Running...yet again..

I love this article that I read in the Saturday papers on running. It is a piece so apt really. Let the extract from the article itself does the talking:

The camera’s eye
Does not lie
But it cannot show
The life within
The Life of a runner (Excerpt from “Runner” by W.H Auden)

..Running, after all, is an activity that comes free and allows you to feel free. It is the easiest of sports and equally the most available. It has no need for rivals as in football, it does not depend on a specific arena with marked lines like tennis, it is not hostage like golf to weather….

Running is also a sport at its most deeply profound where even on the busy road the athlete can discover his personal space...

Here, you exit the house, you can turn left, or right, run up, run down, literally and metaphorically make your own journey. Here, you make your own pace, you challenge no one but yourself, you have room to contemplate unlike football or tennis where the brain is tuned to tactics and quick responses…

The lure of running is that every man can chase his own cause…

To the outsider who sees no wisdom in solitude, no virtue in the mind’s ability to suppress a litany of aches, no attraction in the idea of man against himself, a clock, a road and a dream, running can seem boring. Yet as a sport, it is alive with theories, with gadgets, with personal preferences...

So enough now, stop reading, go on then. Find the shoe that fits. Choose your music. Strap on a Fuel Belt. Plan your run. Set the alarm. Join the tribe. Look out into the distance at dawn and breathe. Listen and you will hear the quiet call of the road. Then put a foot forward, run, eat up the cement, fly. And let the words of the runner John Bingham drive you:

“The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.”