Beyond the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The grassy slopes of Citadel Hill still dominate the heart of old Halifax. The hill is a glacial deposit left by unimaginably thick ice sheets that pushed through here thousands of years ago. Like many drumlins, the hill is shaped somewhat like a teardrop. Towards the northwest, there is a road that gently descends the length of the teardrop’s tail to its tip, where it meets the intersection of Ahern Av. and Rainnie Dr. The road is a favourite of runners looking to strengthen their quads with some hill work. It’s not quite long enough for effective hill repeats – it’s not even 200m to the top – but it still serves as a nice challenge, rewarding breath-heavy runners with views of the harbour and an expansive feeling of towering over the city.

For me, though, this road is less interesting as a place to run (I shun city streets for wooded trails whenever possible) and more interesting as a place where runners seem to ascend into the sky along the knife edge of the world. To see what I mean, you need to walk north along Ahern. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch sight of a lone runner toiling up the road as billows of fog swirl like dragon’s breath in the nothingness behind. Even on a sunny day, the sight of a runner on that road always stirs my spirit. With no land and no buildings visible behind, she looks like the loneliest and bravest person in the world.

This loneliness – the solitary runner moving like a shadow against the sky – is part of the romance of running. I’m reminded here of a passage from Alan Sillitoe’s story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” where the main character, identified only vaguely as Smith, describes his own keen sense of loneliness:

When on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door… I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once, if you can believe what I’m trying to say.

And that’s what a runner on Citadel Hill look like to me: the first and last person on earth. Her silhouette evokes a mixture of possibility and sadness – the bitter-sweet contradiction of solitude.

On my own solitary runs through the forests of the Shubenacadie, I expand into this loneliness. There, I’m not boxed in by expectations or responsibilities, so once I’ve outrun the superficial worries of the day, I’m free to explore the open ground (inside and out) that reveals itself only in isolation. On the trail, there is little that I need to respond to, little that calls forth the tight masks we put on and take off in social encounters. There is room to move, to breathe, to transform.

Although I’m often alone on the trail, I know I’m not alone in seeking the boons of solitude through running. I’ve talked to runners who view their running as a contemplative practice – a chance to schedule time away from the daily grind in order to pursue meaningful and pleasurable thoughts that would otherwise remain unexplored, buried under layers of everyday concerns. I’ve talked with other runners who view their running as a kind of therapy – something about being alone and moving rhythmically through space returns them to emotional equilibrium. And I’ve talked with runners who view getting out onto the trails as a chance to commune with nature, a chance to escape the narrow logic of asphalt and concrete grids, the reduced geometry of rectangular buildings and squared angles, the constant bombardment of information and marketing: text and imagery that over-stimulate only a tiny portion of the soul.

I too have felt the contemplative and therapeutic possibilities of running, but it’s the idea of communing with nature that has captivated me recently. Taken literally, the verb commune refers to the act of talking intimately with someone. The image that first comes to my mind is of lovers seated facing each other – eyes locked, hands intertwined, soft words exchanged in hushed tones. Communing is a special kind of communication that engages more of someone’s being than a passing hello on the street or even an evening debrief of the day’s events between spouses. Communing denotes a heightened state of mindful awareness in which a more robust and satisfying exchange can occur between self and other. Communing opens you up to the subjectivity of the other – maybe it even overcomes the loneliness of selfhood for a moment.

So what’s all that fancy talk got to do with running in nature? What does it mean to commune with nature? I can assure you that it doesn’t mean that I sit facing a tree with my hands intertwined in its roots, cooing soft words to the squirrels as they chatter angrily and drop acorns on my head. What I mean by communing with nature is, first, simply becoming more aware and mindful of the forest as I move through it: noticing the sparkle of sun on the lake beyond the bright birches, the first ladyslipper to bloom between kilometres 6 and 7, the “here, sweety” song of a chickadee on the make.

From within this mindful state, I look and feel for my intimate connections to the natural world – the nonverbal ways in which we communicate. It might be helpful here to know that the words commune and communicate both come from the same Latin root communis, which means “common.” Communing, then, is just this search for commonalities – and when it comes to nature, it means rediscovering our connections with the larger world.

You might be wondering, though, what exactly I mean by communicating with nature. After all, nature doesn’t use symbolic language (at least that we can understand) and it doesn’t really take much notice of us, except for the small animals who run away. On one level, what I mean by communication is simply taking notice of the exchanges that are always going on: the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide as we breathe, the exchange of force as our running shoes push against the ground and the ground pushes back, the exchange of hot and cold and moisture between our bodies and the air, and so forth.

As I run, I try to recognize all the physical conditions necessary for my running to occur: air, ground, friction, gravity, light, warmth, and so on. Without these conditions, there would be no running. And – if you’ll forgive yet another venture into etymology – the word condition, which I’m here using to mean “anything on which something else depends; that without which something else cannot occur or exist,” comes from the Latin com- “together” + dicere “say” – conditions, then, are elements that speak together or commune in order to produce a result. The way I see it, when “I” run, it’s not just about some lonely guy going out for an early-morning jog. No way. Running is much more than that – running is air, ground, friction, gravity, light, warmth, and me all saying “run” together – and each stride through the forest awakens new voices into the commune.

It’s a bit paradoxical, but the loneliness of the solitary long distance runner has, for me at least, led me into a deeper sense of connection with the larger world. In fact, I find I feel much lonelier when engaged in the superficial social exchanges that dominate most working days. In the forest, though, that feeling of being an independent person engaged with other independent people dissolves along the edges when I feel with each breath and each stride the host of conditions on which my running – and my existence – depends.

For me, then, communing with nature means becoming aware of conditionality, of the way that any action or thing is a saying-together of everything else. It means listening to me and everything else commune each other into existence at every moment. It means feeling my wovenness, my embeddedness, my common connection with the world around and through me – it means glimpsing the kind of consciousness that can hold all these threads together at once.

The sight of the lonely runner ascending Citadel Hill is no less stirring for me, even if I don’t think she is ever really alone. As she teeters on what looks like the edge of the earth, I rest assured in the feeling that she can never really fall into the abyss beyond because there is no space outside this world – she is held safe within the intimate communion of a conditional universe.