You cannot convey to the nonrunner the romance of the road any more than you can bring a spiritual slug to savor the exquisite joys of philosophy and chess. But if you are a runner you should be able to appreciate the following passage from On Running, pp. 166-167. George Sheehan (1918-1993) has been dead for some time now and it pains me that he is pretty much forgotten. He was one of the pioneers along with Jim Fixx and Kenneth Cooper. The young runners I query haven't heard of him, and an old guy I talked to the other day at the starting line hadn't either. Sic transit gloria mundi. Here's the passage:
One of the beautiful things about running is that age has no penalties. The runner lives in an eternal present. The passage of time does not alter his daily self-discovery, his struggles and his sufferings, his pains and his pleasures. The decline of his ability does not interfere with the constant interchange between him, his solitude, and the world and everyone around him. And neither of these happenings prevents him from challenging himself to the ultimate limit, putting himself in jeopardy, courting crisis, risking catastrophe.
Because he refuses to look back, the runner remains ageless. That is his secret, that and the fact that his pursuit of running is in obedience to, in Ellen Glasgow's phrase, "a permanent and self-renewing inner compulsion."
In my 50s, I am aware of all this. Like all runners, I live in the present. I am not interested in the way we were. The past is already incorporated in me. There is no use returning to it. I live for the day. Running gives me self-expression, a way of finding out who I am and who I will be. It makes me intimate with pain. I know the feeling of too little oxygen, of too much lactic acid. I have, always within reach, the opportunity to test my absolute barriers, to search out the borders set up by straining muscles and a failing brain.
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