Mystical Miles The 2nd Dimension of Running

By Paul Vorwerk

the philosophy of running ... the running of philosophy; the joy and life of running ... the running of joy and life: it’s all in the book mystical miles the 2nd dimension of running. through stories of the author’s running and racing distances from 1 km to 100 miles, the book explores the sweat, chafe, blisters and exhaustion; the challenges and achievements of running - its 1st dimension. Always practical it offers insights into most levels of running. Then mystical miles does more; much more as it turns out. ever-present for the author is the sense that running has more than one dimension. So the book also tells of the growth and blossoming of running rooted and sustained in its 1st dimension, into a second, ever-enriching dimension. The book tells of impact of running months into seasons and years on roads and through mountains, under star-bright skies with dolphins, rainbows and moon-shimmered waterfalls. It tells of the opening of mind and soul, of running into rewards, richness, value and spirit; of an ever-deepening understanding of self; self as a runner, of self and life. The book goes on to give enticing glimpses of more to explore and deepen. if there is a challenge in mystical miles it is less one of competition, effort, pain and work, and more one of finding a way to get some of the very best in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Vorwerk
• Release date: Sep 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311270665

Paul Vorwerk

I live, run think about running, from time to time, hop into the mystic, in Cape Town, South Africa. I work as a Human Resource consultant providing support, advice and solve problems helping business owners to get the best value of their investment in people. Two young children make my life rich and interesting. My studies include degrees in Philosophy and Psychology. I run every day if I can and ultra marathon or two every year to keep my running and thoughts honest. I'm often astonished and overwhelmed by the richness and diversity of life that emerged on this special planet of ours. That makes me want to run in life more.

Book preview

Mystical Miles

The 2nd dimension of running

Paul Vorwerk

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Paul Vorwerk

All rights reserved. The publication contains copyright material. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the author.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover by John Tidy; Editing and Design by Wildbooks Ink, Cape Town

This book is also available in print. See http://www.mysticalmiles.com

Cover by John Tidy; Editing and Design by Wildbooks Ink, Cape Town

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"Mystical Miles lets us into the secret we always sensed was there but were never able to articulate: there is an alternative world that only people who push the human limits can discover. An enticing world where the psyche rules and the human spirit is in control. Bryan Peazon - adventurer

"Mystical Miles was such an inspiration during my 42-day Cross-Karoo, 2 700 km challenge run from Cape Town to Durban, South Africa. We had to trail-blaze a route for the Freedom Cycle challenge in South Africa. I read Paul’s book every evening. Mari Ballot - runner, poet, person extraordinaire.

" ...Yet in transcribing into words what every runner feels (even if they won’t admit it), Paul Vorwerk lends clarity, validity and unspoken delight to an unsophisticated, difficult and oft misunderstood activity … Lindsay Weight, ultramarathon champion and sports scientist.

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Dedication

To the universe and all that blossoms within it

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Beginnings

Chapter 2: Inner Healings

Chapter 3: Nature

Chapter 4: Racing

Chapter 5: Rituals, Rites and Ceremonies

Chapter 6: Running Art

Chapter 7: Running Far

Chapter 8: Footfalls in the Fields of Philosophy

Chapter 9: Hopping and Zen running

Chapter 10: The Dark Nights

Chapter 11: Mystical Miles

Postscript

What others have said about Mystical Miles

About the author Paul Vorwerk

Connect with Paul Vorwerk

Foreword

When, a while back, 1960 Olympic pole-vault gold medallist Don Bragg was asked to shut up talking about the Olympics all the time, he was confronted with the condescending and paternalistic words that have governed the non-dreaming man’s attitude towards the dreamer since our first ever human interaction: Don, there’s a life beyond all that.

Not impressed, Bragg returned the condescending look, added a bit of mild surprise, shrugged his shoulders and replied: Oh, is there? For people like Don Bragg there is nothing beyond sport: sport is not an add-on, a part-time activity engaged in during the wee hours of morning or whenever time permits. It is also not a hobby, whatever that word really means. It is it.

Ask a violin player, a painter, any artist, and you’ll likely get an equivalent answer. The same words ring true for the runner. To the runner – a slightly different being than the person who merely runs from time to time – running is integrated into the self, and springs from the self. It is developed organically, often without the person realising it all. As Tim Noakes once wrote, I was a runner before I knew what running was.

The biologist Bernd Heinrich, an apostle of the Gospel to all runners, wrote in Why We Run: A Natural History that running is something we are simply meant to be doing: It is an affirmation of life and it brings us to life.

A sedentary life, he claims, leads to degeneration. We take these risks not to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping us, wrote American runner and writer Scott Crabb, and if that’s true, the act of running becomes both a physical and metaphysical necessity.

Canadian ultra-runner and writer David Blaikie brings it more philosophically: As poets, apostles and philosophers have insisted from the dawn of time there is more to life than logic and common sense. The ultra-runners know this instinctively. And they know something else that is lost on the sedentary. They understand perhaps better than anyone that the doors to the spirit will swing open with physical effort. In running such long and taxing distances they answer a call from the deepest realms of their being – a call that asks who they are.

Religious stuff. So apparently there is something mysterious about the act of running and about the people that do it. At times it appears an act of self-flagellation, raging anger bringing the body over a hilly 10-miler in the pouring rain as punishment over a failed race – I am sorry, father, for I have sinned – cleansing the soul as in confession. At times it is an exercise in dreaming and impossible goal setting. How many of us, ready to go in the predawn, are like the queen in Alice in Wonderland, exclaiming we sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast?

At other times running is an exercise in meditation, of transcending earthly gravity. The pilgrims of centuries ago walked vast distances for the simple fact that the exertion brought on a state of light-headedness, which they interpreted as getting nearer to God. The runner knows more than any other sportsman the feeling of bliss after a long workout, when chemicals alter our consciousness and the doors of perception, to paraphrase a poet who knew what he was talking about, open up.

It is no wonder that mental patients are urged to do aerobic exercise instead of taking pills. Running creates ecstasy and it led Brutus Hamilton, an Olympic gold medal decathlete but also a coach and keen observer, to note that we should never feel pity when we see a group of people lining up for a distance race. We should feel jealousy instead!

Scientific and philosophical discourse aside, the very act of running is difficult to describe. How does one describe running up a hill? How does one describe the complete sensory activity during an early morning run, head still asleep, legs trembling and sore from yesterday’s hills, stomach rebelling from too much coffee too strong? Not easy. This requires the mind and body of a runner, the storytelling ability of a gifted writer, the descriptive eloquence of a poet, the wisdom of a philosopher.

Above all, it requires a person who does not take himself too seriously, one who understands that the powers of the environment, the stubborn disobedience of the body, and all the unplanned dramas and wonders from start to finish are largely beyond his command and thus better faced with a smile. You’re holding a book that is written by a man who is much of the above, if not all.

Paul Vorwerk gently weaves multiple threads that serve any runner looking for almost any insight. More than anything, this book may reveal aspects of runners’ relationship to running and ultimately of themselves. Its outcome is a tapestry that makes any runner say, That’s me! Or, much better, it makes some runners say, That’s a part of me I didn’t even know existed.

This book ultimately is about life and creating life and supporting life. And it is about making the most of life. Listening to Paul Vorwerk, his singsong voice and twinkle-eyed passion accentuating his words, is enough to make you lace your shoes and join him for a very long run, even when your rational mind tells you you’re in no condition to do so. Simply because it’s part of the human condition.

My relationship with Paul Vorwerk dates back to 2000 when as an innocent and totally naïve Comrades novice I prepared for the uphill run to Pietermaritzburg. I had no clue whatsoever. Experience as a two-time Olympic athlete had taught me to think that nothing was impossible, but the distance and the long hills had taken on ominous proportions. Paul’s chats, weekly updates on training, history and Comrades folklore, brought the event to life, made it larger than life, made it human.

Eventually I couldn’t wait for the gun to go. I had realised what the incredible pulling power created by storytelling, an honest love of life and gentle persuasion to try things slightly out of the comfort zone could do. It had created magic.

Magic was there again when a few years later he visited Amsterdam. On a long run in the dunes we discussed the prospect of large Boerenjongens pancakes with rum-soaked raisins and sweet Oud Bruin beer awaiting us at the end. Mouths watering but still spinning tall tales, we eventually sprinted down the homestretch. A run, good food, a drink or two and friendly company: it was all a man needed.

So here it is, the book of the mystical miles: the too early mornings, the grumpy first steps, the journey from reality into fantasy, from the natural into the supernatural, the pocket change tucked away in shorts in case of a sudden urge for a bottle of Coke; weaving philosophy, colour and descriptive observations into the rhythm of lungs breathing, heart pumping and legs pounding. These are things we see and feel but often cannot quite comprehend.

Once upon a time along the Comrades Marathon route I ended up running with a small group of people which haphazardly formed along the way. There was a clear leader (he called himself the bus driver) and he motivated and cajoled the people behind him. That man – I wish I remembered his name – was a true spirited apostle of the sport. He wore a yellow number, indicating he was running his tenth Comrades; upon finishing the number would be his forever.

He asked us to look at his number. He said that today he was graduating. He was a humble man. At one time he looked back and scanned the faces of those following in his footsteps. Men, he said, What we do today is the right thing. His words were so profound that no one dared reply. We just looked at him and could only nod our tired and sweaty heads.

Then on the hills, today in the rain, running is the right thing. Reading Mystical Miles will make you realise how very true those words ring.

Hans Koeleman

(Two-time Olympic steeplechaser representing The Netherlands and six-time Comrades Marathon finisher, author of Het Blauwe Uur)

Preface

Running will forever inspire me. A road, a path, a track always unwinds before me. The exhilaration and fulfilment of running, bubbles and fizzes in me as I look forward to running again, equally as I feel back to perfect moments run under stars and sun.

The time will come when I can no longer run. Yet I know that the life I have carved and cast, and the experiences shaped and wrought through running, will comfort me. I’ll feel content then as I feel satisfied now.

Those memories will not be of victories, fame or fortune. They will be simpler, richer; mine. They will be memories of days in nature’s arms, of uncovering and healing of my soul making; of the continual surge of life through my body.

I’ll be able to say: I have felt fully alive. I have run with the grace of a bird in the air, a fish in water, the rising sun. No longer am I too sad to die; I’m too full of richness and magnificence.

For now while I can, heeding a call resonating from the depths of Being way outside of me, I’ll take a familiar turning, run a well-known road. Or I’ll seek a fainter path and head up into the hills, drawn on by a sunrise, fresh and vital, and when it comes sipping its warm riches.

The promise of a starlit run under the wheeling sky is just as revitalising. Hardly wanting to move, I’ll linger in the thrill of stepping onto a path leading off a main road, dance rocky path, step into a puddle, its depth misjudged, feel my shoe fill and laugh-curse.

I’ll run. I’ll have another perfect moment to savour.

My runs were once recorded numbers, achievements training programmes; in repetitions, intervals, times and distances – all of which reflected strength, commitment, a dash of austerity, a bit of discipline and effort.

Now my runs are recorded in sparkling lines drawn through the places I run, in simple songs, pure and clear, repeated, perfected, extended in colours and shapes continually deepened, which orchestrate my feelings and doings in a concerto of joy.

These are runs of purple mountains and green shadows. Runs of fleeting impressions; of lasting effect, of new perspectives and meaning, of colours combining with shapes and feelings. Of life, magnificence and being.

Forever, because I ran into this world, I’ll be able to imagine a road on which to run which will lead to a forest. The feeling of having run long in the heat on a hard road to get there will be in my bones. Turning onto a softer path and into shade will refresh me. The forest and I will become one with flitting light and the smell of much. We’ll be part of the suck of water and nutrients from the earth, the flow of sap.

I’ll kneel to drink from a stream. The reflection of the trees and glimpses of sky will whisper ancient wisdom and callings. The water will become gold, the air green. My knees will be muddy.

The running path will wind higher. The tree line will pass and a wider world will open. Sunlight and warmth in the cooler air will swirl around my straining legs, through my heaving chest. Effort, persistence, will. The reward: A perfected moment.

Running the ridge down, my elbows nudging the universe, I’ll run magnificence – if not all of me then at least my nose and fingers will poke into it. The world will spread around me; the sky will be my limit.

Beyond bliss, I’ll be running.

Introduction

Running

Feet and eyes to the ground

Stars in my mind

Mystical Miles is a story of another side of running; a story of the riches running creates; the second dimension of running.

Running begins as physical effort and practicalities: training, stretching recovering; of dealing with injuries, nutrition, sleep and supplementary exercises. This running becomes one of a goals and targets; of running measured by achievements, victories, personal bests, training schedules completed and distances run. This also a world of running filled with technology, gear, gadgets and shoes. Out of this running come all the great athletic events; the races and records, the successes, failures, heroes and villains.

This first dimension is dazzling, exciting, vibrant, competitive; replete with ongoing achievements and celebrations; a celebration of people, their doings and Life.

The second dimension of running is all of this and more. This running grows out of the first dimension. This second dimension of running is the running enabled by running. It’s the running of inner paths as well as the outer tracks, trails and roads; it’s running the inner and outer into one; it is the running of moon-tan and star-shimmered waterfalls.

The Mystical Miles stories tell of a man’s running. In doing so they tell of a of finding a passion and through that finding his uniqueness which allowed him access to the richness at the heart of life; and the beginnings of exploring the deeper parts of life.

And so Mystical Miles is a story of doing something with maybe narrow but easy to see and understand aims – run a half-marathon, lose weight, get healthy – then finding oneself in an ever-blossoming realm, always practical and always engaged, of unfolding enriching experiences, of even a magnificence, quite unsuspected when starting.

It’s a story of ethereal miles emerging from the ongoing physical effort of running, much as music emerges from physical efforts of the musician and from the physical instrument played.

The story of Mystical Miles echoes the part of story of the Universe, which the spirit rising from physical.

The richer miles begin when body, mind, soul engage with all that lies outside of the runner. They grow as the outside world reaches in and engages with deeper parts of the runner, and grow fuller more when the two, when inner and outer become one.

Part of this story is that even mystical miles are run in an edgy, harder world, just a trip, a stumble, an ankle-twist away.

The second dimension of running allows and later requires the uniqueness in each runner, in each of us, to blossom; to let the life in us bloom. Because of this, Mystical Miles is based in the story of my running. It is from my running that I learned how rich running can be, how it becomes so much more than just running. While we share some things we are also essentially and existentially unique and it is that uniqueness that will colour our running.

In other words: our running, experiences and thoughts will differ, but for all of us they can be incredibly rich.

That Mystical Miles is based in my running is less important than the bigger story of just what running can enable.

◊◊◊◊◊

This edition aimed at producing an e-book version of the first edition of Mystical Miles Running Living Beaming published in 2000. I have revised the text a little because my approach is now slightly different.

When I wrote the first edition, I felt the need to prove what I was saying which made it perhaps unnecessarily ponderous. Part of that was that I wrote much of it from an outside perspective wanting to show running we all share rather than just my personal running story.

I know now my premise was valid then and so have less need to, may I say in cliché, hammer home the points. I have, I hope, lightened the writing and made it a better read.

The underlying themes and ideas remain unaltered; as does the story of how running evolved from its early struggles into a fulfilling a reward spiritual journey.

Structure

A word on structure: Books often, word after word, page, chapter after another leading to an end, have a sequential structure. The ideas in Mystical Miles are less a sequence and more sparkles that catch the eye. While the running and plodding is step by step, the mind in running is not. Even half-formed thoughts set off others, ricochet to still others and all of them merge, split, fizz and pop.

So this book is a best-fit of non-sequential ideas into a sequence. This means in the text side-comments, ideas and images appear. They may be distracting, but I ask readers to indulge them and let them sparkle.

Because of this sparkle-sequence, the chapters don’t need to be read in any order. They are maybe facets of a jewel, maybe spokes of a wheel, with running at the centre, the idea of mystical miles as, maybe, the rim. Each spoke part of the whole from which it gets, and to which it gives meaning and value; and beyond that, what the whole, as wheels do when they turn, eases and enables.

Readers are invited to start with what gets their attention and from there let the whole unfold, which is how it happened for me:

•In the afterglow of an extra-long run, deep affection grew for my earliest running steps so hard, uncomfortable and inadequate because without them I could not have run as I did.

•One morning I understood the strand of blue which wove through my running while sweatily grinning in a supermarket buying a banana and a small packet of cheese and onion crisps to fuel the next part of my run. That blue light soared and burst, showering me in its mist, the visual echo of that sadness that once threaded itself through my hopes and longings, resonating with the yearning for something deeper from my life.

Context: Marathons and ultra-marathons

Running in South Africa is often enough, defined by the Comrades Marathon. Its quirky distance is between 86 and 90 km – always two standard marathons one after the other, and then a bit extra – always enough to take every runner into discomfort and make each one dig deeper, while at the same time providing an event where enormous goodwill prevails.

So for me and many in South Africa, normal running and training is Comrades Marathon far – a product the well-developed South African ability to endure the demands of life, nature and people and their passions.

But while for me running is often enough about running further than the 42.2 km standard marathon distance, my point is not that everyone should or needs to run that far. My point will not be that the best of running comes from extraordinary distances.

Running is running, and all running is good, whether it is a few metres, a hundred miles or more and everything in between.

When I tell stories of longer runs, it’s because they are part of my story, not because it is only through them that the value of running I talk about is generated.

Having said that, it’s also true, and part of the running riches, that when we run we get almost certainly get to run further and faster than what we might have imagined when starting.

This goes further. When we eventually find our natural running limit it’s often further than we could imagine. Even when we find our limits, now and again, because we run, we can be tempted to go beyond them.

Context: Running

When I talk about running it’s because running came so naturally to me and I went so deeply into it. But I know from the little paddling, surfing and hiking I have done; from the music I have played, gardening and writing I have done; also from being with others and their passions, that the mystic can rise from activities other than running. The essence of richness come from how deeply we engage with them, how we engage our minds, and the how we allow the greater energies in life to engage with us.

Influences

My thinking, my concepts and values were influenced by running and, largely, and however I changed, mangled and abused them but in the end made my own sense of the ideas of others, including:

•The Dark Night of the Soul and The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic whose experiences and activities echo those of mystics of a variety of traditions who pre-date him as well in those who followed.

•RD Laing’s Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise.

•Wallace Stevens’ and Ezra Pound’s respective Collected Poems.

•Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, so gracefully written, gave me a style to aim at; and its trout fishing soul still resonates with the holiday activity my father cast about our young lives.

•Ross Adey’s life of a poet, though dead these many years, is alive in me and remains my touchstone. He knows.

•My philosophy and psychology studies with the University of South Africa; especially the eco-systemic concepts of the Psychology Department and the philosophy professor’s epistemological starting point that talk is cheap, money buys the whisky. Together they unlocked thinking patterns that let me understand even the densest philosophy book and enjoy even the least enjoyable run.

•Runner Paula Vaughan, who in flirting with snow and view high up in the Colorado Rockies put usually separate ideas together and helped unbind my running ideas.

•And the books about running: Tim Noakes’ Lore of Running, George Sheehan’s Running and Being, Norrie Williamson’s Everyone’s Guide to Distance Running, which allowed me to run, and so clearly talked about the one side of running.

Thanks

I thank Bryan Pearson, Helen Collins, Roelien Theron, Stephen Seymour and Vera van Lieres and Rod Prodgers for their parts in bringing this book to life.

Final thoughts

My mystical miles were wrought from a doing, from running, pounding tar, tripping on trails, scratched by shrubs, bumped by lampposts, stepping past sometimes jumping into rain-puddles, warmed even burned by sun; panting, falling, scraping, dehydrated; and from the jauntiness that follows a well-run run.

Wrought from walking, stumbling, cursing, hopping and hoping, struggling up long hills and painful downs on trashed legs, which running can also be.

Wrought from the profusion of sunrise light, starlight swirl that flows about and into me, and often pours from my pores.

So while this book has an end, it’s not the end. There will always be more to explore not just for me, for all those who run and for those who deeply do.

Running light beams from me.

Paul Vorwerk, Cape Town, winter 2014

And then

Sometime in the next day or so I will run. Choose a shirt and shorts. My socks choose themselves, the brightest yellow or green, even if they are a little hole-y. I will tie my laces. I’ll feel a familiar, peculiar, puckering, pre-run feeling as if my skin sensors have been switched on – somewhat like the feeling when the national anthem is played. Anticipation will rush through me as I remember all that running means to me.

I’ll begin. Probably walk a few steps and then lift myself into an easy stride. Step by step, my shoulders, arms and neck will loosen. I’ll know more or less how far and hard I’ll run. My mind will ration and distribute resources, manage the emergency reserve, fill it too if it gets a chance.

Breathing deeper and smiling, I’ll be running real in a real world. If it’s been raining I’ll probably shake the branch of a tree. Will glance upwards and savour stars, first glimmers of sunrise. Or clouds, or the perfect blue.

Most likely, I’ll shout or whoop, or jump on a bench. Unshackled I’ll run faster, feeling the goodness in the day; fostering life, opening myself to love, light, to learning, to experiencing every fragment of beauty and wonder. My legs will churn happily, rhythmically tracing a path over the planet.

Through city, suburbs or across a field, maybe next to a river or sea, welcoming whatever rushes at me, I’ll run. Deeper than any other feeling, will be that of feeling fully alive, the enjoyment and satisfaction this brings. I’ll know deep inside that I am satisfied with my life and have a powerful reason to go on.

The road will unwind before me, and I’ll run down it into perfection.

Chapter 1 Beginnings

Let me take a run,

spread it on the world.

Let me take a smile

Let it fly unfurled.

Running begins like this: All running is good.

Running also begins with getting up from the armchair, out the door and moving forward, step by step, both feet off the ground, most of the time. And it’s always better to hold in your stomach muscles, belly button to the spine, when you run.

Because all running is good, it means that when you begin, you step into goodness. Even one step run, gets some of that good.

All running is good also means that all reasons to run, every prompt that gets people running, as well as all the things people want from running are, are good too. It also means you don’t have to be in contention for Olympic selection or an extreme-marathoner to be a runner.

How people get into running always interests me. The force that takes them out of their other lives into the demands of running is strong.

A friend may invite you to run. A colleague organises a team to take part in a charity event. A challenge in a pub when one says, in jest, that running a marathon is easy. The conversation all of a sudden becomes serious. A challenge is issued and it’s hard not to accept.

Maybe you were inspired by watching an event on television or from a car when a stream of runners blocks the road. A niggling voice suggests that if those people can do it, so can you.

The impetus may come from being asked to join a hike. You wish you could but are afraid that you are not strong enough, so you start to run to get strong. A doctor may suggest that you need exercise. After the hurt and the defensiveness, you know that prescription is correct. You know how often you’ve ignored evidence in a mirror, the no longer wearable clothes in the cupboard, over-bulging underwear.

It may be simpler: you want run, to lose weight, to meet other people. It may start as a fantasy about what you’d like to do. Or even that you are looking for a way to exercise your compulsions, to be your compulsions. Or that you’re getting older and you want to stay strong.

Because all running is good, all levels of running are good, even if it’s only a few hundred metres around a field, no matter how ungainly or how poorly they might compare with competitive athletes.

The value of running is in the doing, in the effort, the push of the feet, the drive forward; and it’s confirmed by the glow of satisfaction afterwards, in the colours added to dreams.

It’s not that there are real runners and then the others of a lesser breed. We admire the beautiful, the fast and the athletic. We admire the athletes, the work they put into and how they approach their perfection. I admire all who run.

It’s worth knowing that all running is good. Without that, you might not go out and run at all. When the day comes that you dress differently, tie up exercise shoes, and you try running somewhere – on a road or a path through a park, along a beach, around a school field; or late at night when the inner force wells up and spills on to the streets – it can help to know that you’re stepping into a world of goodness, no matter just how weak, unfit and overweight you are or might think you are.

Knowing that all running is good helps too in the hard times of running because almost inevitably there are those.

In the beginning

The first steps, those very first steps are special. They are step into perfection. Maybe talking about Perfection is an overstatement. But it doesn’t have to be and anyway when you get to see that perfection is a process of perfecting, it isn’t an overstatement.

That simple first step can be the start of so much that it’s worth calling it something superlative.

With the first steps, the process that drives the good of running begins. Another step follows the first, then more. They build, add, accumulate. As they do they let you do more. Just there, in letting you do more, is the running marvel.

Step by step, resting sometimes maybe, you get a little stronger each time you run. Changes begin: ability builds, body refines and reenergises, mind sparks.

Every step taps deeper into what we are. Each step releases a natural drive inside. Running is as natural as breathing and the beating of our hearts, as dancing and hugging.

Our bodies respond to the physical effort. They adjust, strengthen and become healthy. In parallel, our minds respond. We look forward to going out again; look forward to seeing others; sometimes to breakfast after an early run; the sweet taste of fruit, the aroma of newly baked muffins, a cup of tea, maybe the tang of marmalade on hot buttered toast, which are so much better for having been run towards.

The promise of running

The good in running is guaranteed through allowing enough steps to be taken often enough.

Three times a week (preferably four) for as little as twenty to thirty minutes, (preferably forty), for twelve weeks and the changes are rich.

Running has no mystique to be penetrated, no mystery to be solved, costs but comfortable shoes and the rest – effort – is natural, available and directly accessible. You hardly have to think how to run. We can all just run.

Besides the physical benefits of running can also enrich your mind, your psyche and more.

Done right, running can last a lifetime – it’s sustainable and enjoyable.

Running can become a meaningful family affair, as long as the competitive elements and the need for some to keep telling others what to do, finds some other outlet.

Running enables more than you can imagine when not running.

The first step, the first steps

The very first step is crucial. It has enormous power. Without it there is no running. The next steps build on it. The ones that follow build on those that come before. But the first step is only one and anyone can manage that … and the next.

Those early steps can be embarrassing, disheartening and demanding. So it is as well to know that running can get hard. In case it’s hidden in mystique, let’s make it plain. The trick is to run gently until it gets too much then to walk until one feels like running a bit again. The forty minutes, four times a week should be done like this: run as much of it as is comfortable, then walk, recover and run again to see through the forty minutes. Run, walk, run walk – its simple, allowed required. Funny to think of how just forty minutes of fun can be so life-enriching.

To the extent that running is hard work, it is not just so for beginners. Running is hard work even for the very best athletes. They run themselves strong and then run themselves as hard as they can deep into exhaustion. They must. After sprinting a hundred metres in an Olympic final the athletes feel the pain, puff and pant, and are happy to walk again. They give their all and maybe a little more. Sure, they also recover quickly; it’s one of the benefits of running.

We too can make the effort and recover afterwards – a little slower than the well-trained maybe, but we equally get the opportunity to put all we have into a runs. Better still, we not-so-fast runners are allowed to drink the beer, the cappuccino or have the chocolate.

Beginning is tough. It can feel like there is no progress. It can reinforce the feeling that you are just not good enough, that you shouldn’t be running. I remember my lungs’ awful sucking when trying to run. My legs could do more than my lungs and I could feel every gram of the unnecessary fat I carried and the guilt about not having exercised enough and letting myself slide so far.

Funny how the streets around my home where I started seem short now, not the endless steep inclines they were then. The park I aimed to get to seemed to be at the end of the universe.

I run there sometimes just to celebrate that start. Now it takes just a few minutes and a thank you smile.

The good part is when you get to run all of just a kilometre, it’s an achievement, it’s a kilometre more than what you could run before, no matter how fast or slow it was done. You don’t need to hurry, you just need to run.

In the first kilometre you run is a glimpse of what can be. By keeping at it, one kilometre will turn to two, two to three, three to five and from there it’s just a kilometre or two to happiness.

From the very beginning, from the first step, achievement and progress are part of running. Each run is a victory. Each time I went a little further I won back more, even if I felt that each time I ran I got a little more battered.

But there are still barriers. What to wear, what shoes to buy from the bewildering array in a shop and the sales assistant who needs to make a deal. It can be uncomfortable to admit our struggles to others, don’t want to be seen struggling, puffing and panting, overweight in exposing clothes.

So know that it’s fine to run some and then walk when we tire; that it’s normal to huff and puff, that not all of us are athletes of the highest order. Know that what’s important is to get out the door and start moving.

Of course, we need to be careful; a medical assessment is a good thing; so its running in safe places; especially is good is listen to encouraging advice: not to do too much too soon, not to expect