Running with the Pack (11 page)

In the end, the big-arsed-ape-that-was-born-to-run hypothesis is motivated by a kind of faith — a faith in evolution to have come up with a perfect solution to a cost-benefit problem presented to it by a tight-fisted client. That is a lot to ask of anything, especially a blind biological process. Over time, evolution does tend to get things more or less right. But this big-arsed-running-on-simian-legs-and-feet thing is just so new, comparatively speaking. It's not like hearts, lungs and blood. Evolution has had plenty of time to iron out the problems with those. These things take time, and I would be rather surprised if evolution has had enough time to comprehensively troubleshoot the problems with the strategy it used to produce humans. It may be that we are fractured creatures, even on the biological level. Were we born to run? From an appropriately distanced evolutionary perspective,
we may have been born to do many things, not all of them, perhaps, entirely consistent. It may be that we are all mongrels, every living thing.

The fourth, and for Aristotle the most important, explanation of anything is its final cause: its why. The formal cause of something tells you what it is. The material cause tells you what it is made from. The efficient cause tells you what made or produced it. The remaining cause — what Aristotle called the final cause — tells you why it was made. The final cause of anything is its why. The final cause is the purpose of the activity, the reason why the activity is performed.

It may seem that I have already explained the final cause of running. I run to save my house and possessions from the jaws of one then two then three marauding canines. That certainly seems like the purpose of my run. My pack, and their destructive proclivities, provides the impetus for my running — they are its efficient cause. And then the purpose of the run is to mellow them out sufficiently to abstain from eating the few things I still actually possess. The final cause of my running is based on my desire to safeguard my remaining possessions. If I didn't care about these possessions — for example, if I didn't care whether or not Brenin chews holes in the sofa (happened), or whether Tess chews through the power cord of an almost new TV (happened, thankfully it wasn't plugged in at the time), and if I didn't care whether or not Nina chews a hole through a partition wall big enough for her to walk through (happened, though I'm not entirely sure there was enough evidence to pin it on Nina acting in isolation — she was simply the one caught red-handed), then the proclivities of the pack would provide no reason for me to run.

This, however, describes only the final cause of
my
running, not the final cause of running itself. If this is the final cause of my running, others will have different final causes for their runs. After all, how many people run in order to persuade a pack of wolves and dogs to spare their possessions? Some people will run for the sake of their health, others to relieve the stresses of the office or perhaps even the family, others because they like the company it affords, and yet others because they like competing and accruing medals in the races they enter. And even when we restrict the focus to me, the particular final cause I cited will be operative only during a certain portion of my life. None of these reasons are the final cause of running — only of my running at a given time, your running at a given time, and so on.

As I pass Charles Fort, I turn left up a steep hill. This involves a couple of hundred yards of tough climb. I slog grimly onwards and upwards in the shadow of the Devil's Bastion. But this is nothing. I turn right, and head downhill again, past a farmhouse and some cottages, using the decline to stretch and loosen my muscles. I could have continued on up the hill, it would have soon levelled off, and I would have been left with a relatively easy mile or so home. On some days, if I am ill, I might take advantage of that. I continue on with the descent and at the bottom of the hill we turn left then right, and now I come to a grim but favourite part. I have been anticipating this since Charles Fort; the adrenalin started to course through me back then. We are at the foot of a hill that stretches away into the distance, and it is frighteningly steep; standing here at the bottom it looks more like a wall than a hill. My goal is to run up this hill, as fast as I possibly can. I must not stop, I must not falter: I must not even slow. If I do, the run has been a failure. It's an impossible goal — but sometimes they are the best.

I am looking straight down at my feet. If I raise my head, I feel like I will topple backwards. The hill starts off steep and then gets steeper. If I see any of this, if I see how far I have to go, if I see how long this pain will last, I know I will stop. My legs — driving, pumping — are on fire. My lungs feel as if they are turning themselves inside out trying to get the oxygen they need to combat the lactic burn. Keep going. Get to the next pothole, then the next. And then, finally: the hardest part of all. I'm reaching the top, the gradient is starting to level off: job done! No, the hard part is to keep going now, keep driving those legs as the lactic fire spreads outwards and is eventually replaced by a pervasive numb deadness; keep driving those legs as my lungs start to work again. Here is when the nausea kicks in, and it's worse than anything that has gone before. Sometimes — not often, but more than enough — I'll throw up; but I'll try to keep running as I do so. Finally, the nausea flooding my system is replaced with warm triumph. I roar, the pack bounces around me. And then, slowly, the gentle rhythm of the run takes over once more.

The days when this sort of endeavour might have actually had a point are long gone. I no longer play the sort of sports for which this torture might help. The most obvious facet of this ascent is its sheer pointlessness. I could jog up the hill; I could even walk — the pack wouldn't mind. But I charge up the hill. Here, although I did not understand it at the time, is a clue to the final cause of running — the real purpose not of my running, not of yours, but of running in general. It is not that there is a difference in kind between the charge up the hill and the rest of the run. It is just that in the charge up the hill the final cause of running is made particularly graphic. I was initially pushed into running by the jaws of
one, then two, then three efficient causes. But the running I was pushed into has a final cause — a why — of its own.

On that hill, dying, gasping for breath, in mute lactic agony — at that precise moment in time, there was nothing in the world I would rather be doing. I ran that hill for one reason only: to run it. And that is a clue to the final cause of running. You and I may run for many reasons, but the purpose — the final cause — of running is always the same. At its best, and at its purest, the purpose of running is simply to run. Running is a member of the class of human activities that carry their purpose within themselves. The purpose of running is intrinsic to it. That, I would one day realize, is important.

4

American Dreams

2007

There is the whoosh of the cars on one side of us, and the slap and whir of the garden sprinklers on the other. Every run has its heartbeat. I am running with Nina and Tess through the early morning suburban streets of Miami. I left Alabama with Brenin twelve years ago. The intervening time has seen us run the green fields and plunging lanes of southern Ireland, the muddy woodlands of Wimbledon Common, the barren-as-boulders hills of the Pembrokeshire high country and then, finally, the sunset-golden beaches and fields of purple lavender — the way I shall always remember Languedoc. Brenin, my old friend, is gone now. His bones are buried in a sandy copse, beneath a ghost of stone that stands on the delta of the River Orb. After a long detour, for me at least, this is a return of sorts. A few days ago, we all moved to Miami. Poor old Nina and Tess, they have become old and they're not really capable of these runs any more. I've been in denial about this, but it ends here. Today is the last time I
shall ever run with them. From now on, it will just be gentle walks. A little more than a year later they will both be dead. Tess went first, in the land of her father, victim of the same sort of cancer that claimed him. Nina went three weeks later, victim, I still think, of a broken heart.

This is the first run of my second life in the US. I cast my mind back to the last run of my first life here. That was a run of sadness: a run of times that had gone and would never come again. That was a run of fear: a run of times as yet unknown. I would soon, in a few short days, be putting Brenin on a plane to Ireland, and quarantine, but at that moment he floated along beside me as we ran through the early morning streets of Tuscaloosa. I was twenty-four when I moved there, fresh out of Oxford, and starting my first real job. I began Oxford-style. I went to work in blazer and flannels. I ended up grunge: T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops and a ponytail. I did not anticipate my first job turning into a seven-year party, but sometimes things have a funny way of turning out — it's one of life's most endearing features. After seven years, over a hundred rugby games, thousands of tequila shooters and more 25¢ longneck beers than I could number, I was ready to leave Alabama. When I had arrived there, I was younger than many of my students. So it was perhaps not particularly surprising that I had found my way into the university's student rugby team, and the rather surreal subculture that surrounded it. But before I knew it I was thirty-one. I was too old, and the party had moved on. There is only so long you can turn up at student parties — even student rugby parties — without it getting first a little sad and then a little creepy. I suspected I had already transgressed the borders of sad, and wanted to get the hell out of Dodge before I crossed over into creepy. No one comes back from creepy.

Brenin had been my constant companion for my last four years in Alabama. For four years, every bar, every party, every road trip, Brenin had been there with me, mute and impartial witness to the beers and the chasers and shooters — to the women I had chased and the women who had chased me. I was going to detach myself from what was becoming, with quiet inevitability, the wreckage of a life. We were moving to Ireland, somewhere quiet where I could write. But Brenin had first to go into quarantine, and I would not see my friend and brother for the next six months.

It was an early Sunday morning. We'd had a game the previous day, followed by the inevitable festivities and so I was running off the party of the night before. My memories of those streets are pallid. In this respect they are not inaccurate, for the streets were also pallid. Once the blinding-white porched-and-pillared abodes of respectable southern gentility, that part of town had been taken over by the students of the University of Alabama, and the houses were grey and cracked and peeling from all the young lives that had burned brightly within them. But my memories are pallid and peeling for another reason. They were made in a time when I had little need for them. Age is not, in fact, the destroyer of memories; that belongs to youth. Age is the preserver of memories, the reverer of memories. The memories I make become stronger as I get older. The memories I made in my youth are sickly children.

I knew the people who lay dreaming in those shattered houses that lined the streets. I had taught some of them, played rugby with some of them and been to parties with many of them. I knew the people and I knew their dreams, at least the dreams they were willing to tell. Most of them were dreams by proxy — dreams their parents dreamed, that grew
inside of them apace with the yet-to-be-born child. These were dreams of doctors and lawyers: dreams of big money and big houses, of expensive cars and attractive spouses. This was America, where you could be whatever you want to be if you were prepared to work hard enough. This was the great dream. This was the great lie. Most of these dreams would fail my sleeping friends. By the time I returned to America, they would have found newer, smaller dreams.

This first run of my second life in America is not taking place in real Miami. By that I mean it is not the sort of thing you would think about when you think about Miami, not if you live somewhere else. When someone who is not from Miami thinks of Miami, they probably think of South Beach, or Downtown: the sort of skyscapes and art-deco-ed ocean front they would cut to on
CSI: Miami
, just to let you know you're watching
CSI: Miami
and not
CSI: NY
. But we could be anywhere — at least, anywhere the streets are lined with palm and banyan trees. In fact, we are in Palmetto Bay, a decidedly bourgeois suburb about ten miles south of the centre of Miami, or where the centre of Miami would probably be if it actually had a centre. Horatio Caine wouldn't be seen dead in Palmetto Bay — nothing ever happens here. Our presence in this place is a sign of how things are changing. Nina and Tess may be fading, but there is new life on the way. Emma, my wife, is four months pregnant, and we're living the safe, solid, respectable life of a safe, solid, respectable middle-class couple. I have school zones to think about now — or, rather, Emma does; it would never have occurred to me — and Palmetto Bay has the best state schools in Miami-Dade.

Twenty minutes into this debut run, I have already decided I hate running in Miami. It's not the heat or humidity. This is
January, it's a bright, pleasant early morning and I would guess the temperature to be in the high sixties — it will climb to the upper seventies by the afternoon — and humidity won't become an inconvenience for a few more months. By the time that happens, I'll look back with fondness on these winter runs. It's the flatness of it all that I hate; the unremitting monotony of these suburban death flats. There's nothing to break up the run: nothing to grimly prepare for when approaching the bottom, or breathlessly exult in when reaching the top.

When you come from Wales and now live in Miami, you tend to miss the mountains. You don't necessarily miss much else, but you do miss the mountains — or hills, or any sort of gradient really. Some areas of Miami have ‘heights' in their name — Richmond Heights, Olympia Heights. It's a sick joke. They're eight feet above sea level — nosebleed country in these parts. Sometimes I'll find myself staring fondly at the Rickenbacker Causeway, the biggest gradient in Miami-Dade County. At weekends, if you drive over the causeway to Key Biscayne, you'll see scores of cyclists going back and forth over it. The causeway is arched and it's the largest ‘hill' they have to practise on.