Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  But these are all just contingencies: distances, directions, times, even landscape. They don’t matter. The heartbeat of the run is the essence of the run, what the run really is. Here, on an early summer’s morning in Languedoc, the heartbeat is a gentle one. There is the gentle sinking of my feet into sandy ground, the gentle pant-pant-pant of Hugo’s breath and the quiet jingle-jingle-jingle of the tags that adorn his collar. There is the whispering rustle of the tramontane — the wind of the mountains — in the branches of the sycamores above me and in the vines that surround me. There is the gentle dance of the butterflies in the warm breeze. When the run does its work, I will become lost in its beating heart. We run on.

  I remember another run, along some of these same trails, but in a different time, almost a different life. Brenin had lymphoma, the vet had told me, and the prognosis was what in the profession they call ‘guarded’. In other words, he was going to die. It was going to be soon and my primary duty now, the last important thing I could do for my old friend, was to make his death as easy as it could be. As easy as it could be for him, I mean. That probably meant making it hard for me. If he could just slip away in the night, painlessly, unaware … But I suspected that was not the way it was going to be. Not since Max II had any dog of mine slipped away in their sleep and I had been six years old at the time. I was going to have to make a decision, a final judgement. The judgement would be that Brenin’s life was no longer worth living. Not a second less of a life worth living, and not a second more of a life that was not. That was the goal. Then I would have to take him to the vet, and I would have to ask the vet to kill him. I am human. I make mistakes. My decision would always be riddled with doubt. Even now, years later, I ask myself: was that the right day? Did I get it right? Was it too soon? Or was I too slow, too late — too weak? These are questions I have never been able to answer and probably never will.

  We had just returned from taking Nina and Tess to boarding kennels for a few days. They were still young then, exhausting to be around; and I had decided Brenin might benefit from a short rest, a break from their grinding effervescence. Upon our return, I quickly noticed a change in Brenin’s demeanour. Brighter, more alert, more interested, hungrier than he had been in weeks — I offered him the spaghetti I had made for my lunch and he quickly devoured it. Then he did something altogether unexpected. He jumped onto the sofa and howled.

  When he was a young wolf, Brenin had a little party piece that he would perform most days. He would run full-tilt at the settee, jump onto it and then continue his run up the wall. When he had got as high as his momentum would carry him, which was typically around three-quarters of the way up a standard living-room wall, he would spin his back legs up and around — a kind of canine cartwheel — and then run back down the wall. This was his way of letting me know we had been dawdling in the house for far too long, and that it was time for a run. Time had stripped him of this sort of outrageous athleticism — jumping on the settee and howling had become his middle-aged substitute. Still, I knew exactly what he was suggesting.

  There was a ditch at the end of the garden and when we got there Brenin began to run up and down it, over to the trees on the other side and back again: a display of excitement of the sort I had not seen — not from him anyway — in a number of years. When we’d left the house, I had envisaged a gentle stroll, an opportunity to sniff a few smells and mark a little territory. But something in his behaviour, perhaps it was a glint in his almond eye, convinced me that something strange was happening. And so we did something that even now I still cannot quite believe.

  I had not been running for the best part of a year. Whenever I’d tried, Brenin, more than a decade old now, would soon start lagging behind. At first, I had tried to incorporate this into the run: running forward for a while, then jogging back to reunite with Brenin, before heading forward again to catch up with Nina and Tess. I think it had been the look of desperation on his face, the desperation that goes with understanding that your body will not do what you want it to any more — I was probably projecting, admittedly — that convinced me to stop doing this. Nina and Tess could still run all day, of course. But I could not do this to my old wolf brother and so my running with the pack had transformed into gentle walks.

  That was how we began our last, entirely unexpected, run together. I had quickly put on some shorts, dug out my neglected running shoes and we’d set off through the woods, along a narrow path that brought us out to the Canal du Midi. For the first couple of miles we ran in the shadows of the giant sycamores. If this had been July, the trees would have been a blessing. But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. This was January; we were only a few days into the New Year. The tramontane, this time tasting of the snows of Lozère and Auvergne, swept down between the trees, a sycamore windtunnel. This was a run as cold as death. Every run has its own heartbeat, and this was the beat of a heart that was cold. The barren, leafless branches of those giant sycamore trees danced to the wind of snow and mountains. Our feet were soundless; our breath and the jingle-jingle-jingle of Brenin’s chain were lost in the wind. We were not there.

  I had expected Brenin to tire quickly. I had expected a quick return to the house. But he did not tire. Not a bit: he drifted, apparently without effort, over the ground beside me, almost like the Brenin of old, almost as if he was floating an inch or two above the earth; almost as if he wasn’t dying. In fact, if you had to pick the dying member of the two of us, you almost certainly would not have chosen Brenin. The year in France had, let us say, not been kind to me. I’d spent it writing a little, thinking a lot, but most of all drinking copious amounts of young wine — I had become good friends with the wines of Faugères and St Chinian in particular. I had stopped running, and the wine had been slowly catching up with me. So here I was: soft, slow, staring down the barrel of forty and looking my age for the first time since looking my age had become a bad thing.

  We reached the village a couple of miles away and soon after that there was a turn off from the Canal, down a little dirt track that ran along the edge of the village’s vineyards. I was getting a little worried, because we were approaching the furthermost point of the run from our house. The cancer had robbed Brenin of a considerable amount of his weight. But even so, he would still have been around 120 pounds, and I really did not relish the prospect of having to carry him three miles home. But he glided on, apparently untroubled by the death that grew inside him. After about a mile, the track swung south and brought us to the eastern edge of the Grande Maïre. On one side there was the maïre, on the other there were fields scattered with the white horses and black bulls of the region. Many of the bulls were up to their knees in water. It did not seem to bother them too much.

  The sun warmed us slightly, now we had left the trees behind. Even the tramontane couldn’t quite take that away from a sun that had begun its slow afternoon descent into the sea, and danced fiercely on the wind-worried waters of the maire. After a mile or so of tracking the lagoon, we reached the digue. We ran along here for half a mile or so, and then turned south again and we soon reached the beach. It was there that we rested and sat in the dying January sun, watching the waves wash gently onto the golden sands, sands littered with trunks of trees and assorted detritus from last week’s storm. The sun sank slowly over the snow-peaked Canigou, nestled in the mountains that wrapped around the coast, south down to Spain.

  The empty house was waiting for both of us. But, for a while at least, we sat and watched the sun.

  I was thirty-nine when Brenin died. That is not, it strikes me, a particularly good year for any of us: an existential fin de siècle (in the bad rather than good way). That’s when our myelin sheaths start breaking down. They coat the axons — the connections between brain cells. The more these sheaths break down, the worse the connectivity between neurons becomes, and the slower in both thought and deed we become. Thus begins the long road to cognitive and motor decline. The speed at which you are able to process information, and also move
your body, increases with the frequency of what is known as neuronal ‘action potential’ (AP). This is an electrical discharge that travels along axons. Fast processing of information, and fast bodily movements, require high-frequency AP bursts. And high-frequency AP bursts depend on the integrity of the myelin sheaths coating your axons. So, as these sheaths break down, you will not only be incapable of thinking as quickly as you once could, you will be incapable of moving as quickly too. Myelin integrity starts to decline at thirty-nine.

  Apparently, I will also have lost getting on for 20 per cent of my muscle mass. That is another thing that will have happened to me since I sat on the beach with Brenin that day. At least, that is the standard loss between forty and forty-nine years of age. I am not yet forty-eight, not quite — on the day of this run with Hugo along the Orb delta — but even so. And while it is a truism that different people age at different rates, once decline starts in any given area, that decline is — without some serious intervention — typically linear. In other words, a graph plotting our decline in one or another respect would follow a straight line. The gradient of the line will vary from one person to another, and for a single person it will vary from one capacity to another. But for each capacity, the line’s descent is usually, bar a few minor local eccentricities, linear. This is the line of our lives.

  I am sure being a mammal brings with it numerous benefits, but also one notable drawback. Many reptiles, for example, do not decline — not in the way mammals do. With all mammals, there is a gradual increased mortality with age: the older a mammal is, the more likely it is to be eaten, or to slow down too much to be able to catch food. The mortality of reptiles does not increase gradually with age — it remains pretty much constant until the reptile is very old. As mammals get older, they lose the capacity for oocytogenesis — they can no longer produce oocytes, female reproductive cells. There is no loss of this capacity in reptiles. They can keep producing young (more accurately, eggs containing the young-to-be) almost until they die. Some reptiles can regenerate lost limbs; no mammals can. Mammals typically have two sets of teeth, and once they have worked their way through them, they are out of luck. Reptiles enjoy continuous tooth replacement throughout life. Mammals therefore decline in a way that reptiles do not. But mammals evolved from reptiles. What evolutionary processes would have brought about this difference in response to the passage of time?

  An animal that has evolved in a hazardous environment — one where there are many predators, for example — will maximize reproduction. That’s the strategy best suited to cope with hazard. An animal of this sort will be what’s known as r-selected, and this sort of selection will favour rapid development, small body sizes and a short lifespan. An animal living in an environment with few hazards, on the other hand, will face significant competition for resources from other members of the same species. Such an animal will be K-selected, and such selection will favour parental involvement, delayed development, larger body sizes and longer lifespans. In recent years at least, humans, elephants and whales are K-selected; mice, voles and rats are r-selected.

  The expression ‘in recent years’, however, is a telling one — and the ‘years’ in question number, at most, the last sixty-five million. When the dinosaurs were still around — and this period also comprises nearly two-thirds of mammalian history — all mammals were r-selected: they were small, nocturnal animals, growing no bigger than rats and stuck stubbornly at the bottom of the food chain. So, according to one well-known story, I am declining in the way I am because of r-selection in early mammals, something that my later K-selection was not able to completely erase or overwrite.

  So that clears it up: it’s all the dinosaurs’ fault. It is a little bit unlucky when you think about it. Without r-selection in early mammals, my life might have taken on more reptilian contours. Thrusting and burgeoning I might have remained, right up until I dropped. From this perspective, my mammalian life profile seems just a little unlucky — given that there clearly were other possibilities. If only my earliest ancestors had not been so timorous, then it might all have been different. If intelligent reptiles had co-evolved with us, descendants of the dinosaurs, then I am fairly certain I would be more than a little envious. I’m sure I’d conclude that in the great evolutionary lottery of life I had drawn a markedly shorter straw than them. ‘Unlucky, mate!’ a sympathetic post-dinosaur might respond. I suppose I might (in, it goes without saying, some extraordinarily loose sense of ‘might’) have been descended from mayflies: two hours and that’s my lot. But just because I am luckier than some doesn’t mean I’m not unlucky, all things considered.

  Philosophers have had very little to say about decline and death, which is rather surprising given their centrality in our lives. And what they have said is often barely believable. For example, on the subject of death, many prominent philosophers have been surprisingly upbeat. Epicurus argued that death cannot harm us because while we are alive it has not happened yet — and so can’t have harmed us yet — and when it happens we are no longer around to be harmed. Much more recently, Bernard Williams argued that immortality is overrated on the grounds that it would result in the eventual loss of our categorical desires — the desires that give us a reason for living — and eternal ennui would be the result.

  While content with saying some rather implausible things about death, philosophers — Schopenhauer aside — have had next to nothing to say on the subject of decline. To the extent they do, their efforts are equally implausible. For example, Cephalus, the old man of ironic name who features, briefly, in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, maintains that being old and infirm is a good thing because you are no longer subject to the tyranny of ‘youthful lusts’. But their failure to address the issue of decline reveals itself most clearly in philosophers’ ruminations about what is important in life. These seem strangely off-target, almost as if decline is not an inevitable feature of life. Hedonists tell us to be happy. Happiness is what life is all about. But this is a life where I get worse and worse and then die. Should I not be at least open to the possibility that life is not really about that at all? If life is all about being happy, then this life, bequeathed me by my history, biology and the laws of the natural world, seems stunningly inapt. Taking my happiness where I can find it — maybe that is what it is about. But then what about the rest of life — the large swathes of it where I cannot find happiness? How do I live these presumably dominant segments of my life?

  Then there is the mantra of the Enlightenment, enthusiastically adopted in the country to which we shall, in a few days, return: ‘Be the best you can be!’ Life is all about self-realization: shaping yourself according to a vision of how you would like yourself to be; striving, and becoming the best incarnation of this vision that is possible for you. But this overlooks the fact that, for the most part, this life is a process of becoming worse than I once was. As Schopenhauer put it: ‘Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse — until at last the worst of all arrives.’ I can be the best I can be at getting worse, I suppose. But this is nowhere near as inspiring as the original version.

  Nietzsche tells us: be strong. What does not kill me makes me stronger. Maybe, but unfortunately something is, sooner or later, going to kill me. He adds: happiness is the feeling that one’s power is increasing. This is deeply unfortunate, because for most of this life I will find my power diminishing. I would have thought that the question of how I should live this life must take this obvious fact as a starting point, and not blithely ignore it.

  When I had just started my life as a professional philosopher, the keynote speaker at a conference I was attending, a very distinguished and well-known philosopher, was presented with an obvious objection to his clearly flawed argument. This was in the Q&A session immediately afterwards and so the audience was still there. He failed to respond adequately, instead opting for a series of rambling observations of little relevance. The man who had asked the question, a big-hearted colleague of mine, desisted from the questio
ning and scribbled a note that he passed to me: ‘He can’t do it any more.’ Indeed, he couldn’t. It was obvious. But this did not stop the rest of the audience from jumping on him like a murder of crows sensing a fatally weakened peer. This had a big impact on me. I know this is what life has in store for me. One day — I don’t know when it will be but I know it will come — I won’t be able to do it any more either and whether my inability is exhibited in public like this, or merely secreted away in the private sphere, does not really matter that much. Either way, this is, for me at least, monumentally sad. ‘At least you will have escaped those tyrannical youthful lusts,’ I imagine Cephalus muttering to me. Yes, well, that makes it all okay then, doesn’t it. When some philosophers talk about life and what is important in it, I find I cannot help thinking of this old and distinguished philosopher who had done good work and couldn’t do it any more. All I see is a series of rambling observations of dubious relevance.

  It is at this point in the run and its ruminations, as Hugo and I are making our way back to the village along the digue, that my calf decides, in my view rather unnecessarily, to emphatically reaffirm my mammalian bloodline. Calf tears have been happening to me off and on since around 1997 — since those runs in Kinsale, when I used to charge down the hill by Charles Fort, just for the hell of it. My left calf first went on one of these descents and has been going periodically ever since. My right joined in too, after a couple of years, even though by then I had excised the downhill sprints from my running. But before today I’d had no problems for the past three years and thought I’d left this particular issue behind. I hang around on the digue for a while, to see if I can somehow miraculously stretch this problem away. It isn’t going anywhere.