Running with the Pack (7 page)

The hundred metres was my, somewhat reluctant, speciality. And that's only because there were not any shorter events on offer. I could do the two hundred metres at a pinch, but never the four hundred — in my view, that's an event reserved exclusively for masochists of the most twisted kind. You have to run pretty much as fast as you can for four hundred metres! How anyone could enjoy that is beyond me. Even the hundred was far too long for me, really.
I'm Mr Fast-Twitch. I'm at my best for the first five metres or so, and after that it all starts falling apart. If there was an Olympic event called ‘Out of the Blocks', I'm convinced I could have gone a long way (to the extent it makes sense to talk of ‘going a long way' in such an event).

In
Why We Run
, Bernd Heinrich, one of a vanishingly small number of people who managed to combine being a world-class biologist and a world-class distance runner, outlined the general anatomical characteristics of someone suited to distance running: ‘Distance runners have one common trait — the good ones are skinny. The distance runner must fairly float along the ground, sometimes for hours on end. Ideally, he has light, thin bones, and long, thinly muscled legs, like a bird.' If that is the distance runner, then I am the anti-distance runner. I don't float, I thud (I have what's known as a very hard strike — apparently it's a problem, the source of many injuries down the years). I am far from bird-like. I have short legs, big bones and I'm broad. I like to think of myself as a mesomorph with endomorphic tendencies. More realistically, I am probably an endomorph with mesomorphic tendencies — assuming there is a difference between the two. At my best, if I'm training hard, I'm big and heavily muscled like a sprinter. At my worst, I'm a fat boy.

There are two basic types of muscle fibre — slow-twitch and fast-twitch. The successful distance runner's leg muscles are made of between 79 and 95 per cent of slow-twitch muscle fibres. The muscles of an average person's leg contain a fifty-fifty split of fast- and slow-twitch fibres. For an elite sprinter, the ratio is more like 25 per cent slow-twitch against 75 per cent fast-twitch fibres. Slow-twitch fibres burn fat, and can operate only with a continuous supply of oxygen. They work aerobically. Fast-twitch fibres burn glucose and operate
without oxygen. That is, they operate anaerobically. The lactic burn you get in your legs when you sprint is the byproduct of the anaerobic operation of your fast-twitch fibres.

The way you exercise has been shown to have a small effect on the ratio of slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibres. Gollnick and colleagues, in a classic 1972 study, suggested that rigorous aerobic exercise — he had his subjects run on a treadmill for one hour a day for four days a week for five months at 85—90 per cent of their maximum aerobic capacity (talk about earning your volunteer research subject stipend!) — could, at most, result in a 4 per cent rewiring of fast-twitch to slow-twitch fibres. This figure has been more or less borne out by subsequent studies.

Fast-twitch muscle fibres have, more recently, been discovered to divide into two sorts: FTa and FTb. FTa fibres have some of the characteristics of slow-twitch fibres. As fast-twitch fibres, they can work anaerobically, by burning glucose but, like slow-twitch fibres, they can work by burning oxygen too. The average person's fast-twitch fibres are split evenly, roughly 50 per cent of each sort. Hard and consistent exercise is more effective in transforming FTb into FTa fibres than it is in transforming fast-twitch into slow-twitch. Elite marathoners end up having almost no FTb fibres. I'm pretty sure that is not something I could emulate. More than that, I'm not sure I would want to.

So I suppose the most important and obvious fact about me as a distance runner is this: I am not very good at it. I have little aptitude for it, and I suspect this lack of aptitude is grounded in certain features of my biological make-up. I don't know what happened that day on Mynydd Maen. Then, I could not, for the life of me, see any reason why my legs should stop doing what they were doing — why they
couldn't keep going like this all day and through the night. But no matter how much I would like to, no matter how much I've worked and trained to do just this, I have never since quite been able to replicate the sense of freedom and power that I felt that day on the mountain of stone when I was somewhere between a boy and a man.

I suspect the iron bonds of inevitability hold us all, young or old. But when we are young, and on our good days can barely contain the power that sings inside of us, our chains seem so much lighter. I ran that day with the freedom of youth, a freedom that could think of no reasons to stop, and so for which there were indeed no reasons. The freedom of youth is the freedom of a life that is overflowing, of a power that can only with difficulty be contained within the bodily vessel. When you grow older, this feeling inhabits you less and less. You come to understand all too well that there are many, many reasons to stop: reasons that thrust themselves upon you vociferously — and the more tired you become, the more insistent are these reasons. But if you are lucky, if you are very lucky, you will one day come to understand that these reasons — no matter how savagely they snarl — have no authority over you. That is the freedom of age.

The appeal to bodily constitution — bodily ‘facticity' as the French existentialist philosophers sometimes designate it — is it perhaps just an excuse? After all, I've never had a muscle biopsy done. Perhaps if I did I would be staggered to learn that I have the muscle constitution of a world-class distance runner, 80 per cent slow-twitch fibres with virtually no FTbs. But I doubt it. Connected with my lack of biological aptitude is another feature of that day's run that became a recurring theme of the runs of later life: it was completely unplanned.
When I woke up that morning, I felt like taking off for the day with Boots, that's all. I didn't plan to run up the mountain. I didn't even know I was going to the mountain. I simply found myself running there. Sometimes I say I don't like running. Sometimes I believe it too. But I doubt this can really be accurate. I've been doing it for so long that, on some level at least, I suppose I must like it. But it is certainly true that I hated the thought of running. Until very recently at least — things have changed now, and there are reasons for this — if I wanted to go running, I had to make sure I didn't think I was going to go running. I had to sneak up on my runs.

If you read running magazines, they'll sometimes offer advice on how to motivate yourself to go running when you don't feel like it. For the businessman or woman, for example, the advice is to schedule your runs like you schedule a meeting, and then feel proud afterwards as if it was a job well done. For me, for a very long time, there was only one way I could get myself to go running and that was to convince myself that I wasn't going running. There is a British film of the 1960s,
Village of the Damned
, based on the John Wyndham novel
The Midwich Cuckoos
. It is about some aliens who take the form of children. They have some rather nasty telepathic powers and apparently plan to take over the world — the usual alien stuff. At the denouement, the hero, who has planted a bomb, is being telepathically probed by the alien children, who suspect he is up to something but are not quite sure what. He must, at all costs, not think of the bomb. That is how I used to approach my running. No, I'm definitely not going running today: no sir, not a chance. I'll just sit here and write. And then I'm up in a flash, tearing across the room: shorts on, runners on and out the door, one or more canines in tow, before my body has a chance to realize what's
going on and put together the usual objections or obstacles — a feeling of enormous lassitude is its usual strategy.

This hatred of the thought of running — not running, the thought of running — continued through my twenties, thirties and some of my forties. I'm very different now. Now I can't wait to get out on the road. Perhaps it is because I now have two young sons: and, believe me, compared to spending a few hours with them — which, don't misunderstand me, I love doing — running twenty miles is a relaxing break. Or perhaps it's because I am starting to understand that, in all the injuries, niggles and general persistent low-grade pain that goes with the approaching half century, my life of running does not necessarily stretch out into the indefinite future. I have a sell-by date, stamped quite legibly on my dodgy knees, a rather boorish Achilles tendon, a questionable back and recidivist calf muscles. And in the light of this, I have come to understand that running is not just something I do. It is not even something to which I have a right. It is a privilege.

I run with dogs, not humans. That was the other feature of the run that was to be reiterated in the years to come. Humans run together for company, for encouragement, to talk, to shoot the breeze, just to be together. These reasons are entirely understandable and respectable ones. But they are not my reasons.

People sometimes assess the quality of their runs in terms of times, distances and also in more sophisticated ways: the AIs — the number, duration and intensity of the aerobic intervals they have inserted into the miles they have run; the TUT — the total uphill time and so on. But, as far as I am concerned, times, distances, AIs, TUTs — these are all just contingencies, incidentals. Every run has its own heartbeat;
the years have taught me this. The heartbeat of the run is the essence of the run, what the run really is. There, on an early summer's morning on the mountain of stone, the heartbeat was a gentle one. There was the gentle sinking of my feet into mountain grass and heather. There was the whispering rustle of the mountain breeze in the branches of the twisted, wind-hunched trees. And there was the gentle dance of skylarks in this breeze. Most of all there was Boots: the gentle pant-pant-pant of his breath and the quiet jingle-jingle-jingle of the tags that adorned his collar.

In my later life, people will sometimes ask me what I think about when I run. It's a reasonable question — especially given the profession I shall come to adopt — but, nonetheless, the wrong one. The question betrays a lack of understanding of what the run does. Any answers I could give would be pretty boring. ‘Oh God, this hurts' is an increasingly common refrain. More generally, what I think will reflect what is going on in my life before the run begins. If I am happy, I shall think happy thoughts; if I am sad, I shall think sad ones. Thinking carries too much of me in it; too much of the stench of my life, its concerns and preoccupations.

If I am thinking at all when I run, this is a sign of a run gone wrong — or, at least, of a run that has not yet gone right. The run does not yet have me in its grip. I am not yet in the heartbeat of the run; the rhythm of the run has not done its hypnotic work. On every long run that has gone right, there comes a point where thinking stops and thoughts begin. Sometimes these are worthless, but sometimes they are not. Running is the open space where thoughts come to play. I do not run in order to think. But when I run, thoughts will come. These thoughts are not something external to the run — an additional bonus or pay-off that accompanies the run. They
are a part of what it is to run, of what the run really is. When my body runs, my thoughts do too and in a way that has little to do with my devices or choosing.

There have been a number of studies on the effects running has on the brain — at least, the brains of mice — and these effects are quite impressive. Not so long ago, no one knew that adult neurogenesis — the growing of new brain cells as an adult — was even possible. But it seems that it is, and running is one of the things that can make it happen. At least it does in mice — when allowed free access to treadmills, laboratory mice grew hundreds of thousands of new cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory. Then there is BDNF — brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This is a protein that aids both in the formation of new brain cells and also in the protection of currently existing cells — and running produces lots of it. There may come a time when I am very happy about these effects that running has had on my brain, but for the present they do not concern me. I am more interested in what happens to my brain when I run, rather than afterwards. But until fMRI — functional magnetic resonance imaging — technology grows significantly more portable than it currently is, I shall probably not be able to find out, at least not directly. Nevertheless, I think it's possible to make reasonable extrapolations from work done on other aspects of brain function, particularly with regard to the connection between rhythm and information processing.

Let us begin with the phenomenon to be explained: the way it feels to you when you run. I described this in terms of a transformation of thinking into thoughts, and suggested that the hypnotic effect of rhythm was at the root of this transformation. If this phenomenon were unique to me, then
it would be largely uninteresting (except to me, of course). But other people have described substantially similar experiences. For example, Joyce Carol Oates writes: ‘Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.' And, in a similar vein, but with a slightly different emphasis, Haruki Murakami writes: ‘When I am running my mind empties itself. Everything I think while running is subordinate to the process. The thoughts that impose themselves on me while running are like light gusts of wind — they appear all of a sudden, disappear again and change nothing.' Both Oates and Murakami identify important but different aspects of the experience. With Oates, the emphasis is on rhythm: the fleeing and pulsing of thought in tune with the swinging arms and moving feet. Murakami emphasizes the emptiness of the mind, and compares thoughts to gusts of wind that blow through this emptiness. I differ from Murakami in this respect: he claims that, for him, these thoughts change nothing. Sometimes that is true for me too. But occasionally, just occasionally, they can change everything. Then, rather than a feathery breath that gently caresses my cheek, they are more like a sharp slap.