I run with dogs, not humans. That was the other feature of the run that was to be reiterated in the years to come. Humans run together for company, for encouragement, to talk, to shoot the breeze, just to be together. These reasons are entirely understandable and respectable ones. But they are not my reasons.
People sometimes assess the quality of their runs in terms of times, distances and also in more sophisticated ways: the AIs — the number, duration and intensity of the aerobic intervals they have inserted into the miles they have run; the TUT — the total uphill time and so on. But, as far as I am concerned, times, distances, AIs, TUTs — these are all just contingencies, incidentals. Every run has its own heartbeat; the years have taught me this. The heartbeat of the run is the essence of the run, what the run really is. There, on an early summer’s morning on the mountain of stone, the heartbeat was a gentle one. There was the gentle sinking of my feet into mountain grass and heather. There was the whispering rustle of the mountain breeze in the branches of the twisted, wind-hunched trees. And there was the gentle dance of skylarks in this breeze. Most of all there was Boots: the gentle pant-pant-pant of his breath and the quiet jingle-jingle-jingle of the tags that adorned his collar.
In my later life, people will sometimes ask me what I think about when I run. It’s a reasonable question — especially given the profession I shall come to adopt — but, nonetheless, the wrong one. The question betrays a lack of understanding of what the run does. Any answers I could give would be pretty boring. ‘Oh God, this hurts’ is an increasingly common refrain. More generally, what I think will reflect what is going on in my life before the run begins. If I am happy, I shall think happy thoughts; if I am sad, I shall think sad ones. Thinking carries too much of me in it; too much of the stench of my life, its concerns and preoccupations.
If I am thinking at all when I run, this is a sign of a run gone wrong — or, at least, of a run that has not yet gone right. The run does not yet have me in its grip. I am not yet in the heartbeat of the run; the rhythm of the run has not done its hypnotic work. On every long run that has gone right, there comes a point where thinking stops and thoughts begin. Sometimes these are worthless, but sometimes they are not. Running is the open space where thoughts come to play. I do not run in order to think. But when I run, thoughts will come. These thoughts are not something external to the run — an additional bonus or pay-off that accompanies the run. They are a part of what it is to run, of what the run really is. When my body runs, my thoughts do too and in a way that has little to do with my devices or choosing.
There have been a number of studies on the effects running has on the brain — at least, the brains of mice — and these effects are quite impressive. Not so long ago, no one knew that adult neurogenesis — the growing of new brain cells as an adult — was even possible. But it seems that it is, and running is one of the things that can make it happen. At least it does in mice — when allowed free access to treadmills, laboratory mice grew hundreds of thousands of new cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory. Then there is BDNF — brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This is a protein that aids both in the formation of new brain cells and also in the protection of currently existing cells — and running produces lots of it. There may come a time when I am very happy about these effects that running has had on my brain, but for the present they do not concern me. I am more interested in what happens to my brain when I run, rather than afterwards. But until fMRI — functional magnetic resonance imaging — technology grows significantly more portable than it currently is, I shall probably not be able to find out, at least not directly. Nevertheless, I think it’s possible to make reasonable extrapolations from work done on other aspects of brain function, particularly with regard to the connection between rhythm and information processing.
Let us begin with the phenomenon to be explained: the way it feels to you when you run. I described this in terms of a transformation of thinking into thoughts, and suggested that the hypnotic effect of rhythm was at the root of this transformation. If this phenomenon were unique to me, then it would be largely uninteresting (except to me, of course). But other people have described substantially similar experiences. For example, Joyce Carol Oates writes: ‘Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.’ And, in a similar vein, but with a slightly different emphasis, Haruki Murakami writes: ‘When I am running my mind empties itself. Everything I think while running is subordinate to the process. The thoughts that impose themselves on me while running are like light gusts of wind — they appear all of a sudden, disappear again and change nothing.’ Both Oates and Murakami identify important but different aspects of the experience. With Oates, the emphasis is on rhythm: the fleeing and pulsing of thought in tune with the swinging arms and moving feet. Murakami emphasizes the emptiness of the mind, and compares thoughts to gusts of wind that blow through this emptiness. I differ from Murakami in this respect: he claims that, for him, these thoughts change nothing. Sometimes that is true for me too. But occasionally, just occasionally, they can change everything. Then, rather than a feathery breath that gently caresses my cheek, they are more like a sharp slap.
Thoughts only come when they are ready. They cannot be forced, they cannot be hurried — they cannot be bargained with. They come in their time, not ours. In the many years that have come and gone since that day on Mynydd Maen, I have lost count of the number of times that a problem I have been trying to solve — and my business is hard, abstract, conceptual problems — has suddenly resolved itself, or if not that then dissolved before my eyes, during a run. Part of the explanation for this almost certainly lies in the idea of rhythm.
When someone taps out a regular rhythm, activation will occur in regions of the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex and right cerebellum. Just as important as the location of this activity is its frequency. This frequency is in the gamma band: 25—100 Hz, but 40 Hz is typical. Gamma oscillations are thought by many to be the key to optimal information processing in the brain, underlying processes like attention and perhaps conscious experience. Some think this is because of the role gamma oscillations play in binding activity together into a unified whole. Francis Crick and Christof Koch famously argued that gamma oscillations of around 40 Hz are responsible for binding information together in visual awareness, and so are essential to visual experience — although this claim is controversial. Nevertheless, the idea that gamma oscillations are implicated in efficient cognitive performance is now largely accepted. In fact, the technique of optogenetics, developed by Karl Deisseroth’s team at Stanford University, fairly conclusively demonstrates this. In optogenetics, one manipulates the rhythm of the brain through pulses of light directed at a type of neuron that produces parvalbumin — a type of protein that regulates the frequency of gamma wave oscillations in the brain. Using this technique, Deisseroth demonstrated that the right frequency of gamma oscillation will ‘enhance information flow among cells in the frontal cortex’. The frontal cortex is the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive functions like thought.
It is notable that the optimal frequency of gamma oscillations — around 40 Hz — can be induced simply by tapping out a rhythm with one’s finger. So it is not too much of a stretch to suppose that moving one’s entire body in an appropriate rhythm can produce the same effect. Indeed, one might suspect that if tapping one’s finger can induce the appropriate frequency of gamma oscillations, moving one’s whole body might do this a little more forcefully. It is therefore not implausible that there is a connection between the rhythm of the body involved in running and the presence of the brain activity involved in higher cognitive functions. However, rhythm cannot be the whole story. Tapping my finger at a frequency of 40 Hz for hours on end would, at most,
lead to a sore finger.
Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist at MIT, also notes the beneficial effect running has on his problem-solving abilities. He describes this effect in terms of the idea of relaxation: ‘Some solutions are obvious, but they are only obvious when you are relaxed enough to find them.’ But I don’t think this is quite right — at least, that is not how it is for me. To begin with, to state the obvious, there are many ways of relaxing — I’m actually extraordinarily good at relaxing, especially if there’s a TV, a comfortable sofa and a bottle of halfway decent wine in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the solutions to difficult conceptual problems do not seem to announce themselves when I am doing this. Since they are far more likely to appear when I am running, I have to conclude that exhaustion rather than relaxation must play at least some role. Up to a certain point — there is a point of exhaustion that is the death of thoughts — the longer the run goes on, the more tired I become, then the more likely it is that a solution will appear. But this will only work if the rhythm has been established first. It’s not as if I can refrain from running for six months, start again, find myself feeling like death after two miles on my return, and expect all these worthy thoughts to appear as if from nowhere and solve all the problems I’ve been working on for those past months. It would be much easier if things happened like that, but they don’t. On a run like that, I never get beyond thinking — usually badly: thoughts have no wish to be associated with me. The reason, I suppose, is that my mind will not be empty. For that I need the rhythm, and to get that I need to be in shape.
So it seems that, for me at least, there are two crucial factors: rhythm and exhaustion. Neither will work in isolation. Having less empirical work to fall back on, I have to be more speculative with regard to the effects of exhaustion on higher cognitive functions. First, there are some general principles about how the brain works which might be pertinent. The brain is a creature of habit. It travels down the same streets and avenues, visiting again and again the same old cul-de-sacs, dead ends and no through roads of thought. The reason is that the brain is, in essence, an associative machine. Activity spreads in the brain through associations. If activation in one area of the brain has, in the past, produced activation in another area, then an association between the two is set up, and this means that, in the future, when another instance of the first sort of activity occurs, it is more likely that activity of the second sort will occur too. The tendency of humans to make, both individually and collectively, the same mistakes in thinking over and over again — and even a cursory glance at the history of thought will show that essentially the same, typically unsuccessful, ideas are revisited over and over again, in slightly different forms — is a testament to the associative nature of the brain.
Sometimes, the brain has to be persuaded to let go, just for a while, and when it is tired it is perhaps more easily persuaded. When I talk to someone who suffers from dementia or Alzheimer’s, I am often struck not so much by the extent of the memories they have lost, but of the power and vivacity of the ones that remain. Memories from a long time ago, from a lifetime ago, are uncovered once again, as if they were new-born moments before. Their brain is letting go, associations are breaking down and in this process we find the uncovering of things that were hidden. That, I suspect, is the sort of thing that happens when tiredness starts to insinuate its way into the rhythm of my run. Emptiness is the sign of the brain letting go — not letting go in general, but simply allowing its grip to loosen on its day-to-day executive duties. The associations through which its activity is channelled are loosened, just a little. And so, to an extent, the familiar but fruitless avenues and dead ends of thinking are left behind, and in this new desert landscape of the mind thoughts are uncovered, shining and pristine.
There is one piece of empirical work that bears specifically on this topic. In a study of Tibetan Buddhist monks, neuroscientist Sean O’Nuallain demonstrated a correlation between transcendental mental states and gamma wave oscillations of around 40 Hz. More than this, however, he also argued that what these monks have in common — at least the ones proficient at this sort of meditation — was the ability to put their brain into a state in which it consumes power at a lower rate than usual, sometimes approximating zero. According to his ‘zero power hypothesis’, lower power states of the brain may correspond to a selfless state, and higher power states correspond to the experience of the self. Gamma oscillations are more prevalent in lower power states.
This work is strongly suggestive of the role tiredness may play in thinking — or, more accurately, in the having of thoughts. Intense activity of the body results in the brain adopting a lower power state. The principle would be like feeling sleepy after a heavy meal. Blood has been diverted to the intestine to facilitate digestion, and as a result less blood, and therefore less oxygen, goes to the brain. On the long run, when you reach the point when you are struggling, all your energy must be directed to putting one foot in front of the other. To compensate, the brain — normally taking up more than 20 per cent of the body’s total energy supply — goes into a lower power state in the way described by O’Nuallain. The result is a ‘selfless’ state. Thinking is typically something I experience myself as doing. On the long run, I don’t experience myself to be thinking because the grip I have on myself has become more tenuous. In place of thinking, there are thoughts, seemingly not mine at all, that come from nowhere, out of the blue and into the black.
Thoughts come in their own good time — and this, I suspect, is what their own good time might look like: an increase in gamma activity coupled with a decrease in the overall power state of the brain. There is highly integrated activity in the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex and right cerebellum, coupled with the kind of tiredness that allows the usual associations of daily life to break down just enough. The result is a kind of emptiness: a clearing in the mind where thoughts can come to play. Maybe that is why it happens, maybe not. But, for me, far more important than why this happens is that it does, in fact, happen.
Talk is antithetical to thought. And so I run with dogs that do not talk. But they do more than that. They augment: they magnify the rhythm, enhance the essence, of the run. My heartbeat is magnified by those of the dogs that run beside me; my breath is magnified by theirs. The thud-thud-thud of my feet is expanded and enhanced by the pitter-pitter-pitter-pat of theirs and the chingle-chingle-chingle of the chains around their necks. This is the heartbeat of the run, a heart that beats outside me, not within. And when the run has done its work, I am lost in this beating heart. Before this point, the point when thinking stops and thoughts begin, I am not running, not really. I am only moving. The point where movement transforms into running: that is the point at which thoughts come to play.
That day on Mynydd Maen was perhaps my first experience of the heartbeat of the run — the heart that beats outside me, not within. I could not have understood, neither then nor for many years to come, that this experience would come to shape my life in some of its more important respects. To experience the heartbeat of the run is to have one of the most powerful experiences possible of what Plato would have called ‘The Good’. Many years will have to come and go before the heartbeat of the run will reacquaint me with a kind of value that the child knows best. The idea that life is the sort of thing that needs this value — that an adult who has lost it has become, in a significant sense, a diminished thing — is not something I could have known on that day when I ran with Boots on the mountain of stone, when thoughts that came from the beating heart of the run danced in the place my mind used to be, as the sun danced on the bright blue waters of the sea that lay to the south.
3
Born to Run
1999
Every run has its own heartbeat; the years are teaching me this. The heartbeat is the essence of the run, what the run really is; and the heart beats outside me, not within. Permeating everything is the backbeat: the gusty, undulating thunder of the wind in my ears
. I am on the Rathmore Peninsula of Kinsale, slap bang in the middle of the southern coast of Ireland, and the wind accompanies every step I take: ebbing and flowing, never constant, whoosh, silence, whoosh, silence. Then there is the pack. I am running with Brenin, the wolf, Nina, his dog-friend, and Tess, his wolf-dog daughter. There is the pad-pad-pad of a dozen feet, the click-click-click of forty-eight claws, enamelled metronomes tapping out the beat of distance covered and time elapsed on the cracked, faded, potholed tarmac. There is the pant-pant-pant of three breaths and the jingle-jangle of three chains. These all fuse with the whoosh and the silence.
There are few cars on these narrow, crooked country lanes, and I can let the pack run as it will. More or less: anywhere behind me, but nowhere in front. That is the rule. This is not a matter of dominance, simply safety. But, anyway, they fall into my rhythm, effortlessly ghosting over the ground beside me. Beyond that, it is fluid, always shifting. The flowered hedgerows that line the lanes, the towering hedgerows of summer, are teeming, fidgeting with life. A promising rustle, perhaps a mouse, shrew, rabbit or rat, draws out one of the pack — Brenin plunging paws first, canine hope personified, rigidified, into the buttercupped, cow-parsleyed undergrowth, disappearing up to his tail — and then an empty-jawed return to the rhythm of the pack. This severance and return — to be repeated over and over again during the course of the run — is part of the heartbeat.
Running with the Pack Page 6
