Why runners run — Frank McNally on exercising his inner demons

Whenever the subject of my running habit comes up in our conversations, a sceptical friend (Hi, Sarah) is wont to ask: “Yes, Frank, but what are you running from?”

I’ll come back to that thorny question later. First, let me deal with the more traditional focus of the activity: what I’m running towards.

Thanks in part to an Irish Catholic mother, I consider suffering a virtue. I also see the typical 10k or half-marathon as a microcosm of life itself: a vale of tears from which no good can be expected until it’s over, at which point there may be a reward.

Much of the reward in running is that the pain, self-inflicted as it is, stops.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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But there is also what I call the “chute of glory”: the running equivalent of heaven, just past the finish line, where you are corralled into a corridor of relief and happiness and people on both sides give you nice things. The rewards often include medals (sometimes with fake WB Yeats quotations) or trophies. There will usually be food too: bananas, apples, and chocolate bars, at least.

Occasionally, the finish area may even be a land of milk and honey. And choirs of angels are not unknown there, at least in the music-themed Rock and Roll Running Series.

One of my favourite races down the years has been the Raheny 5-miler, which rewards every finisher with a bulging goody-bag. Much of the contents may be strange, protein-based snacks you wouldn’t want to eat. But I have been known to keep even those in the fridge long past their use-by dates, because a trophy is a trophy.

Switching the focus back from the forward to the ambient of running, while still avoiding Sarah’s question, it is also a good way to enjoy the world around you, especially the fresh air and scenery.

But to be honest, you’d enjoy both those things more if you walked, which might also leave you more inclined to stop and smell the flowers occasionally. Mark Twain’s indictment of golf – “a good walk spoiled” – could equally apply here.

As the corny Hallmark-card line on this year’s Dublin Marathon medal – hilariously attributed to Ireland’s most intellectual of poets – suggests, running can also have a social element.

When you train in groups, certainly, there is an enjoyable pack mentality that brings out your inner huskie. Still, most runners run alone most of the time.

Even in the marathon, where apparently there are no strangers, “just friends you haven’t met yet”, your friends can’t run the race for you. The pain comes individually wrapped.

But to shift focus again, from lateral to rear, and to deal at last with the question of what I’m running from, the simplest answer would be “a beer belly”.

On a deeper level, however, I am also no doubt running from the knowledge of my own mortality. That’s a futile exercise, of course, even if a well-known medical theory has it that every hour of exercise adds two hours to your life.

In theory, that means you could extend your life indefinitely. But there must be limits to this insurance policy. And the beer probably invalidates it. As a runner of advanced middle age, I often use Dylan Thomas’s protest against death as a motivational mantra.

It’s doubly apt at this time of year, when yet another summer passes and it’s a dire struggle to leave the house out on dark wintry evenings. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” I tell myself then: “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

Like Thomas himself, we all have inner demons. The runner’s hope may be to turn them into outer demons and then try to outsprint them. Alas, however unfit our demons are, they’re usually waiting for us when we come back.

Mere misattribution aside, it was funny that Yeats – among the least athletic-minded of writers – should have been invoked on the Dublin Marathon medal. The nearest he ever got to describing the loneliness of the long-distance runner, probably, was in the Song of Wandering Aengus, where the protagonist finds a magical creature, becomes enchanted, then loses her, and spends the rest of his life in a hopeless pursuit. Aengus is more of a walker than a runner, and a cross-country one at that, condemned to traversing “hollow lands and hilly lands”. But while haunted by his past, he has his eyes always fixed on distant trophies: “the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun”.

I’ve never seen either of those in a race finishing area, alas. And despite Yeats’s involvement on the promotion team, they are not likely to feature at the end of this year’s Dublin Marathon either.