Longing to share the same sweet loneliness

On Athletics:Only twice in my life have I sat on a plane alongside a complete stranger and ended up in an argument. On taking off from Boston one time, the man next to me said he was a pilot, and to relax, that even a monkey could fly a plane, such was the excellence of computer technology involved.

No amount of arguing could convince me a monkey should be flying the plane.

Another time, on a trip to Athens, the man next to me asked about the purpose of my trip, as you do. When I told him it was to run the 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens he simply raised his arms and declared: "Ah, the loneliness of the long-distance runner!"

For the entire flight I tried to convince him there was nothing whatsoever lonely about long-distance running, how that very phrase was intended to be ironic, that running was about freedom. But he couldn't get my point.

Some people just don't see the purpose in running any distance, even to catch the last bus home.

If by chance I'd had a copy of Alan Sillitoe's seminal story I'd have gladly handed it over. Written in 1959, a mere 40-page novella within a collection of stories, The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runneris still among the best examples of running literature, if only because it fleetingly captures the very essence and purpose of running.

When Sillitoe gets into the mind of his Borstal boy Colin Smith there are some beautiful thoughts on why people run: "Because 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 feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once . . . It makes me feel 50 times better than when I'm cooped up in that dormitory with 300 others."

And when he's out along the "frosty grass of an early morning when even the birds haven't the heart to whistle" the young Smith knows "it's a treat, being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do . . . Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates."

More than just freedom, the loneliness of running is also about exultation, and exhilaration. It's to feel a superabundance of energy, not to necessarily be strong, but to feel strong, and a valuable retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

So come Monday morning when 11,000 men and women are seen running 26.2 miles around Dublin I can imagine those same people raising their arms and wondering, "Who in hell is crazy enough to want to run that far?" Or something to that effect. It's something Hunter S Thompson asked in his brilliant account of a trip to the 1980 Honolulu marathon, The Curse of Lono.

"Why do those buggers run?" wrote Hunter. "Why do they punish themselves so brutally, for no prize at all? What kind of sick instinct would cause 8,000 supposedly smart people to get up at four in the morning and stagger at high speed through the streets of Waikiki for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have the slightest chance of winning?"

Whatever about being sick, it's certainly instinctive. And depending on how far you take it, running can be also be addictive, even spiritual. That came to mind this week when I revisited Jon Krakauer's incredibly haunting Into The Wild, the only book I've read in one sitting and immediately started over again. Published in 1996, it's just been released as a film by Sean Penn.

Into The Wildhas practically nothing to do with running, and begins thus: "In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness. He had given all his savings to charity, abandoned his car and possessions, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters."

The only running connection is that the young man, Chris McCandless, was captain of his high-school cross-country team and later ran for Emory University in Atlanta. He viewed running as an intensely spiritual exercise and would intentionally run as far and as fast as he could, the whole idea being to lose his bearings, to push himself into unknown territory.

When McCandless took that fatal journey into the wilderness of Alaska he was in a way taking the loneliness of the long-distance runner to the extreme. Running an hour or two no longer satisfied his need for solitude and total freedom.

As Into The Wildreveals, some people feel he went recklessly and foolishly out of his depth, but most runners would find it impossible not to admire his desires.

In the same way, no doubt some people will look upon the 11,000 runners in Dublin on Monday and feel sorry for them on their foolish pursuit. I'll look upon them sharing the same, sweet loneliness and feel sorry I'm not among them.