The Runner Slows Down

This is no easy post to write. It may well be the most contentious thing I’ve written. It’s personal to me because many of my friends, colleagues, close acquaintances, people I admire, people I respect, are marathon runners. I’m in a long term relationship with someone who has run half marathons. So here’s the problem: I think marathons are boring.

Don’t worry – this isn’t going to be a Spiked Online style rant about the evils of ‘charity muggers’. I think charities are a massively important part of civil society, I have worked for charities, I think on the whole they do an enormous amount of good. I know the argument that some people only give to charity so that they can feel good about themselves – but so what. The drug of sanctimony is harmless in small doses.

So whenever anyone passes the tin around for a charity marathon, I always give. But part of me sighs inside. Why?

It’s not like I don’t care for exercise. I have worked out on and off for almost twenty years, I use a home cycle, I even box occasionally, I walk most everywhere (and not just because automotive travel gives me panic attacks). When I was younger I used to get up at 6am and sprint up and down the Transpennine or around Woodhouse Park, and then go to work. I’m no alpha male, I’m another middle aged suburban guy with a beer gut, but I do understand the benefits and pleasure of exercise. People say: ‘Running is very good not just for physical health but for your mental health.’ I get that.

So why am I bored of marathons? I think it is just one of those minor irritations that we all have towards people who do other things that are positive but for some reason we find annoying and objectionable, in a way that is hard to define. If blogging has a purpose in this day and age, it is a space for refining one’s irrational prejudices.

Part of my feeling is that a marathon seems like such a waste of time. Sign up for a marathon and you are committing yourself to months of preparation for a single event. And it doesn’t seem like a fun event – you are not going to be tearing around green spaces but logjammed in a city centre with hundreds of other sweating, red-faced competitors, which for me would take all the pleasure and freedom out of running. It’s a subjective thing, but by the same token I don’t go to the gym because I don’t want to be surrounded by other customers and landfill chart house when I can work out in my house with Netflix and my own superior music.

Marathon runners raise sponsorship money – again, I think that’s great, no problems there – but then, it would be less time consuming if you just sold your car and gave that money to charity. Okay, that means you don’t have a car, but on the other hand you have just saved yourself months of free time, a net gain. Living without a car will give you an exercise benefit from having to walk places instead. You might say it’s not practical to give up the car, but neither really is running 13-26 miles in one day.

Which brings me to my next point: marathon running is very compartmentalised. Journalist Nick Cohen – a late, unlikely and enthusiastic marathon runner – tried to imagine what a truly health based society would look like. He concluded that it would not be enough to crack down on booze, tobacco and junk food.

Pedestrians and cyclists would have priority on the roads. If the roads are too narrow to take cars, cycle lanes and a pavement wide enough to allow pedestrians to walk or run in comfort, then cars will have to go. School runs will become history as heads refuse to admit any able-bodied child who arrives at school in a car.

It will not necessarily be illegal to drive in towns and cities, just pointless. Motorists would inch along because cycle and bus lanes would take up road space and pelican crossings would be reset so pedestrians never had to wait more than a minute to cross a road. Even when they reached their destinations, drivers would search forever for a space because car parks would have been demolished and replaced with public parks.

My point is that rather than close the city centre road network for one day to have a marathon we should be encouraging people to avoid car travel where possible. That means restructuring cities so that they are easier to walk and run in.

Probably the main issue for me is the commitment thing. It just seems overly stressful to commit yourself to a long term training regime. It fits neatly, though, with the way our society is going. It’s like for capitalism to be viable people have to commit to more and more – the mortgage, the family, the career, the schools – until it overwhelms their lives and finally burns them out.

Let me end the rambling and contentious post by saying again that no disrespect to you if you are into marathon culture and the mass charity running. I’ll be on Woodhouse Moor.

(Image: Wikipedia)