of daily life ritual and lesson in the late afternoon, and when my dad was the only preacher. Because they’ve long since been built over, concrete apartments standing on the once-upon-a-time perfect running turf.
The Stars of Erin pitch is now the one, magnificently laid out over the highest fields of the Dublin Mountains, suitably named with a link to the heavens. The dawn ritual now is to run barefoot on the dry grass, the sun rising somewhere from beyond the mountains and off from the sea.
They are building a running lane around the perimeter of the pitch, a good idea and for good reason, too. There were distant days when running up and across this mountain was another sort of daily life lesson, only a slightly harder one, starting from Marlay Park – and from there there was no turning back, instead finishing like the whole thing could be run all over again. That’s how good it felt. Not any more.
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There is a beautiful passage in the introduction to Roger Bannister’s The Four-Minute Mile, published in 1955, the year after he became the first human to conquer that horizontal Everest. He wasn’t barefoot on the dry grass, but on the sandy shore, his first moment of running discovery a reminder, perhaps, that it sometimes can and needs to be discovered all over again.
“I was startled, and frightened, by the tremendous excitement that so few steps could create,” Bannister wrote ... “A few more steps – self-consciously now and firmly gripping the original excitement. The earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body. No longer conscious of my movement I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.”
From originally intense moments like this, a love of running can only grow. Bannister also understood such an explanation may well be inadequate – like the description of a rose to someone who has never seen one. Or similarly how John Millington Synge felt about his description of the Aran Islands to anyone who had never visited. It’s a truth that is hard to convey.
Bannister, incidentally, opened each chapter with a quote, before that became fashionable.,The prelude to his sub-four came from Julius Caesar: “Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible.”
In the opening sequence of Rolling Thunder Revue, Martin Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan’s 1975-76 concert tour, Dylan makes a typically laconic pronouncement: “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.”
Trace the long trail and running has often been about this too, creating impossible things. In the house where we lived in Churchtown there was a small bookcase at the top of the stairs – this was by no means a house of books – and pride of place was given to hardback first editions of mostly running biographies, many of which are long out of print.
Ron Clarke, The Unforgiving Minute. Herb Elliott, The Golden Mile. Peter Snell, No Bugles, No Drums. Murray Halberg, A Clean Pair of Heels. Some were about running coaches. Arthur Lydiard, Run to The Top. Percy Cerutty, Be Fit! Or Be Damned! Cerutty is still worth quoting today: “Pain has a face, learn to recognise it. Because when it comes before you it must be your friend.”
In there among them, naturally, was Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 novella The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner, a mere 40-page spread within a collection of short stories, which to this day perhaps best captures the pure essence and very purpose of why people run.
It’s often been quoted here before, pointing out that it’s the aloneness, not necessarily loneliness, which Sillitoe once embraced and celebrated. Tom Courtenay played that character and part perfectly in the 1962 film.
“Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor ... I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once ... it makes me feel 50 times better than when I’m cooped up in that dormitory with 300 others.
‘And as soon as I take that first flying leap out on to the frosty grass of an early morning when even the birds haven’t the heart to whistle ... it’s a treat, being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered ... 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 ...”
When we spoke for the final time, on this weekend one year ago already, my dad asked me was I still running much, as he sometimes jestingly and yet invariably did, before he took his last flying leap out on to the soft running grass in that sacred hour of the late afternoon.
Which I guess is also why I’m back running laps of the local pitch once again. Because after all these years, for all the people who have talked or talk about running, no one talked about it more caringly than he did, and as a long-distance runner once, his thoughts were all I ever cared for too.
Which is also why long-distance running has never felt lonely. There’s just a different feeling of aloneness now.
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