It’ all a blur

Just read the following in Alex James’ Column in yesterday’s Independent:

No distance to run in the country

Run! Run! alone over open fields, all through the wooded hillsides, in secret along the narrowest trails, badger roads and deer tracks, half-dodging wet, scratching brambles, ducking branches. Leaping and swerving over dead tree trunks, with startled squirrels and scattering rabbits springing from nowhere. Dawn, dusk, noon, under the Moon and stars, run as far as you can. Run like the wind, run when it’s raining, run in the sun. Run, run, run – pnanting, blowing, steaming through the cool, soft greys and greens. Run for an hour, run for miles, without seeing anybody, heart pounding, flying weightless downhill, feet crashing through puddles, splattering the fluffy, caressing mud, careless and carefree. Free at last, exhilarated by body whirring at capacity, on limits, singing. There is nothing else: no distractions, just the steady rhythms, absolutes, of breath, heart and hypnotic footfall beating, one two, one, two…

There are no fat bass players of any significance.

The Grizzly – over the hill?

The awesome Grizzly used to be one of my all-time favourite races. The course, starting in Seaton on the southest coast of Devon, can be anything up to twenty miles long and winds across the shingle, along the coast path up steepsided, wooded valleys, through streams and knee-deep black mud, more hundreds of metres of shingle, up a winding path up a cliff and across the grassy cliff-top path, which offers spectacular views of the shingle beach leading to the finish on the esplanade two miles below.

The race is a community affair and all sorts of people participate in the organisation. There were pipers on the hills and bands of all kinds at strategic points, including a folk band and a folk duo and  a drum band in a barn booming out across the hills.

Out on the course, everything was as I remembered it, except my ability to cover the terrain, which rather got in the way of my appreciation of the Kantian and Taoist jokes and Buddhist shrines along the route. At the pace I started, I used to pick people off as the race progressed. But this time I had to look on as fat old men and young girls hurried past me in the later stages. In my late fifties, I am definitely over the hill, and it was silly to suppose thatI would find it easy, just because I had managed to complete the 45-mile Green Man Challenge a few weeks before. As my much younger Green Man partner, Peter DeBoer, remarked it is whole different thing – and he too suffered in the last three miles (although he was way ahead of me!)

But at over 20-years old,the Grizzly too is showing its age. In the past, the race had the use of a holiday centre with a big hall, in which the participants could meet up before the race and could congregate afterwards to exchange experiences and wait for the prize-giving.

Now all that has gone. The only group of runners that were able to pose for a pre-race team photo were the Axe Valley Runners who organise the race. Members of other clubs, who I happened to bump into at the start and on the course, had no idea whether other members with entries had actually made it to the race. In the absence of a proper gathering place afterwards it would have been impossible to find out afterwards either. 

I found the post-race experience a let-down, a definite anti-climax. It could have been better if a hail storm hadn’t driven everyone into the surrounding pubs, restaurants and cafes shortly before I finished. But this year’s perfunctory Grizzly T-shirt was definitely below the standard that had been set by earlier models and the organisers cannot possibly rely of fine weather at the beginning of March for a satisfying end to the Grizzly experience.

The Meaning of the Green Man

As I crossed the bridge towards the setting sun, there were tears in my eyes. I had done it!

True, I had set the challenge in the first place, but, until that moment, I had no idea that I could do it. I though I would keep Pete and Mike company for a bit over half the 45-mile run and then fade away to  let them finish without me. But Mike had to drop out because of a cold, and there I was, nine and a half hours after we had set off from the Dovecote in the frosty dawn, jogging across the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The pink sky over Dundry Down looked the same as it had at 7-15am, but this time it reflected the glory of the sun setting behind the trees of Leigh Woods and Ashton Court.

I had already imbued the westward crossing over the Avon Gorge with special significance in the first chapter of my new book (‘Around Bristol, Off-Road, On Foot – Beyond the Urban Fringe’ – it should be in the shops by April). There, I linked it with the meeting between the hermit sage, Lao Tzu and the Keeper of the Pass, who persuaded Lao Tzu to write down his thoughts in the Tao Te Ching before he passed over the western mountains on his way out of China.

Now the bridge had personal significance for me as it took me on the returning path past the Green Man to the Dovecote.

But what did it all mean after the euphoria had passed and the pain and the stiffness had subsided?

By coincidence, before my legs had recovered, I had to drag my self to the solicitors to discuss my will, and I was inspired to send off for ‘The Natural Death Handbook’, which arrived almost immediately. This proved an amazingly positive book, including all you need to know about green funerals and an injunction -

‘Live each day as though it were your last.’

Perhaps that is the meaning of the Green Man with the tendrils of a tree growing from his mouth – accept death and, in the light of its inevitability, achieve what you can, whilst you can.