The Olympic Games in Paris are here. Humankind’s great ancient festival of exercise will feature many impressive feats of physical prowess, including falling into water, hitting things with sticks and lifting heavy things before putting them down again. But above all things it will feature running. There’ll be short running, long running, medium running, running with added jumping, running where they also throw things. It’ll be a great big running party, all of it on TV. Which means that if you, like me, happen to absolutely hate running, then you may be in for some triggering channel flicking these next few weeks.
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There comes a time in every grown-up’s life where their metabolism slows down, carefree overconsumption of food, alcohol and perhaps even narcotics catches up, and suddenly before you know it, parting the seas and rising up above you like a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster suddenly towers the Greek god of Consequences. Let’s call him Fatsos. It’s around this time that many adults give up completely on their appearance (tempting), or alternatively, “get into running”. Other forms of exercise are available, but running is the cheapest.
Some people throw themselves into running with an abandon verging on madness, allowing it to define their entire personality (see the gang of lycra clad fitness freaks filmed on an organised 5K this summer at holy temple of debauchery the Glastonbury Festival – albeit nobly for charity purposes). Others, like me, drag themselves dutifully and privately around the streets before the normal world awakes in the early mornings a couple of times a week, quietly seething at the shortcomings of human biology. The trick to enduring this regular ritual of self-inflicted spiritual and bodily pain, I have found, is to divert my brain as much as possible through a mixture of stimuli both visual (run nice places, with nice views, like the seaside) and aural (stick your ear pods in and try and bathe your mind in lovely distracting sound).
Podcasts are good, but there’s only so much serious talk that a person can take in the midst of what is already a glum experience (you have to avoid funny podcasts because laughing while running hurts). Music is the runner’s more natural companion, but shuffle play is a Russian roulette that risks compounding your misery. If the tempo of a tune is too high you can burn yourself out trying to keep pace. If the tempo’s too low then whole kilometres can pass slower than an episode of Dan Snow’s History Hit.
- ‘Mindfulness is difficult. Exercise is exhausting. But anyone can go for a stroll through some trees’
- Olympics marathon star Eliud Kipchoge: ‘Running is freedom’
It’s led me to ponder – is there such a thing as the perfect piece of running music? I don’t mean like Vangelis’s theme score from Chariots of Fire or Rocky anthem Eye of the Tiger by Survivor – much as it’s impossible to run along a beach or up some steps without thinking of either of them – but a piece of music that scientifically hits just right, flicking the body’s chemical switches and boosting a runner to glorious, speedy transcendence? Research leads to some interesting revelations.
