Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  The more our lives are dominated by the instrumental, the more we will value pleasure. The function of joy is quite different. Joy can assume many experiential forms. There is the joy of focus, the experience of being completely immersed in what one is doing. There is the joy of dedication, the experience of being dedicated to the deed and not the outcome, the activity and not the goal. There is the joy of enduring, the experience of playing the game as hard as you can play it, of giving everything you have to the game and leaving nothing in the tank, no matter the experiential toll this exacts. There is the joy of defiance, wild and fierce: no, you will not break me, not here, not today. Joy is found in the heartbeat of the run, whatever form this takes. But, ultimately, all of these come to the same thing. Joy is the experience — the recognition — of intrinsic value in life. Joy is the recognition of the things in life that possess value in themselves — the things that are valuable for their own sake: the things in life that are worthy of love. Pleasure distracts us from what does not have intrinsic value. Joy is the recognition of what does. Pleasure is a way of feeling. But joy is a way of seeing. Joy is something that pleasure is not and can never be. It is the recognition of the places in life where all the points and purposes stop.

  Most of us will leave this life in the same way we entered it: scared, confused and alone. But when we came into this world we were met with loving arms and soothing words. On the way out of it, we will be met by nothing. The life of every living thing follows these general contours, and to this extent life is sad and deeply unfortunate. But with humans, it is something else. I used to worry about what the future had in store for me, and this, I suppose, is bad enough. But I know that this is what life has in store for my children also, and that is far worse. Sometimes, as Wittgenstein once remarked, the most difficult things to see in life are the most obvious, and they are the most difficult to see precisely because they are the most obvious. This now seems obvious to me. I can do nothing of any great significance to protect my children from life and this evil place to which I have brought them. To be sure, I can help out a little when their lives are going well, when they are growing, burgeoning and their encounters with intrinsic value in their lives crowd most thickly. But when the going gets tough, I’ll be out of here like the worst deadbeat dad. In a few short decades — and that is assuming I have a few decades left in me — I shall abandon them to face their gradual disappearance without me. But can I live on in their memories, and provide for them a powerful example of how to live in this malignant place and how to face their gradual disappearance? Perhaps, but unfortunately the memories we make when we are young are sickly children. My sons have no need of memories yet — why would they? And by the time they do, I shall no longer be around to be remembered. As Milan Kundera once remarked, before being forgotten we are transformed into kitsch. The memories that remain of me will be caricatures, vague suggestions or themes where a man used to be. For we humans, understanding our fate is part of our fate. And because of this the fate of those we love becomes part of our fate. This means that our lives are more than sad or unfortunate: they are tragic. Tragedy is born when misfortune and understanding meet: when one not only suffers and dies but at the same time understands that this suffering and death is irrevocable.

  If there were a meaning to this life it would be that which redeems it. It would be something that, as Camus said, makes life ‘worth the trouble’. Nietzsche went further than this — a meaning in life must allow us not merely to endure life, but to love it: ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary — but love it.’ Amor fati — the love of fate — is a lot to ask. Sometimes I can almost deal with backward. I’ve been very fortunate in my life. But even so, it is truly difficult not to regret at least a few of my past idiocies or indiscretions. Some people tell me they would not change a thing. Personally, I suspect I would. But backwards pales into insignificance when you compare it with forwards. To love this fate is, I suspect, an impossible task.

  And yet, there are moments when I come close. Fundamentally, there is a difference between a life that is lived chasing what is important and a life lived immersed in and surrounded by it. The two types of life are separated by a vast, unbridgeable chasm. There are those who run in order to chase something else. And there are those who run simply to run. To the extent there is a meaning to be found in this life, I cannot see how it could be anything other than this: do not chase, just run. A life dominated by instrumental value is a life spent chasing, of hunting down one thing for the sake of something else. Instead, find what is Good in life, love what is Good in life, surround yourself with it and hold on to it with all the strength you have.

  Running and the pack, both canine and human: these have consistently been the twin poles of intrinsic value — The Good — in my life. When I run, I am immersed in The Good. When I run with my pack, although the pack will change, I am surrounded by The Good. We cannot always find a pack — circumstances sometimes conspire against us in that way. But it is still possible to find The Good. To do that, it is enough to put on a pair of running shoes and keep running until you find yourself in the run’s beating heart. If you keep going, it will happen in the end.

  In these moments when I am immersed in and surrounded by The Good, if I cannot love fate I am at least reconciled with it. I am reconciled with fate because I am unable to make myself care enough to wish that it were different. This is hardly the same as loving fate — but it is an accommodation. And that is the best I can do. For these brief moments, nothing that has happened before, nothing that will happen after is of the slightest consequence. I would no more desire a difference in the past or future than I would request that a lizard that bathes in the sun, as the pack and I drift past, be moved from one basking rock to another. In these moments, my fate has no dominion. I cannot love my fate, but I can at least be as impassive as it is, as impassive as the rock on which the lizard lies. In these moments, at least, I am equal to my fate. In these times when all the points and purposes of life stop, that is where the chase ends and the run really begins.

  In the beating heart of the run, I hear an echo of what I once was and what I once knew. When the heartbeat of the run embraces me, holds me tight, I am returned to what I was before the fall. When the rhythm of the run holds me tight, I run in a field of joy. Surrounded by it, warmed by it from the outside in. In these moments, the run whispers to me: her whispers are the thoughts that come and go, out of the blue and into the black. She whispers to me a truth that I once knew but could not remember, like a dream that stood and slowly faded just beyond the edges of recall. These are whispers of joy, of what it is to be free, and of what is truly important in a life like this — a life that holds us naked and dying. She whispers to me of my time in Eden.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to my editor, Sara Holloway, for her patient and invaluable advice over the months as this book slowly took on its final form, and for encouraging me to follow the emerging thoughts wherever they led. Thanks to Anne Meadows who was kind enough to read an entire draft of this book and made some very useful suggestions. Thanks also to Benjamin Buchan for his excellent copy-editing, and to Miranda Baker for excellent proofreading and more.

  Thanks, as always, to my agent, Liz Puttick. My thanks also to the magic fingers of Bruce Wilk, the physiotherapist who succeeded in breaking down decades of scar tissue in my left calf — efforts without which the events that formed the basis of Chapters 1 and 7 would never have happened. No doubt, I shall be seeing you about my right calf in the not too distant future.

  I’m almost convinced that running is a place where I channel long-forgotten thoughts: of thinkers read and largely forgotten, of thinkers buried long ago and whose thoughts have similarly been buried somewhere in my brain while it goes about its
day-to-day business of keeping me alive and mostly sane. Many of the thoughts which brushed by me when I ran, almost like I was standing still, and which find their way into this book in various ways, are the thoughts of people such as Plato, Moritz Schlick, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Aristotle, David Hume and René Descartes.

  Most of all, my greatest debt is to the pack that has been good enough to share its life with me, and helped me understand the difference between a life spent chasing what is important and a life spent immersed in it. Thanks, first, to my canine pack. Thank you Boots, Pharaoh, Sandy, Brenin, Nina, Tess and Hugo, for sharing the trails with me over the years: lazy so-and-so that I am, I probably would never have run them without you. Thanks to my human pack. Thanks to my mother and father, for ensuring my life was never going to turn out dogless. Thanks to my sons, Brenin and Macsen, for reminding me, each in your inimitable way, of something I had long forgotten — something, indeed, that I was destined to forget. And, finally, thanks to Emma, whom I believe I once described as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met and the kindest woman I’ve ever known. I wasn’t wrong.

  Index

  Achilles tendon, 46, 105, 117–18, 149, 162, 175–6

  aerobic exercise, 43

  age

  freedom of, 24, 44

  and wisdom, 152

  ageing, 140–1

  see also decline

  agriculture, 66

  Alabama, 79–81, 159

  alcohol, 11–12

  altitude, 149

  Alzheimer’s, 52

  Americans

  and anxiety, 85

  and holidays, 84–5

  and running, 7–9

  and work, 89

  amor fati, 202

  anamnesis, 28

  anger, 126

  anguish, 172, 180, 200

  anole lizards, 103

  ants, 124

  apes, 66, 69–70, 125

  Aristotle, 61, 64–5, 75, 87

  Athens, 184–5, 189, 192, 195

  athletics, 41–2

  attention, 50

  axons, 140–1

  Badwater, 8, 16–17

  Barnes, Julian, 15, 25

  Barry, Dave, 6

  bees, 124

  Beethoven, Ludwig van, 162

  Bekele, Kenenisa, 190

  Ben-Shahar, Tal, 197

  Bentham, Jeremy, 197

  Bible, the, 192

  Black Mountains, 34–5

  bodily constitution, 44

  see also facticity

  Bolt, Usain, 17

  boxing, 20, 37, 39

  brachiation, 70

  brain

  associative nature, 52–3

  effects of running, 48–54

  encephalization, x

  zero power hypothesis, 53–4

  Brenin, 56–65, 71, 75, 79–81, 136–41, 148, 193

  Buddhist monks, 53

  calf muscles, 3–4, 146–7, 155–6, 162, 175–6

  Camus, Albert, 28, 182, 202

  Canal du Midi, 135, 138–9

  capitalism, 89

  causes, 61, 170, 173, 178–9

  efficient, 61, 63–5, 71, 75, 78

  final, 64, 75–8

  formal, 64–5, 71, 75

  material, 64–5, 71, 75

  Cephalus, 144, 146

  cerebellum, 50, 54

  cerebral cortex, 65–6

  cerebral oedema, 16

  Charles Fort, 58, 68, 76, 146

  chess, 94–5

  chimpanzees, 66, 127

  choices, 171

  choking (‘the yips’), 92–3

  Cicero, 23, 194

  cognitive abilities, x, 118

  Col du Minier, 149

  communism, 89

  conscious experience, 50

  consciousness, 115–20, 166–70, 173–5

  objects of, 167–9

  Cordain, Loren, 67

  cortisone, 12–13

  coyotes, 125

  Crick, Francis, 50

  cricket, 20–1, 36–40, 92–3

  cross-country running, 40

  CSI: Miami, 82

  Cwmbran, 35, 41

  Darwin, Charles, 125

  Dasein, 183

  Davies, Idris, 35

  death, 14–15, 143–4

  decline, 140–6, 151–2

  Deisseroth, Karl, 50

  dementia, 52

  Descartes, René, 22–3, 30, 159–61, 169

  dinosaurs, 142–3

  distance runners, 42–3, 190

  DNA, 131

  Dogs

  genes, 127

  legislation, 104

  puppies, 129–30

  dysentery, 129

  eidos, 189

  elephants, 142

  emotions, origin and content of, 126–7

  energy, competition for, 113–14, 116–17, 122–4, 126

  enjoyment, 94–6, 116–17, 119

  Enlightenment, 144

  entropy, 113, 134

  Epicurus, 143

  Etang de Thau, 136

  Euclidean geometry, 28

  evil, 192

  evolution

  human, 66–7, 70–5

  fish, 72–3

  K-selection, 142–3

  and love, 125–8

  r-selection, 142–3

  of social groups, 124–6

  wolves and dogs, 68–70

  exhaustion, 51–2

  facticity, 44, 175–6, 181

  faith, 8–9

  feelings, 199–200

  flamingos, 147

  flatfish, 72–3

  forms, 189–91, 194

  freedom, 21–3, 172–3, 178, 204

  of age, 24, 44

  and knowledge, 29–31

  of youth, 20–1, 23–4, 44

  frontal cortex, 50, 54

  fun, 196

  games, 89–94, 96, 187–9, 195, 198, 200

  gamma oscillations, 50–1, 53–4

  Garonne, river, 136

  Gebrselassie, Haile, 40, 190

  genes, 124, 126–8, 130

  genetic fallacy, 126

  Gestell, xii, 181–2

  gluteus maximus, 66

  Good, The, 190–1, 194–5, 203–4

  gorillas, 66

  gout, 10–13

  grasp over reach hypothesis, 18

  happiness, 144–5, 196–200

  Hardrock, 16–17

  hedonists, 144

  Heidegger, Martin, xi–xii, 181–3

  Heinrich, Bernd, x, 7, 42

  hippocampus, 48

  holidays, 84–5

  Hugo, 2, 13, 103–11, 113, 122, 127, 135–6, 141, 146, 148, 190, 206

  human societies, 125

  Hume, David, 161, 169

  hunter-gatherers, 66–7

  immortality, objective, 99

  India, 129

  Industrial Revolution, 35

  information processing, and rhythm, 48–52

  instrumental value, xi–xiii, 87–8, 93–4, 100, 183–4, 191–4, 196, 200, 203

  intentionality, 167

  intrinsic value, xiii, 87–8, 92–3, 100, 153, 172, 188–9, 191–5, 198, 203–4

  and joy, 200–1, 204

  and Platonic Good, 191–2, 194–5

  running and, 92–3, 97, 100, 180, 184, 193–5, 203

  introspection, 161

  joy, 150–3, 172, 180, 199–201, 204

  Julius Caesar, 15

  Kant, Immanuel, 188

  Karnazes, Dean, 7

  Ketterle, Wolfgang, 51

  Keys 100, 19

  Kid Rock, 162

  kin altruism, 126

  Kinsale, 56–8, 89, 96, 101, 103, 146, 155

  Knockduff Lodge, 62, 68

  Koch, Christof, 50

  Kolnai, Aurel, 14

  Kundera, Milan, 202

  Lake Okeechobee, 84

  Layard, Richard, 197

  Leadville, 8, 17

  life, meaning of, xiv–xv, 25–8, 86, 100, 153, 182–
4, 202

  Tolstoy and, 97–100

  linguistic conventions, 167–8

  living things, structure of, 114

  love, 122–8, 130–2, 151

  lusory attitude, 90–1, 95, 187

  McDougall, Christopher, 7

  mammals, 141–3

  Marathon, battle of, 192

  Marathon des Sables, 8, 16–17

  marathon running

  Cartesian phase, 159–65

  chip time, 180–1

  city marathons, 5

  Humean phase, 161–5

  music and, 162

  origins of, 192

  pace runners, 156, 176

  Sartrean phase, 165

  Spinozist phase, 162–5

  training, 2–3

  ultramarathons, 8, 16–17

  meditation, 52

  memories, 33–4, 53, 81, 201–2

  memory, and anticipation, 118–19

  mice, 48, 142

  midlife crises, 16–18, 20–1, 24

  mind

  and intrinsic value, 194

  states of, 161

  mind-body dualism, 22–3, 159–61

  money, love of, 192

  monkeys, 125, 129–30, 132

  Murakami, Haruki, 49

  muscle fibres, 42–3

  myelin sheaths, 140–1

  Mynydd Maen, 34–5, 38, 40, 43, 49, 55

  Nantyglo, 35

  natural resources, xii

  neurogenesis, 48

  neuronal action potential, 141

  neurons, 140–1

  Newport, 35, 39

  Nietzsche, Friedrich, 145, 202

  nihilists, 26

  Nina, 56–8, 61–4, 68, 71, 75, 79–80, 82, 84, 88, 100–1, 105–6, 110, 137–8, 148–50

  Oates, Joyce Carol, 49

  Olympian gods, 186–9, 195

  O’Nuallain, Sean, 53–4

  oocytogenesis, 142

  optimism, 8–9

  optogenetics, 50

  orangutans, 66

  Orb, river, 79, 133, 135, 141

  osteo-arthritis, 12

  pain, 176–9

  Palmetto Bay, 82–4

  parietal cortex, 50, 54

  Parkes, David, 41

  parvalbumin, 50

  Pasteur, Louis, 61

  pessimism, 120

  Pheidippides, 192–5