Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands Read Free Book Online Page A

knew it. Running takes me back to this thing that I once knew but had to forget. Running puts me in contact once more with a certain kind of value that is easily lost to the adult. Running is a way of remembering — a way that the body remembers what the mind could not.
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    On the long run, there is an experience of freedom, of a certain sort — the freedom of spending time with the mind. On the long run, also, there is a certain type of knowledge: a kind of knowing that once permeated the lilting days of a life that was still young. This is knowledge of value, of what is important in life and what is not. The experience of freedom I find on the long run is not the experience of being able to do whatever I want. It is not the freedom that goes with absence of constraint. On the contrary, one of the things the long run teaches me is just how far I am removed from freedom in this sense. There is, however, another kind of freedom: a freedom that goes with knowing, a freedom that accompanies the absence of doubt.
    The speeches are over. There is the gun, and we go … absolutely nowhere. We’re ten thousand back, and it’ll take almost ten minutes for us to get across the starting line. A cheerful older gentleman who has been standing next to me in the corral, who told me his goal time was two hours — I did a double take until I realized he was running the half marathon not the full — whips off his tracksuit top and throws it backwards over his head into the crowd. He turns around to watch the result of this, and cackles when he sees, in the meagre light afforded us by the streetlamps, the confusion of the person on whom it has landed. So that’s how you stay warm: you bring clothing with you that you don’t plan on ever seeing again — next year, maybe. There is a lot of hooting, hollering, yipping and possibly even a little yodelling. We start moving forward. There is a shuffling walk, which slowly, almost imperceptibly, turns into a scuffling jog.
    At some, perhaps not entirely determinate, point in this process, we shall find what we might think of as my first stepin my first marathon. Here it is — I push off on my left foot and as I do, I find myself thinking: that is it. It has begun. That is the magical thing about first steps. Before that step I was outwardly calm but inwardly riddled with doubt: psychologically, a shifting, wriggling frame of confusion and uncertainty. Will my calf hold together? Will I be able to go the distance? How painful will this be? How humiliating? But with that first step, all my doubts are washed away by the quiet calm of certitude. According to Descartes, and a tradition instigated by him, to know something is to be certain of it, to have no doubts about it. We sometimes talk of being ‘free of doubt’, and I think there is a deep truth contained in this expression. Freedom and knowledge are closely entwined. The calm, quiet certitude that washes over me as I take this first step is the experiential form of a certain kind of knowledge. If I were more influenced by Spinoza, as I was when I was a younger man (and who, when they are young, could fail to be influenced by Spinoza?), then I might have been tempted to describe this understanding as the knowledge of how things have to be, of how things must be. But that would not be quite correct. Even as I take this step, I understand all too well that things did not have to be this way. My certitude consists in an understanding of how things should be rather than how they must be. But ‘should’ is a value term: a term that prescribes rather than describes. The experience of how things should be is an experience of value: an experience of what is important and, correlatively, implicit in the experience, an understanding of what is not. When the terror of doubt and indecision turns to calm, quiet, certainty, this is grounded in an experience of value.
    As I take this first step, I