Now we are drawing close to the place where the rabbits live: around the corner, and four hundred strides to where the hedgerows open up into a field. Marking the entrance are two hulking, rotting bales of hay that have been here longer than we have. Between the bales is a rabbit warren, and today as ever, the rabbits will be making the most of the milky, reticent Irish summer sun. Reticent is about as good as the sun gets in these parts. As we turn the corner, I can feel the excitement of the pack beginning to build. We’re still three hundred strides away, but they try to persuade me to run faster, slowly building the pressure. Brenin inches his nose in front of me, testing the water. ‘Back!’ I growl, but inwardly smile, gesticulating brusquely with my thumb. Seconds later, Nina tries the same thing. That was the strategy. First one animal then another: testing me. Another growl: ‘Wait for it!’ Then, an agony of moments later, I release the tension: ‘Go on!’ and we sprint the remaining distance. It’s an enjoyable way of getting in some speed work. I need it. By the time I have reached the bales, trailing miserably behind the others, the pack has dissolved before my eyes: Brenin one way, Nina another, Tess yet another — a frenzy of chasing and snapping and slipping. To no avail — no rabbits were ever harmed on these runs. Perhaps they hear us thundering along the lane, and by the time we arrive are waiting, patient, unsurprised, maybe a little amused, by their burrows. I don’t know. I’m hunched over, winded, often nauseous, but always elated. The pack bounces up to me in unison, tongues lolling, eyes shining with excitement: that was fun, maybe better luck tomorrow. A few minutes later, we are back on the road and the gentle rhythm of the pack reasserts itself.
When I was twenty-seven, I did something really rather stupid. Actually, I almost certainly did many stupid things that year, but this is the only one I remember because it went on to indelibly shape the future course of my life. When I first met — and acquired — Brenin, I was a young assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, and he was six weeks old, a cuddly little teddy bear of a wolf cub. At least, he was sold to me as a wolf, but it is quite likely that he was a wolf-dog mix. Whatever he was, he grew up.
On the following page is a picture of us taken some years after we left Alabama: taken, in fact, at a place we shall pass on today’s run. This is at Charles Fort, in a little village called Summer Cove, a couple of miles outside Kinsale. As a result of having to live with a rootless and restless philosopher, Brenin became a very cosmopolitan wolf, moving with me from Alabama to Ireland, on to England and finally to France. At the time this photograph was taken, Brenin would have been around seven years old, and this day was my thirty-fifth birthday.
The first run I ever took with Brenin was short but not entirely without incident. I ran from the living room to the bedroom, to the study, to the next bedroom, to that other room I never knew what to do with, to the kitchen, to the den, and then out of, and finally under, the house. I was not so much running with Brenin as after him. I had bought him that day and was introducing him to the house. His first act was to rip down the curtains in every room, before finding an open back door. He then made his way out into the yard, and then, through another open door, managed to make his way under the house where he ripped down all the soft-lagged pipes leading the cold air from the air conditioner back into the house. $500 those two minutes cost me, to go with the $500 it had cost me to buy Brenin scarcely more than an hour before. In those days, that was nearly a twentieth of my annual salary.
A playful cub, you might think. But it’s not as if he mellowed as he grew up. If anything, he got worse. Brenin had, let us say, certain idiosyncrasies. If I left him unattended for more than a few minutes, he would destroy anything he could lay his jaws on — which, given that he grew to be thirty-five inches at the withers, included pretty much everything that wasn’t screwed to the ceiling. I don’t know whether he was easily bored, had separation anxiety, or claustrophobia, or some combination of all of these things. But the result was that Brenin had to go everywhere I did. I took him to lectures with me. He would lie down and sleep in the corner of the lecture room: most of the time anyway — when he didn’t, things would get interesting. Any socializing I did — bars, parties — he had to come too. If I had a date, he would play the lupine gooseberry. For more than a decade Brenin and I lived our lives in each other’s pockets.
Allied to his destructive proclivities was his boundless energy. When Brenin was a cub, and then a young wolf, he liked to play a game: he would grab a cushion off the sofa or armchair on which I was sitting, and tear off out to the garden, with me in hot pursuit. It was a game of chase and he loved it. But when he started getting big, he decided to modify the game. One day, sitting in my study, my reflections were interrupted by a sequence of loud thuds coming from the room that led out to the back garden. Instead of taking a cushion from the armchair and going out to the garden, Brenin had decided that it would be far more rewarding to take the rest of the armchair too. The thuds were made by the chair, locked firmly in Brenin’s jaws, being repeatedly slammed against the doorframe. I think it was at precisely this moment I decided that, all things considered, it would be a really good thing if Brenin were constantly exhausted. And so our daily walks together became daily runs. That is the how, when and why of the beginning of my life of running, at least as an adult. The years will see us move across an ocean. Our pack will double in size. But our running together started that day in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with the thud-thud-thud of an armchair against a doorframe.
Aristotle claimed that anything that exists — object, person, event, state or process — has four causes. When he talked of ‘causes’, Aristotle meant something like what we would call an ‘explanation’. Anything that exists — and my running is no exception — can be explained in four different ways. We need to understand all of these ways if we are to understand the thing in question. Brenin was what Aristotle would have called the efficient cause of my running. The efficient cause of something is its immediate impetus. When one billiard ball hits another — to use the sort of example philosophers typically employ in this context — and makes the second move, the movement of the first is the efficient cause of the movement of the second. Brenin, of boundless energy and destructive appetites whose limits I had no desire to test, was the efficient cause of my beginning to run, and the efficient cause of my continuing to run, day in day out, rain or shine.
When he was around four years of age, we moved from Alabama to County Cork, Ireland, where Brenin was soon joined by other efficient causes. Brenin had to go into quarantine for six months. This was back in the days before pet passports and the like, and the British and Irish governments apparently had not had time to catch up with the recent invention of a rabies vaccine by Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux in 1885. When he was released, I vowed to make the second half of his life as good as it could possibly be and so decided to get him a friend, one with more legs and a colder nose than I. The result was Nina, a German shepherd/Malamute mix. Here she is, pictured in Knockduff Lodge, the tiny, drafty, tumbledown cottage we all shared. She’s still quite a young dog (her muzzle went prematurely grey), and here she’s in full-on ‘take me for a run or I might just have to kill you’ mode.
A couple of years after Nina had joined us, Brenin unilaterally decided to augment the pack on his own. An illicit rendezvous with a white German shepherd a few miles away resulted — sixty-three days plus around five weeks later — in the addition of Tess. She grew up to resemble her father in many ways. She was predominantly grey rather than brown, but you could certainly tell whose daughter she was. I remember her as a softer, gentler version of Brenin: a toy wolf, beautiful but just a little too round, a little too fluffy. She never quite acquired the clean angularity of her father and her coat was far less coarse. Just a smidgeon too cuddly to be a real wolf, Tess was elegant, retiring and she loved comfort. There wasn’t an aggressive bone in her body. I once had to rescue her from a savaging at the hands of a Jack Russell. This was largely the result of Ni
na’s unsparing efforts. Being the older dog, Nina was alpha female; and she intended to keep it that way. Any sign whatsoever of Tess asserting her authority would be ruthlessly stamped out by Nina. If she had fought back against the little terrier, Nina probably would have joined in — and not on Tess’s side. Nonetheless, as you can see, they were the best of friends.
Here, Tess is around six months of age and still has a lot of growing to do. When she was fully grown, she was a little bit bigger than Nina. Everyone thought she was much smaller.
Both Nina and Tess seemed to worship Brenin — at least, they copied everything he did. This was far from an unadulterated blessing. Brenin would eat my house and all my possessions if I left him unattended. So you can imagine what the three of them could do together. Our daily runs continued with renewed urgency.
Brenin, Nina and Tess were the efficient causes of my beginning to run, and my continuing to run, every day — whatever the weather and whatever my state of health. Bad things would happen if I didn’t. Serious illness, the loss of a limb or something like that, might have bought me a day’s grace. But, after that, I’m sure they would have expected me to trundle around the lanes in a motorized wheelchair. Those animals needed to run, and would accept no excuses.
If Aristotle is right, however, there is more to understanding something than just its efficient cause. He writes:
‘Cause’ means: (a) in one sense, that as the result of whose presence something comes into being — e.g. the bronze of a statue and the silver of a cup; (b) in another sense, the form or pattern; that is, the essential formula and the classes which contain it; (c) the source of the first beginning of change or rest — e.g. the man who plans is a cause, and the father is the cause of the child, and in general that which produces is the cause of that which is produced, and that which changes of that which is changed; (d) the same as ‘end’; i.e. the final cause — e.g. as the ‘end’ of walking is health.
Here, the idea of an efficient cause is captured by (c). Brenin, Nina and Tess were the efficient causes of my running, in the way that the father is the cause of the child. Or, in the case of a statue, one of Aristotle’s favourite examples, the efficient cause would be the sculptor, chiselling away at a lump of marble. Brenin, and then Nina and Tess, were the sculptors of my running in this sense — chipping (or perhaps gnawing) away at the couch potato to reveal the runner underneath. But to understand the statue we need to understand more than this: we also need to understand what Aristotle called the ‘material’ and ‘formal’ causes of the statue. The material cause of the statue is the material from which it is made: the lump of marble or whatever else the sculptor employs. The formal cause of the statue is its form or shape: what it is a statue of — a wolf, a dog, a man, etc. To understand something like a statue you need to understand not only who or what makes it (the efficient cause), but also from what it is made (the material cause) and what it is that is being made (the formal cause).
There are, of course, no runs in the abstract. There are just the runnings of runners, concrete episodes where a certain physical body changes its location, moves from A to B, in a certain way. Both the material and the formal cause of my running coalesce in me. The material cause is me: Mark Rowlands, lump of meat. The formal cause of my running is the way this meat has been organized. And what way is that, precisely?
Aristotle defined humans as rational animals. Echoing him, despite more than a little evidence to the contrary, we now refer to ourselves as Homo sapiens. Of course, we have every reason to be delighted with the way our cerebral cortex turned out. A very large and impressive cerebral cortex it is. On the other hand, we might, with approximately equal justification, focus on our large and impressive arses.
When I started running with Brenin, I suffered from a rather unfortunate case of species-envy. He would glide over the ground with a grace and economy of movement I could never match: from a distance it would look like he was floating an inch or two above the surface of the earth. I, on the other hand, was the clumsy featherless biped, the leaden-footed monkey puffing and thudding along beside him. I rail against this misfortune at some length in The Philosopher and the Wolf.
But, of course, it is all relative. I may not look good next to a wolf, but compared to other apes, I’m really not bad at it. By ‘other apes’ I mean non-human ones. Like most other humans, I am much better at running than my simian cousins. Playing a not insignificant role in my augmented abilities is my gluteus maximus. Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans — they never developed glutes, not big ones like I have. What distinguishes me from my simian brothers is the size of my arse. For entirely understandable reasons, we humans would rather focus on our cerebral cortex or, at a pinch, our extraordinarily flexible thumbs. But I think a good case can be made for the arse being the crowning bodily development of human beings — the decisive phenotypic modification that paved the way for everything else. It is our arses that allow us to run upright, instead of bumbling and stumbling along on our knuckles like other apes. It is all very well to come down from the trees, but without an arse there’s really not much to do afterwards.
I am already at that age where if I do not run, my arse will disappear. My gut will get bigger and my arse will get flatter. I’ve been there. Then, big shouldered and somewhat hirsute, more and more I come to resemble a gorilla. When I don’t run, I regress — at least in bodily terms — to the ape I would have been if evolution had never come up with big arses. Running is what keeps me in touch with what is distinctively human in me: my big-arsed humanity.
My constant companion — wherever I turn, my arse is there — is also a reminder of just how ill designed I am for the life I lead. Human beings — or at least their recognizable big-arsed precursors — first made an appearance in the fossil record about two million years ago. Agriculture didn’t make an appearance until around 10,000 years ago. For the other 1.99 million years we were hunter-gatherers. If we think of the current span of the human race as twenty-four hours on a clock, then the modern sedentary me, the me who spends much of his day sitting and eats food grown and picked (and, in my earlier years, raised and killed) by someone else, was born no more than a few seconds before midnight.
According to Loren Cordain and colleagues, hunter-gatherer males typically expend around twenty to twenty-five kilocalories per kilogram of body weight per day in physical activity. A modern sedentary office worker typically expends less than five kilocalories per kilogram per day. If we introduce a three-kilometre walk into the office worker’s day, this only ups the energy expenditure to less than nine kilocalories per kilogram per day. It is only when more vigorous forms of exercise are introduced — for example, a sixty-minute run at a pace of twelve kilometres per hour — that we start to reproduce the energy expenditure levels of our Stone Age ancestors.
We are, it goes without saying, the product of evolutionary processes. And evolution takes a long time to get things done. Even if it perhaps does not work as slowly as people used to think, 10,000 years, in evolutionary terms, is the blink of an eye. Any biological changes wrought in us in the last 10,000 years will be relatively minor. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that our modern sedentary life is one for which we have not been designed and for which, at least biologically, we are poorly equipped. It is a common misconception — pervasive and tenacious, but a misconception nonetheless — that arses are made for sitting on. It seems, instead, they are made for running. We are happiest and healthiest when we live our history, and so become what we are.
Beside me runs a living representation of this truth. We race down a steep lane that will swing around to the left and bring us to Charles Fort. This is a star-shaped fort built in the seventeenth century on the site, like so many things in Ireland, of something far older: Ringcurran Castle. The fort was on most of our running routes and marked the lowest point in this rollercoaster of a run. The south and west of its walls — the Cockpit Bastion and the Devil’s — loom over us as we round the bend, and p
romise us a speedy turn, at least it might have been speedy if it had not involved climbing a frighteningly steep hill to the east and the start of the long road home to Knockduff.
I have to be careful on this descent. There is a Welsh proverb: Henaint ni ddaw ei hunan — old age doesn’t come on its own. Lately, incipient old age has been consorting with some calf issues. Down a hill this steep, there is anywhere between seven and twelve times my body weight being put on each stride, and my left calf has already gone a couple of times in the past six months (I had to buy a mountain bike to exercise the beasts during my recuperations). Armed with new running shoes and new caution, my former charge down the hill has transformed into a careful plod. At the bottom of the hill, in the shadow of the Devil’s Bastion, I relax, if that’s the right word, and prepare for the climb home.
Nina has the markings of a shepherd, but the massive, muscled shoulders and barrel chest of a dog bred for pulling. She is in effect the result of a great split in the wolf nation that occurred, according to current estimates, between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago (yes, current estimates are that exact). The division came about through random mutation and natural selection. No one is really sure why it happened, but probably the most plausible story looks like this. Some wolves, as a result of simple genetic variation, developed a lower flight threshold distance. That is, they were more able than the average wolf to tolerate the proximity of these new, strange, big-arsed apes. As a result, as well as obvious dangers, they were also presented with certain opportunities that escaped their more cautious peers. These wolves started to specialize in the refuse of the apes. They became scavengers, not hunters. Some wolves learned early on that if you can’t beat the big-arsed apes — and it turns out you can’t — then you have to join them.
Running with the Pack Page 7