Footnotes: Running Experiences

Come share your tales of poetry in motion at this spoken word Open Mic night in Colchester

Tues, 8th September at The Minories Art Gallery Colchester, 7.30. £4 on the door




This is a new event that aims to bring together runners of all abilities to share their stories, successes, failures, sprains, sprints and splints. Come and take part by reading a short essay, story, or poem. Have an opportunity to express your way of running, and how it impacts on you, your emotional and physical experiences.

Featured guests are:

Writer, Vybarr Cregan-Reid - will read from his forthcoming book, Footnotes: running, landscape & the way we live now. The book is a  psychogeography of running that darts between poetry, philosophy, neuroscience, history, paleoanthropology, and biomechanics. It is a running book for those that love the new nature writing. Vybarr has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and will be reading from his work on Radio 4's Open Book next week. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kent.

• "When Vybarr Cregan-Reid set out to discover why running meant so much to so many, he began a journey which would take him out not only to tread London’s streets, but climbing to sites that have seen a millennium of hangings, or down the crumbling alleyways of Ruskin's Venice.  Footnotes will transport you to the cliff tops of Hardy's Dorset, the deserted shorelines of Seattle, the giant redwood forests of California, and to the world’s most advanced running laboratories and research centres, using debates in literature, philosophy and biology to explore that simple human desire to run."

Artist, Veronique Chance - she will be telling tales of her astounding M25 Great Orbital Run a solitary run and artwork that took place in March2012 over nine consecutive days around the inside boundary of the M25 London Orbital. Véronique will read extracts from her daily blog entries written during the time period of the run. A speeded up recorded version of the work will provide a projected backdrop. Veronique is based in London and has a studio at APT studios, Deptford. She has shown artworks nationally and internationally, including China, Canada, Korea, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland and France. She is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the MA Fine and MA Printmaking courses at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and completed her PhD at Goldsmith's College in 2012.

Exercise scientist, Dan Gallagher - has research interests in 'green exercise' and is particularly interested in 'adherence' to exercise programmes and how this may be tied up with our relationship with the environment. He is about to begin a new research role at the University of Essex which will assess the current fitness levels of primary school children, relating to the state of PE in Essex Schools. He will take part in a Q&A at this event where he will talk about the huge difference that our exercise environment has on the emotional and psychological impact of our seemingly everyday routines.

The evening will re-engage audiences with their environment and themselves, taking the audience from their demanding and structured lives on to new pathways and in to the wild. Reconnecting them to landscape and encouraging their minds to play, and to have a beer and a chat about running.

Things I love about running - item #422

One of the reasons that running has become so adhered to my personality is that for all its monotonous appearance, it is one of the most complex things that the body can do. Throughout my adult life I have been relearning how to run (I think we unlearn the skill through childhood). And bit by bit, my form has become more evenly balanced and more symmetrical. But at the age of 46, I am still learning quite big things about quite big muscles.

When I went to Boston earlier this year on an Arts Council trip, I spent some time with Dr Irene Davis, one of the world's most renowned experts in the biomechanics of running, and among other things, she let me sit in on a patient appraisal. The patient had recently done an Iron Man but had been left with a nagging bit of ITB pain. His initial consultation lasted three hours in which he was carefully assessed by Irene and another physical therapist. Their conclusions drawn, he had some imbalances, but the main thing was that he wasn't firing his glutes when running.

The tripartite gluteal muscles are the largest muscle group in the body, and our biggest muscle, the 'gluteus maximus', is what gives our bums their shape. This is a lot of muscle to be doing nothing while running. If you are not using it you may as well stick ten kilos of sand in a backpack and carry that, too.  Irene's aim was to retrain this runner focussing on a number of things, but mainly to get his ass working.  She said that in some extreme circumstances, she had even grabbed a butt and said something like 'come on, squeeze there!' in order to help runners understand what they needed to do. (There is nothing like haptic feedback for learning new motor skills).

biomechanics assessment 

from the Spaulding National Running Center.

I learned so many things about running and runners in the short time that I spent with Irene at the Spaulding National Running Center (some are in my book and some are in article due out in the Telegraph in a fortnight). But having 'active glutes' left me scratching my head. I tried to feel if I had? I tried squeezing my butt cheeks together when I ran like I was holding a coin up there or something, but that just felt impossibly peculiar (and must have looked even stranger as I tried to run with semi-locking knees). Then, today, the penny dropped (not literally because I never actually tried that).  I didn't need someone highly trained to lean over a treadmill at a clinic and grab my ass, I could grab my own.  So here, in the old fishing village of Aldeburgh, on a rainy and windy August day, I did just that.  Checking that I had no audience, I put one hand on a cheek and could feel that sure enough, my glutes were not firing. All was soft as a favoured pillow.

The look out in Aldeburgh, the view from my window

I tried tensing the muscles again, but this didn't work and messed up my form too much. So I started pushing off a bit more from my glutes, and it was really easy to feel the difference. I felt my pelvis straighten (lifting my tendency to anterior pelvic tilt). I felt stronger at toe-off. My centre of gravity felt like it moved forward.  It seemed to fix things with my form that usually require focus and concentration.  That's it!

It's early days, yet - so I don't know what difference it will make. And all changes to form have to be done slowly. But as I returned to the Centre of town I toned down the butt feeling though was able to continue firing the muscle group. I urge you to give it a go.

I am just so amazed that something so seemingly simple as running can still be offering up new things to try after thousands and thousands and thousands of miles have gone by under foot.

Footnotes: Running Experiences

COLCHESTER DATE ADDED

Come share your tales of poetry in motion at this spoken word Open Mic night

Weds, 2nd September at the Amersham Arms (7.30) in New Cross, nr Goldsmiths. £4 on the door.

&

Tues, 8th September at The Minories Art Gallery Colchester, 7.30. £4 on the door


This is a new event that aims to bring together runners of all abilities to share their stories, successes, failures, sprains, sprints and splints. Come and take part by reading a short essay, story, or poem. Have an opportunity to express your way of running, and how it impacts on you, your emotional and physical experiences.

Featured guests are:

Writer, Vybarr Cregan-Reid - will read from his forthcoming book, Footnotes: running, landscape & the way we live now. The book is a  psychogeography of running that darts between poetry, philosophy, neuroscience, history, paleoanthropology, and biomechanics. It is a running book for those that love the new nature writing. Vybarr has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and will be reading from his work on Radio 4's Open Book next week. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kent.

• "When Vybarr Cregan-Reid set out to discover why running meant so much to so many, he began a journey which would take him out not only to tread London’s streets, but climbing to sites that have seen a millennium of hangings, or down the crumbling alleyways of Ruskin's Venice.  Footnotes will transport you to the cliff tops of Hardy's Dorset, the deserted shorelines of Seattle, the giant redwood forests of California, and to the world’s most advanced running laboratories and research centres, using debates in literature, philosophy and biology to explore that simple human desire to run."

Artist, Veronique Chance - she will be telling tales of her astounding M25 Great Orbital Run a solitary run and artwork that took place in March2012 over nine consecutive days around the inside boundary of the M25 London Orbital. Véronique will read extracts from her daily blog entries written during the time period of the run. A speeded up recorded version of the work will provide a projected backdrop. Veronique is based in London and has a studio at APT studios, Deptford. She has shown artworks nationally and internationally, including China, Canada, Korea, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland and France. She is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the MA Fine and MA Printmaking courses at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and completed her PhD at Goldsmith's College in 2012.

Exercise scientist, Mike Rogerson - will be explaining some of the latest research from the University of Essex's Green Exercise Research Group.  How can our choice of environmental setting influence desirable outcomes of running?  Mike is a completion-year PhD candidate with previous degrees in Sports & Exercise Science (BSc Hons) and in Psychology (MSc).  He has guest lectured on his area of expertise at Queensland University of Technology and Technische Universität München, and holds a seat on parkrun’s Research Board.  Mike’s research has been published in scientific journals and featured via interview by Reuters and Cycling Fitness Magazine.

The evening will re-engage audiences with their environment and themselves, taking the audience from their demanding and structured lives on to new pathways and in to the wild. Reconnecting them to landscape and encouraging their minds to play, and to have a beer and a chat about running.

https://jographies.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/announcing-running-dialogues-a-public-seminar-series-on-running/

From my friend Simon Cook's blog -  We are organising a series of events on themes connected to and around running.  See below if you're interested.

Announcing: Running Dialogues – A Public Seminar Series on Running

JANUARY 26, 2015 / SIMONIANCOOK

*News and an Invitation*

After the excitement of announcing the run-commuting scheme I am involved with at the University of Manchester last week, I have yet more announcements this week. Along with colleagues from Surrey and Kent, I am heading up a team establishing an interdisciplinary, public and free seminar series around running. The news came through last Monday and our ideas have been formulating very quickly since then. Whilst the exact details are still very much to be confirmed, I can provide an overview of what it is we are doing and why it is we are doing it.

In academia, running has generally been the studied by those in the sport and life sciences. This work is often concerned with science of performance improvement, injury reduction and understanding the physiology of the running body. Running, however, is so much more than just a sport.  Running is an inclusive social practice that significantly animates the everyday lives of millions. It is a simple, accessible and low cost activity that can involve socioeconomically and culturally diverse swathes of society, improving health and wellbeing, and engaging communities both locally and across society. It alleviates the sedentariness of modern life and acts as a way of caring for the body and self; as a form of self-expression and identification; as a focus for different socialities; and a mode of engaging and being in the world. Parkrun is a case in point – it involves over 50,000 participants across the UK each weekend, including 5,000 volunteers and 7,000 first-time joiners across over 200 green space venues.

The social and cultural aspects of running are just beginning to be studied by academics, and a growing body of work is emerging from right across the social sciences, arts and humanities. This work provides critical new understandings into the practice of running that is of immense value to those involved in the planning, encouragement and promotion of running. Such perspectives could generate new insights for policy agendas including public health promotion, social wellbeing, sustainable travel and urban planning. The work is also of immense value to runners themselves, offering new perspectives and ways to understand a practice they already know so well. We therefore applied for funding to set up this seminar series that will not only bring researchers from diverse background into contact with one another, but also to connect the researchers with those interested in running and the possibilities it presents: governing bodies, health organisations, sport kit companies, activists, charities, running networks, journalists, bloggers, authors and runners themselves.

We will have 4 seminars in total and each seminar will be based on a theme central to the practice of running but with a broader academic and public resonance as well. We will be inviting three to four speakers along to each seminar, from a great diversity of arenas, as well as an open invite for anybody interested in running to come along to discuss and engage with us. These should be really fun and informative events.

So the provisional dates for your diary.

• 9th March – Evening
• 13th April – Lunchtime
• 11th May – Evening
• 8th June – Lunchtime

All are going to be held at the Roxy Bar & Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, London SE1 1LB. This is a really great informal venue where drinks are available through the seminar.

We will be launching a website for the seminar series in due course and there will be much more information forthcoming shortly about these very exciting events. We have received funding from the ESRC for these seminars so many thanks to them. I am working on this project with Katy Kennedy, a psychology PhD student at Surrey researching the emotions of running, and Vybarr Cregan-Reid, a senior lecturer in English at Kent who is better known as psychojographer and is currently writing a book on running for Ebury Press (Random House) – Footnotes: a study of running, meaning and modern life.

So please come along and join us, bring your family, bring your friends, bring your colleagues and keep an eye on the website for more details shortly!

Everyday Run-ins

Most of the time when I go out barefoot I will get a comment (fair enough, it is a bit odd).  Today I got two, and I noticed for the first time that they represent a kind of sexism.  Not because of what the commenters do or say, but because of who they are.

Today I got "Yo! Do you know what year it is?"  It was well-meant and delivered with a laugh.  I thought it was quite good and certainly have not had its ilk before.  The second wasn't quite so pleasant.  I was running along a path and another walking-runner approached me in the opposite direction.  As I smiled a nod, he didn't return it.  Instead, he coughed a short sneer and looked away shaking his head with such vigour that it could have been seen from the back of the dress circle.  I caught myself thinking, "Yes, but at least one of us is running." This thought was quickly rinsed with the relief that he hadn't seen me tightroping in pain across some gravelly road.  So here is a completely unscientific breakdown of the people that make comments:

Teenage boy: 0%

Teenage boys: 0%

Teenage girl: 0%

Teenage girls: 5%

Older men: 10% (usually quite witty)

Older women: 1%

Women 20-50: 0%

Men 20-50: like, 85% (I said 'completely unscientific').

It's not that men say a lot, but that adult women say NOTHING. In years of running, I've not had one comment. Men feel entitled to share their wit or disdain publicly.  The walking-runner (for pete's sake) felt the need for me to know that he was looking down on me. He wanted to put me in my place in some social order that he found very important, and likely placed himself near the apex of. While I don't find the teenage girls' comments particularly pleasant, their diminuendo is a sad reminder of the fact that as they get a little older, that energy will be quietened, attenuated into a submissiveness that is more socially digestible. I am not a victim of everyday sexism, but it is there, operating all around me.

Contact!

As I was running barefoot in Ladywell today, my mind wandered to why I have found it so easy lately.  Last year when I stopped and had to start from nothing, I had cramps and numerous niggling injuries that wouldn't let me continue to build up to a standard three miles. (On one occasion I even managed to garner an injury on a 1 mile walk).  This time round, nothing.  I have done everything barefoot and I have not had a single twitch or twang anywhere.  I have made mistakes.  I let my feet get too wet and a sharp stone scratched my heel.  And you do get the occasional discomfort from those metatarsal twigs under giant elms.  They seem to settle themselves into the tonsures between the struggling tussocks under the canopy. These 'eeks' are easily offset by the changing landscape that you can feel beneath your feet, from the cool dewy grass in the shade, to the moist warmth of that which has been in the sun.

I don't know why, but it made me think of Robert Zemeckis' 1997 film Contact (from Carl Sagan's novel) which tries to imagine how first contact with alien life would play out, politically. Ambient research continues for years with Jodie Foster's character working tirelessly listening in on the galaxy for whispers of life. After seemingly endless work a data signal is discovered, containing blueprints beamed across the galaxies to any intelligences smart enough to read them.  The plans provide detailed instructions for how to construct a pod that will transport one human to who-knows-where. The suits and safety technicians construct a chair and a safety harness for the pod, but Jodie's character is mindful.  She wants to trust the plans which say nothing about any contents in the pod, except a person.  As the machinery around the pod boots up, comms go down, weird magnetic fields are created outside the pod, but Jodie whimpers that she's 'OK to go'.   The floor of the pod starts to become translucent, a wormhole is opening up beneath her feet 'I'm OK to go'. The pod is dropped and she is travelling faster than the speed of light.  And it's a rough ride.  Jodie starts to judder like buggery. The vibration becomes so severe that it sounds like the pod will fall apart.  At the end of one wormhole she enters another. The vibration now becomes life-threatening. Then she sees that her necklace has come off; it floats, buoyant in the air.  She decides to detach her chest harness from the seat and, she too floats. The screws and hinges of the chair rattle so hard like they will explode.  Then the chair breaks, and it floats, too.  All is peaceful in the land of pod. The deafening noise is silenced. 

Ladywell Fields

I wondered if running shoes might not be a little bit like the chair in the pod? For the body's biomechanics, and especially that of the foot, are already incredibly technologically complex. Our feet have cushioning, sprung mechanisms, a 100 moving parts; they are already built to do exactly what they are supposed to do. Their design is the best that nature has come up with over millions of years. The spongy motion-control shoe is like the chair in the pod, it is a clunky safety mechanism designed by the suits because they know best. It introduces all kinds of statistical noise into what is already a highly complex mechanism.

One of the many attractions of running, for me and for many, is that I can step out of the door and run. I don't have to remember to take my gym membership card, carry a towel, remember my shampoo, rely on a friend to hit the ball back over the net. Running barefoot means that I have got this list down to shorts, shirt, door key. And this time round, at least, instead of being injured, or nagged by niggles, when the air beckons, 'I'm OK to go'.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scBY3cVyeyA)

Personal Bests

Out on Blackheath during Sunday worship.  Runners cross one another’s paths as busily as the dancers in a Busby-Berkeley musical from the ‘30s.  They all look like they are doing the same thing, shuffling along at various speeds.  But running is like reading.  A room full of readers may share what they are doing, but their experiences from the different things being read are chalk and ink. The linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure explained that for a language to function it needed to possess two aspects 'langue' and 'parole'. The 'langue' is, for example, the sounds made by a voice, or the shapes drawn on to page.  But the 'parole' endows these sounds and shapes with meaning, because it is the structure, or rules, in which these things become speech or an alphabet.  Running is the 'langue'; it is a kind of movement, nothing more.  It is the 'paroles' that are different. Runners may be performing the same movement, but they are doing very different things.

One of the ways that runners measure how they do what they do is by ‘personal bests’ - the best time achieved over a given distance, or given race.  This is what I would call sport, as it’s governed by context and competition (even if it is with oneself).  There are lots of runners who don’t do this.  They just want to get outside and play.  They want to freewheel with their thoughts, garner enjoyment from movement for its own sake.  So when people ask me how fast I do something, or what my personal best is, it makes as much sense to me as being asked how fast I read Bleak House, or Anna Karenina, or a poem.  If someone asked you that, might you think that it is the quality of experience that measures the book?  This is how I feel about running. These are my personal bests, runs I will never forget because of how they felt. 

It is the quality of experience that matters to me - not how fast it happens.

Go slow - enjoy it as much as you like.

This month's blog can be found on The Guardian webpages. It is an article for beginners about the top 5 reasons to keep going with their training, about all the hidden benefits of running.

Optical Yoga (and what the eye evolved to see)

"...we'll take the launch down to the Thames Barrier. You've never seen it after dark."

"I havent seen it at all. Won't it be cold?"

"Not particularly. Wear something warm. I'll bring a thermos of soup and the wine. It really is worth seeing, Declan, those great hoods rising out of the dark river towering over you. Do come. We could put in at Greenwich for a pub meal."

(P.D. James - Original Sin)

Runner's can be inclined to dithering.  Once they are out of the house, that's different.  But when I have my long run to do, boy!, I can dither.  I need to eat at the right time.  I need to drink the right amount (too little and I won't last the 12 miles, too much and I'll be stopping to ...). Shall I take music?  What kind? Which earphones? What will I wear? How will I keep my iPod dry if it rains? (ans. cling film)  Will I need my Oyster Card? What about a £20 note? Which shoes?  I am going to stop there, as I could go on for several hundred more words.  Anyway, the last question that I always ask is: 'Oh, where am I going to go?'  12 miles (as it was in this case) is a lot of pavement to eat up, and if you're going out for a couple of hours, you may as well go somewhere nice.  In South-East London we are not spoiled for nice open spaces.

I always end up orbiting Blackheath in some way.  So after there, I wandered towards Greenwich, and with several miles still to use, headed for the Thames Path.  When I hit the path on the South side of the river, I usually go east because it's quieter, and because of the Thames Barrier. There is something about it that I love.  It is beautiful.  It doesn't look like a flood barrier at all, more like an oversized Christmas decoration left to float. Once you turn south on the Greenwich peninsula it comes into view in the distance and every shuffling step brings you closer and closer, and it just gets bigger and bigger.

I think the other reason that I like the Thames Path is the constant motion in one's eyeline.  Years ago, when LCD computer screens first began shrinking (and so expanding the real-estate of our desks), there was the problem of the dead-pixel. LCDs use the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals that behave in certain ways when tiny amounts of electricity are run through them. In the earlier days of LCD displays, it was common to have a couple of dead or stuck pixels on your screen.  If you were lucky, you could gently massage them back to life - a carefully-applied fingernail, a little gentle rub, and a pixel stuck in the 'off' position might come back to life.

When I'm running, I feel like this is what is happening to my retinas.  In the urban landscape, almost everything is static; the pixels are stuck in the 'grey' position. Features of the landscape are more difficult to notice because they don't move. This is what is so amazing for me about the Thames Path, on one side, there are cranes, fences, the giraffe-heads of CCTV cameras peering from out of their pens, the Dome, the Barrier.  Everything is statue still.

And on the other side, is the broad Thames with its million wavelets.  There is something restful about seeing this movement, like my eyes are getting a workout, a long and deep yogic stretch that they can't get in the town.  And so it seems that movement is the essence of vision.  We have a highly adapted flicker fusion frequency of about '60'.  This means that we can see at approximately '60 frames per second'.  Urban landscapes are discordant with our wellbeing in ways that we don't yet understand, but it seems to make some sense to me that my eyes feel restored, somehow, by this omnimovement of the Thames.  It is as close as they can get to experiencing the dynamism and fluidity of the paleolithic landscapes of the past.  Those are the landscapes, after all, the eye evolved to see.

(Many studies have linked the modern pandemic of myopia with too much time spent indoors looking at books or screens.  See, Nina Jacobsen, Hanne Jensen, Ernst Goldschmidt, ‘Does the Level of Physical Activity in University Students Influence Development and Progression of Myopia?—A 2-Year Prospective Cohort Study’, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, April 2008, 49:4, pp. 1322-7.)

Sunday Worship

It used to be a day of worship, but in an increasingly secular society we still seem to go in search of out-of-body experiences on a Sunday

Blackheath village is a basin. It sinks down into its centre; and because that is where life is busiest, a runner can't take advantage of the slope.  Then they have to climb all the way out again like a spider out of a bath.  Today, I was still on the village's outskirts when I saw a Sunday worshipper (doing her long run) on her descent after clambering the village's walls.  In a moment, believing herself unseen, she threw her arms out like wings, closed her eyes, her head dropped back to look up at the sun, and she was gone; falling into a world of her own.  Her runner's high had struck.  The brain's endocannabinoid system had activated and anandamide flooded her system.  The effect is euphoric.  her heart will have slowed as her blood vessels dilate.  Pains and niggles will disappear as the analgesic effect of anandamide kicked in.  It was wonderful to see it happening to someone else.

Sunday is the day that most people do their long-run. It is slower, longer, and probably the most looked-forward-to date in the runners' diary.  Like being pregnant, or growing a beard (trust me on this), once it's something you've done you can see it everywhere.

It was several months ago, end of March 2014.  I know the date because of the conversation I was having with a friend.  We were driving through some of London's outer suburbs (Beckenham / Bromley), and on one of the longer straighter roads were some runners.  I said to my mate H.
   'They're training for the marathon; they're doing they're long run.'
   'How can you possibly know that? You can't know that?'
He's right; I couldn't.  But it was THAT day, the one where you have to do that last 18-22 miler before the three week taper for race day.  It wasn't just that, though.  There was something about the way that they were running.  Their gait was rhythmic and minimalist - their clothes were fit for the rainy day. They were upright, economic, efficient.  They didn't shuffle.  Their was nothing about them that suggested 'beginner' or 'short run'. Of course, Sunday is the day that is most-free in people's schedules, but I wonder if there isn't some kind of social or atavistic throwback to the way we lived a thousand or so years ago.  The rhythm of life was one in which (in this example, going to church) was time away from work, not leisure, but rest. And, for anyone that has experienced a runner's high, they will tell you that it is as close to a religious experience as they can imagine.  Is running, then, a kind of worship, an expression of gratitude, to and for... something?  Being, perhaps.