Louisa May Alcott: 'A Joy to Run'

The latest adaption of Louisa May Alcott's  868 novel 'Little Women', directed by Greta Gerwig, was released in December 2019. An early scene features Saoirse Ronan (playing Jo March) dashing through the streets of New York - possibly a nod to Gerwig's own running scene in Frances Ha.  That's as far that's as far as it goes in terms of running content in this film. But did you know that Alcott herself was a keen runner from childhood, long before women's athletics let alone running clothes!

Alcott (1832-88_ was an early feminist who grew up in a milieu that included the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, famous for their romantic celebrations of nature.  In one of her memoirs, 'Sketch of Childhood, by herself', Alcott wrote: 'Active exercise was my delight, from the time when a child of six I drove my hoop round the Common without stopping, to the days when I did my twenty miles in five hours and went to a party in the evening. I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run. No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences, and be a tomboy. My wise mother, anxious to give me a strong body to support a lively brain, turned me loose in the country and let me run wild, learning of Nature what no books can teach, and being led, — as those who truly love her seldom fail to be — through Nature up to Nature's God.

I remember running over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, and pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw, through an arch of trees, the sun rise over river, hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it before. Something born of the lovely hour, a happy mood, and the unfolding aspirations of a child's soul seemed to bring me very near to God; and in the hush of that morning hour I always felt that I "got religion," as the phrase goes. A new and vital sense of His presence, tender and sustaining as a father's arms, came to me then, never to change through forty years of life's vicissitudes, but to grow stronger for the sharp discipline of poverty and pain, sorrow and success' (now that's what I call a runner's high!).

This moment was recorded in her diary at the time, when she was living in the family home at Concord, Massachusetts (where Little Women is set): 'I had an early run in the woods before the dew was off the grass. The moss was like velvet, and as I ran under the arches of yellow and red leaves I sang for joy, my heart was so bright and the world so beautiful. I stopped at the end of the walk and saw the sunshine out over the wide Virginia meadows. It seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond. A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life'.

This spiritual experience was inspired by running in the wild but was also influenced by her family's Transcendentalist beliefs (shared by Emerson and Thoreau)  which saw goodness and the divine in humans and nature, rather than in institutionalised religion.

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott continued to run as an adult, with her running a part of her writing routine. Staying in Walpole, New Hampshire in June 1855 she wrote 'Pleasant journey and a kind welcome. Lovely place, high among the hills. So glad to run and skip in the woods and up the splendid ravine. Up at five, and had a lovely run in the ravine, seeing the woods wake. Planned a little tale which ought to be fresh and true, as it came at that hour and place'. In February 1861 she recorded that 'From the 2nd to the 25th I sat writing, with a run at dusk' while working on her novel 'Moods', published in 1864. Later while writing Little Women she noted 'Finished my thirteenth chapter. I am so full of my work, I can't stop to eat or sleep, or for anything but a daily run'.

Alcott was a committed slavery abolitionist and during the American Civil War she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C. for a short period in 1862 before becoming seriously ill with typhoid. Even here she seems to have found time for running: 'My work is changed to night watching, or half night and half day — from twelve to twelve. I like it, as it leaves me time for a morning run, which is what I need to keep well; for bad air, food, and water, work and watching, are getting to be too much for me. I trot up and down the streets in all directions, sometimes to the Heights, then half way to Washington, again to the hill, over which the long trains of army wagons are constantly vanishing and ambulances appearing. That way the fighting lies, and I long to follow'.

It's not clear whether Alcott's running was seen as idiosyncratic or whether, at least in her progressive sub culture, it was commonplace for women.

Little Women itself features an episode where Jo runs down hill to the disapproval of her sister Meg:

'"Race down this hill with me, and you'll be all right," suggested Laurie.

No one was in sight, the smooth road sloped invitingly before her, and finding the temptation irresistible, Jo darted away, soon leaving hat and comb behind her and scattering hairpins as she ran. Laurie reached the goal first and was quite satisfied with the success of his treatment, for his Atlanta came panting up with flying hair, bright eyes, ruddy cheeks, and no signs of dissatisfaction in her face.

"I wish I was a horse, then I could run for miles in this splendid air, and not lose my breath.  It was capital, but see what a guy it's made me.  Go, pick up my things, like a cherub, as you are," said Jo, dropping down under a maple tree, which was carpeting the bank with crimson leaves. Laurie leisurely departed to recover the lost property, and Jo bundled up her braids, hoping no one would pass by till she was tidy again. But someone did pass, and who should it be but Meg, looking particularly ladylike in her state and festival suit, for she had been making calls.

"What in the world are you doing here?" she asked, regarding her disheveled sister with well-bred surprise.

"Getting leaves," meekly answered Jo, sorting the rosy handful she had just swept up.

"And hairpins," added Laurie, throwing half a dozen into Jo's lap. "They grow on this road, Meg, so do combs and brown straw hats."

"You have been running, Jo.  How could you?  When will you stop such romping ways?" said Meg reprovingly, as she settled her cuffs and smoothed her hair, with which the wind had taken liberties.

"Never till I'm stiff and old and have to use a crutch.  Don't try to make me grow up before my time, Meg.  It's hard enough to have you change all of a sudden.  Let me be a little girl as long as I can."'

In the sequel to Little Women, Little Men - where Jo is running a school - one of the characters, the tomboyish Nan, also enjoys running:

'“I can beat you in running, any way,” returned Nan, falling back on her strong point.
“Can she?” asked Nat of Jack.
“She runs very well for a girl,” answered Jack, who looked down upon Nan with condescending approval.
Will you try?” said Nan, longing to display her powers.
“It’s too hot,” and Tommy languished against the wall as if quite exhausted'.

All quotes, other than extracts above from Little Women and Little Women,  from Louisa May Alcott; her life, letters, and journals.

[post updated January 2020 - originally written in 2018 after the BBC's adaptions of Little Women]

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain
'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s
'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard
Morrissey - List of the Lost
Burns Night Running Thoughts
Running in the Railway Children
A Midsummer Night's Running
Running to Paradise - W B Yeats
The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike
The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit
The Runner - W H Auden
Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Once a Runner - it's about time

'Once a runner' by John L Parker Jr is a novel first self-published by the author in 1978 and subsequently re-issued with some success in 2009, having established something of a cult reputation as a runners novel about running.

Set in the world of American college athletics - apparently at a fictionalised University of Florida - it inevitably reflects the period that it was written in. The Vietnam war is a reference point and there are battles between the students and the college authorities about the permitted length of hair for men. But much of the book is about the timeless, single-minded pursuit of success on the track at the elite end of athletics.
 

For me some of the more interesting passages are where the authtor reflects on how the runners' notion of time differs from the everyday world: he describes well the specific temporality of speed and endurance.

There is a cyclical time of seasons, of cross country and track, within a longer four year cycle of the Olympic games. But there is also an obsessive focus on the tiny passages of time that make the difference between winning and losing, between reaching or just missing a PB or record: "The Games were over for this time around. He knew quite well that for him they were over for good. Four years is a very long time in some circles; in actual time – real-world time, as that of shopkeepers, insurance sellers, compounders of interest, and so on – it is perhaps not long at all. But in his own mind Time reposed in peculiar receptacles; to him the passing of one minute took on all manner of rare meaning. A minute was one fourth of a four minute mile, a coffee spoon of his days and ways'.

Elsewhere he characterises the running world as a place where 'the jettisoning of but a single second is announced like a birth in the family'.

In some circumstances running seems to have a 'timewarp' dimension that stretches time: 'In the mind's special processes, a 10 mile run takes far longer than the 60 minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists at all in the real world; it is all out on the trail somewhere, and you only go back to it when you're out there'.
 

Waiting for the gun at the start of a race, there is 'that one instant there would be a kind of calm in the midst of all that pounding, roaring furor, a moment of serene calm before an unholy storm. There would be a single instant of near disbelief that it would finally be happening in a fraction of a second; finally happening after the months, the miles, the misty mornings'.

The main protaganist, Quenton Cassidy is 'not interested in the perspective of the fringe runners, the philosopher runners, the training rats; those who sat around reading abtruse and meaningless articles in Runners world, coining yet more phrases to describe the indescribable, waxing mystical over the various states of euphoria that the anointed were allegedly privy to... Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto- religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a 10th of a second, by an inch, by 2 feet or 2 yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province)'.

It is a life measured in episodes of minutes and seconds, as well as metres and miles, and wear and tear. As Cassidy also puts it : 'I have measured out my life in worn out rubber'.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Running down the mountain Jack Kerouac-style

The great Beat writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a college athlete, in fact he got a scholarship to Columbia University as a result of his prowess as an American Football running back.  A broken leg and arguments with his coach finished his sports career.


Jack Kerouac's merchant navy enlistment photo, 1943

At his writing peak though he was no stranger to physical exercise, and his novels 'The Dharma Bums' (1958) and 'Desolation Angels' (1965) both feature fictionalised accounts of his real experiences in the mountains of California and Washington state.

A central episode in 'The Dharma Bums' is a climb of the Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevada Kerouac made with the poet/Buddhist/anarchist Gary Snyder (named 'Japhy Ryder' in the novel). At one point on the way up, Kerouac despairs:

'I nudged myself closer to the ledge and closed my eyes and thought 'Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,' and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' The saying made my hair stand on end'.

However the way back down is a lot more fun:

'Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it's impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five minutes I'd guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of my sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn't care any more I was so anxious to get down out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain goats or I'd say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago, enough to raise the hair on the head of the meditating Morley by the lake, who said he looked up and saw us flying down and couldn't believe it. In fact with one of my greatest leaps and loudest screams of joy I came flying right down to the edge of the lake and dug my sneakered heels into the mud and just fell sitting there, glad. Japhy was already taking his shoes off and pouring sand and pebbles out. It was great. I took off my sneakers and poured out a couple of buckets of lava dust and said "Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain"'.

In 1956, Kerouac lived alone for 63 days on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington state, working as a fire look out. In 'Desolation Angels' he again describes running down, this time with the added incentive that he has to catch a boat at the bottom and is anxious to return to the 'sweet cities below' with their 'burlesque shows, cigars and wines and papers in a room, fogs, ferries, bacon and eggs and toast in the morning'. Although few of us have had to run quite like he describes, the struggle of keeping going through the pain will resonate with many of us I am sure:

'The best way to come down a mountain is like running, swing your arms free and fall as you come, your feet will hold you up for the rest – but O I had no feet because no shoes, I was “barefooted” (as the saying goes) and far from stomping down on big trail-singin steps as I bash along tra la tra la I could hardly even mincingly place them the soles were so thin and the rocks so sudden some of them with a sharp bruise – A John Bunyan morning, it was all I could do to keep my mind on other things – I tried to sing, think, daydream, do as I did by the desolation stove – but Karma your trail is laid out for you – Could have no more escaped that morning of bruised torn feet and burning-ache thighs (and eventual searing blisters like needles) and the gasping sweats, the attack of insects, than I can escape and than you can escape being eternally around to go through the emptiness of form (including the emptiness of form of your complaining personality) – I had to do it, not rest, my only concern was keeping the boat...

...So I up I get and lunge along with pack, thumbed, and wince on ankled pains and turn and turn the trail faster and faster under my growing trot and pretty soon I’m running, bent, like a Chinese woman with a pack of faggots on her neck, jingle jingle drumming and pumping stiff knees thru rock underbrush and around corners, sometimes I crash off the trail and bellow back on’t, somehow, never lose, the way was made to be followed...  Sometimes I fall, on haunches, slipt, the pack is my back bumper... it’s a dance, dance from rock to rock, hurt to hurt, wince down the mountain...

... The trail, last halfmile, is worse than above, the rocks, big, small, twisted ravines for your feet - Now I begin sobbing for myself, cursing of course - 'It never ends!' is my big complaint... 'But this is only a Samsara-World-of-Suffering trail, subject to time and space, therefore must end, but my God it will never end!' and I come running and thwapping finally no more - For the first time I fall exhausted without planning.. I push myself up and try on - Every step wont do, it wont work, that my thighs hold it up's'mystery to me - plah -

Finally I'm loading my step on ahead of me, like placing topheavy things on a platform with outstretched arms, the kind of strain you cant keep up - other than the bare feet (now battered with torn skin and blisters and blood) I could just plow and push down the hill, like a falling drunk almost falling never quite falling and if so would it hurt as much as my feet? - nu - gotta push and place each up-keen and down with the barbfoot of Blakean Perfidy with worms and howlings everywhere - dust - I fall on my knees. Rest that way awhile and go on.... the wild flowers don't interest me no more - 'I can't make it' is my only thought as I keep going, which thought is like phosphorescent negative red glow imprinting the film of my brain 'Gotta make it' -

... I rounded the final little shelf-trail to the boat - This I plodded and waved with a smile, letting the feet go by, blister in left shoe that I thought was a sharp pebble ground into my skin - In all the excitement, dont realize I am back in the world at last'.

This was no doubt not Kerouac's most pleasurable journey, but elsewhere in 'The Dharma Bums' he listed running as one of the elements of the good life - and who could disagree?:


'Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running — that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there'.

More running related literature:

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

'These forms who hasten by' - ghosts and runners on the Pilgrims Way (1923)

The Pilgrims Way

Along the Pilgrims' way.

The yew trees sigh and sway,

They stand a lasting line,

On ancient days a sign.

The monk and minstrel gay

With prayer and roundelay;

The pedlar with his load;

They took the Pilgrims' road

And when the sun is low,

They sometimes seem to go

Along the same old track,

By yew trees, gnarled and black.

When folks say what they've seen,

Well, WE know what they mean;

These forms who hasten by,

Are really you and I!

(RMH, South London Harriers Gazette, November 1923)

Pilgrims Way,  Kent, 1950 - Bill Brandt

The Pilgrims Way is a route between Winchester and Canterbury, at least part of which follows ancient trackways on the North Downs even if its name and conception as a single continuous route probably goes back no further than the 1870s. It is popular with walkers and runners - including those taking part in  The Pilgrims Challenge 66 mile ultra marathon in the last couple of years.

The notion of following in the footsteps of ancient pilgrims is an evocative one, and in a certain light quite haunting. In the 1920s, when this poem was written, there was upsurge of interest in both the great outdoors and in ghosts. Robert Macfarlane notes that in this period 'people, traumatized by the war, took to the paths in search of ghosts  - setting out on the tracks of the lost and left-behind. Old paths became mediums in two senses: means of communion as well as means of motion. The convivial pilgrimages described by Chaucer became tinged with a morbid historicism: spectres stepped from the verge or hedge, offering brief address' (The Old Ways: a journey on foot, 2012).

This would seem to apply to this poem, which I found in an old South London Harriers newsletter, but  I like the twist  - that what others see as ghosts may in fact be runners hastening by.

I wonder who 'RMH' was?

[update - South London Harriers have identified an R.M. Harrison who ran for the club in this period, so he is possibly the poet]

Hamish Fulton's The Pilgrims Way features in the current 'Conceptual Art in Britain' exhibition at Tate Britain gallery in London. In  April 1971, Fulton conceived of  'A 165 mile walk' on 'Ancient paths forming a route between Winchester and Canterbury' as an art work leaving no trace other than this photograph of  'A hollow lane on the North Downs'.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

How to get in the football team - just run!

The more I have got into running the more I have come to appreciate its critical role in so many other sports. In some ways it is the ur-sport, the original contest that underlies all the rest. Humans have always run, and the game of who can run furthest or fastest must have existed long before most other sports were codified. More than that the ability to run fast, and sustain that speed over a long game (even if only in short bursts) is a key skill in everything from football to tennis: the ability to run after a ball or away from an opponent. In cricket points are even labelled 'runs' and a 'home run' is a high point of baseball. That is one of the reasons why many suspect that doping is probably as widespread in some of these sports as in track & field, it just hasn't been tested for so extensively.

Anyway in  'A Death in the Family' by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the first volume of his epic fictionalised autobiography 'My Struggle', the Norwegian author recalls how his recognition of all this helped him impress his school football coach and get promoted to the senior team:

'Many people could not understand why I was playing with them. I was no good, after all. There were at least six, perhaps even seven or eight players in the junior team who were better than me... I understood why...

All that autumn I had run a lot and was in such good shape that I had been selected to represent the school in the 1500 meters even though I had never done any track or field events before. So when it was my turn to train with the seniors on the snow-covered shale pitch near Kjota, I knew I had to run. It was my only chance. I ran and ran. In every sprint up the pitch I came first. I gave everything I had every time. When we started to play it was the same: I ran and ran, ran for everything all the time. I ran like someone possessed, and after three sessions of that I knew that I was promoted and I was not surprised. But the others in the junior team were. Whenever I failed to control the ball, whenever I made a bad pass, they let me know, what the hell are you doing in the seniors? Why did they pick you?

I knew why, it because I ran. You just had to run'.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Morrissey - List of the Lost: 'the future is a time when you will only watch'

I still think that The Smiths were one of the greatest bands of all times (I saw them four times), and last year their lead singer/lyricist wrote a novel about running. What's not to like? Except that 'List of the Lost' by Morrissey (Penguin, 2015) received pretty much universally terrible reviews, and knowing that even his musical solo output has been decidely patchy I have put off reading it until now. 

And no it isn't very good. It's the tale of four young Boston athletes, 'America's most sovereignly feared college relay team' but that is a device for the over-intrusive narrator to sing of the joys of a band of brothers at their physical peak before what he sees as the inevitable disappointments of adult relationships and ageing.
  

So as they prepare to run their half-mile relay (or in metric terms 4 x 200m), Morrissey reflects that 'Their success depends upon the communal goal, the spring in eight legs, the combined methodology of four minds, and the maintained perfection of four physical frames; four wheels of the one machine... there is a job to be done - a job almost as old as reading, one which fades faster than it blooms, batting away the decline that rots in life, a decline that must always win'. 

 There is a coach who is simply one of the 'belligerent ghouls, run Manchester schools' (The Smiths, Headmaster Ritual), transplanted to New England. He berates the young athletes 'we search in life for that one race that sums everything. Well keep searching. As they lower your cold-meat body into the ground, keep searching still... Historians of track and field need watch you no longer'.  

Devices that work fine in song lines - alliteration, internal rhymes etc. - sound strained and tortuous in long archaic sentences. And the plot - well without wishing to spoil it, the young athletes are spared the compromises of getting old thanks to a series of deaths with a supernatural twist. But surely Morrissey, who was a schoolboy athlete himself (see my previous post on this) must have some perceptive observation to offer on the world of running? 

Well, this was the best I could find: 'Somewhere alone within the hole of the soul it is known that the page is already turning, and the future is a time when you will only watch. Fully present in today, you will make the most of yourself as you dig deep to bring out whatever will save you'.

The cover star is American athlete Early Young, running a relay for Abilene Christian College, Texas. Young won a 4 x 400m gold medal for USA in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Burns Night Running Thoughts

I've had the (vegetarian) haggis and have the bottle of Bruichladdich ready to tuck into for Burns Night. Don't think I'll be doing any running, but pleased to see that in Westbrook, Maine (USA) they held a Robert Burns 10k Road Race  in the snow last night with more than 100 runners, some  kilt clad, raising money for a local school:

'"I like Robert Burns a lot," co-director of the 10k, Ned Swain, said as he explained why he chose to name the race after the late poet. "It's a holiday that doesn't have much associated with it aside from haggis and kilts and his poetry. How can you hate that?" (Runners don kilts for Robert Burns 10k)

Not aware of any Burns running poems as such, but I think these lines are inspirational enough for all those who 'drudge an' drive thro' wet and dry': 

'What tho', like commoners of air, 

We wander out, we know not where, 

But either house or hal', 

Yet nature's charms, the hills and woods, 

The sweeping vales, and foaming floods, 

Are free alike to all. 

In days when daisies deck the ground, 

And blackbirds whistle clear, 

With honest joy our hearts will bound, 

To see the coming year...


Think ye, that sic as you and I,
Wha drudge and drive thro' wet and dry,
Wi' never ceasing toil;
Think ye, are we less blest than they,
Wha scarcely tent us in their way,
As hardly worth their while?'

(Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet) 

Bagpipes at the finish line (photo from Robert Burns 10k facebook page)

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Footnotes: Running Experiences

'Footnotes: Running Experiences'  at the Amersham Arms in New Cross earlier this month (2nd  September) was an interesting event, a running-themed spoken word Open Mic night featuring 'tales of poetry in motion'.

First up was New Cross-based artist and runner Veronique Chance with tales of  her 2012 Great Orbital Ultra-Run, undertaken 'over nine consecutive days around the inside of the M25. Conceived as 'point-to-point' from and to 10 different motel stops along the route, this journey did not follow preconceived 'paths' but was about negotiating a route round come what may.  Relayed live from her mobile phone through a stream of images along with her GPS coordinates, this was projected as a moving image work with sound at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich for the exhibition 'Evil Sport and Ultra Run''. Veronique showed images from this run/performance while reading extracts from her daily run notes. Of course Iain Sinclair wrote a whole book about walking the London Orbital, but I think his progress in the company of literary and artistic visionaries was slightly more leisurely than Chance's solo navigation of traffic, fences and other hazards, as described for instance in this extract:

'I spend much of the rest of the journey negotiating private farm land and scrubland and climbing over a lot of small barbed wire fences to keep alongside the motorway... In the the middle of all of this I nearly got attacked by a rotweiler that was loose inside an open gateway. As soon as I tried to pass it began barking aggressively and bounded over towards me. I froze thinking that was it- that I was going to be mauled, but luckily he went back, but I was completely stuck, he was not going to let me pass. My only way out was to climb over a wire fence behind me. I was petrified and almost in tears, but relieved I managed to get out of the situation'.


The Great Orbital Ultra Run (archive clip) 2012 from Veronique Chance on Vimeo.

The event was arranged by SE London-based writer Vybarr Cregan-Reid - a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kent - and he read an extract from his forthcoming book, 'Footnotes: running, landscape & the way we live now'. The book aims to be a  'psychogeography of running that darts between poetry, philosophy, neuroscience, history, paleoanthropology, and biomechanics. It is a running book for those that love the new nature writing' (see his Pyschojography blog). The extract he read recalled his impressions of going for a run round Walden pond in Concord, Massachusetts and the irony of coming across a 'no running' sign in this area now preserved as a tourist shrine to the writer Henry David Thoreau who lived there and famously celebrated the natural world as an escape from such restrictions.

After a few short open mic contributions - including a piece from me on breathing and running which I will write up at some point, exercise scientist Mike Rogerson discussed some of the latest research from the University of Essex's Green Exercise Research Group. Essentially this argues that Green Exercise - undertaking 'physical activity while simultaneously being exposed to nature' - brings greater benefits to psychological well-being than doing exercise in 'non-natural' environments. Interesting stuff which sparked a lively discussion about the relationship between environmental and social factors. The argument is less that 'countryside' (actually mostly human-created landscape) is better than 'city', but that within urban areas we might get more benefit from running in parks and other green spaces than from running down a treeless street. Not surprisingly, parkrun is one research focus and Rogerson has been involved in a study to compare effects of four different parkrun courses.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Running in The Railway Children

The Railway Children - both  Edith Nesbit's 1906 novel  and the 1970 film adaption of it - feature a paperchase/hare and hounds race in the north of England. As mentioned here before such races, where a 'hare' runs ahead scattering a trail of paper and is chased by the 'hounds', were important in the early history of organised cross country running in the 19th century - hence many clubs retaining the name 'harriers' to this day.

In the story, the hare leads the hounds down a railway tunnel where one of them trips and is injured, narrowly escaping being hit by a train. But it all end's well, as the children look after him and in return the boy's grandfather helps secure the release of their father from prison. 

 '"Let me pass, please." It was the hare—a big-boned, loose-limbed boy, with dark hair lying flat on a very damp forehead. The bag of torn paper under his arm was fastened across one shoulder by a strap. The children stood back. The hare ran along the line, and the workmen leaned on their picks to watch him. He ran on steadily and disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel...

And now, following the track of the hare by the little white blots of scattered paper, came the hounds. There were thirty of them, and they all came down the steep, ladder-like steps by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens. Bobbie and Phyllis and Peter counted them as they passed. The foremost ones hesitated a moment at the foot of the ladder, then their eyes caught the gleam of scattered whiteness along the line and they turned towards the tunnel, and, by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens, disappeared in the dark mouth of it. The last one, in a red jersey, seemed to be extinguished by the darkness like a candle that is blown out' (E.Nesbit, The Railway Children - full text here).

The author (and socialist) E.Nesbit lived in various places in South East London from the 1870s until the First World War including Blackheath, Lewisham (Elswick Road), Lee, and Well Hall in Eltham. I wonder whether she ever saw Lewisham Hare and Hounds in action, the predecessors of today's Kent Athletic Club? They were formed in 1888 and certainly ran paperchases in the period when Nesbit was living in the area.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Midsummer Running in Dulwich Park

'Why do they run away? this is a knavery of them to make me afeard'

(photo from Dulwich Runners)

Last Thursday 25th June, 150 of us did three circuits of South London's Dulwich Park taking part in Dulwich Runners' Midsummer 5k. Top three finishers for men and women were as follows (full results at Run Britain):

Men:

1. Alex Gibbins (Blackheath and Bromley AC) - 16:10

2. Phil Sanders (Kent AC) - 16:11

3. Warwick Norris (Run Dem Crew) - 16:21

Women:

1. Sorrel Walsh (Run Dem Crew) - 19:07

2. Julia Wedmore (Herne Hill Harriers) - 19.23

3. Melanie Edwards - 19:26

The race was preceded by a one mile children's event, which was all very cute but definitely cost me a place in the 5k later as the children stayed on to cheer their parents... I was running along quite happily when at the end of the second lap a child called out to the guy behind me 'Dad, there's a little boy beating you' (there was a junior runner ahead of us both). In no time at all, said Dad had moved up a gear, overtaken me and headed off in hot pursuit of his youthful rival. 

Midsummer running

'Over hill, over dale,

Through bush, through brier,

Over park, over pale,

Through flood, through fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon's sphere'

It was a hot evening, and where better to be than in the green outdoors? At this time of year with the days at their longest and the sun at its height, people have celebrated midsummer revels for thousands of years with dancing and games. In his book on seasonal customs, The Stations of the Sun (1996), Ronald Hutton notes that it was once common in many parts of  Europe to light festive bonfires on Midsummer Eve (23 June). An  Elizabethan ballad  mentions that 'the nimble young men runne leapinge' over Midsummer fires. There was no fire leaping in Dulwich Park this year, but plenty of nimble men and women of various ages running around.

The 5k route was more or less the same as the regular Dulwich parkrun route, above

The drama of the Green World

Writing about A Midsummer Night's Dream and other Shakespearean comedies, the critic Northrop Frye famously wrote of the ‘drama of the Green World’, with the action moving away from the confines of 'the normal world'  to a woodland setting of rebirth and dreams where the social order is suspended and contradictions are resolved. If the characters generally have to return to the normal world afterwards, it is to a better place than when they left it as a result of their adventures (Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957).

 For me, running races - perhaps especially in parks, woods and fields - functions as a kind of Green World in a similar way. A time and space outside of everyday life when we can temporarily leave behind worries about work or the state of the world, when the things that divide human beings are set aside for a common experience of focusing solely on the immediacy of our physical bodies and the terrain we move over, as fast as we can. And if we cross the line hot and exhausted, we generally feel better for it afterwards.

'O, I am out of breath in this fond chase!'

(all quotes in italics from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream)

See previously: Running in Dulwich Park for a bit more about its history and running culture - in fact the park's origins have a connection with Shakespearean actor and theatre owner Edward Alleyn.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Running to Paradise - W.B. Yeats

Happy 150th birthday William Butler Yeats... the great Irish poet was born  in Sandymount on 13 June 1865. He spent time in my South London neck of the woods, conducting occult experiments on the site of what is now the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill,  visiting Madame Blavatsky in Norwood, and speaking at Southwark Irish Literary Club. Some even claim that his spirit inspired the campaign to save Oxleas Wood - a popular spot for runners - in the 1990s!

1900 portrait by his father, John Butler Yeats

His 1916 poem Running to Paradise is (I think) a reflection on the great leveller of death and ageing. The swift 'bare heel' of youth will end up in an 'old sock'; and in death - whether you believe in the after life or a cold lifeless grave - 'the king is but as the beggar'. So, like the beggar in the poem, we might as well run like the wind.

Running to Paradise (1916)

As I came over Windy Gap

They threw a halfpenny into my cap,

For I am running to Paradise;

And all that I need do is to wish

And somebody puts his hand in the dish    

To throw me a bit of salted fish:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

My brother Mourteen is worn out

With skelping his big brawling lout,

And I am running to Paradise;

A poor life do what he can,

And though he keep a dog and a gun,

A serving maid and a serving man:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

Poor men have grown to be rich men,

And rich men grown to be poor again,

And I am running to Paradise;

And many a darling wit’s grown dull

That tossed a bare heel when at school,

Now it has filled an old sock full:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

The wind is old and still at play

While I must hurry upon my way,

For I am running to Paradise;

Yet never have I lit on a friend

To take my fancy like the wind

That nobody can buy or bind:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

The sky of a Saturday morning

'Today is Saturday, and the sky has that broad bright blunt Saturday quality Rabbit remembers from boyhood, when the sky of a Saturday morning was the blank scoreboard of a long game about to begin' (John Updike, 'Rabbit, Run', 1961)

photo by tpsdave on pixabay

[actually this is the first Saturday in over a year that I'm not running, as I've been sick - so just in the mood for a melancholic/nostalgic quote]

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

The Runner - W.H. Auden (1960)

The Runner

All visible visibly

Moving things
Spin or swing,
One of the two,
Move, as the limbs
Of a runner do,
To and fro,
Forward and back,
Or, as they swiftly
Carry him
In orbit go
Round an endless track:
So, everywhere, every
Creature disporting
Itself according
To the law of its making
In the rivals’ dance
Of a balanced pair
Or the ring-dance
Round a common centre,
Delights the eye
By its symmetry
As it changes place
Blessing the unchangeable
Absolute rest
Of the space all share

The camera’s eye
Does not lie
But it cannot show
The life within,
The life of a runner,
Of yours or mine,
That race which is neither
Fast nor slow,
For nothing can ever
Happen twice,
That story which moves
Like music when
Begotten notes
New notes beget
Making the flowing
Of time a growing
Till what it could be
At last it is,
Where Fate is Freedom,
Grace, and Surprise.

Wilma Rudolph (USA) wins the 100 m at the 1960 Olympics

In 1960 W.H. Auden was commissioned to write a poem for a BBC programme about athletics - presumably tied in with the Olympic Games which were held that year in Rome.  My favourite section of 'The Runner' is the opening of the second stanza: 'The camera’s eye, Does not lie, But it cannot show, The life within,  The life of a runner' . A reminder that we can never see the interior life of the athlete - or anybody else.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'