Free Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands

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. Theyare 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, thenit would be largely uninteresting (except to me, of course). But other people have described substantially similar