Running

Following my father's lead I have always been interested in railways. To cut a level swath through hills and forests and run two heavy iron rails through it seems such an unlikely way to create a mode of transport - and yet it became so popular in Victorian England. Sadly many of those lines have long since been rooted up and converted back to farmland although some have happily persisted as cycle-tracks.

To sit at the front of a rail-car or DLR where you can see the rails ahead fascinates me.

There is a similarity between running and the motion of a train: the legs hitting the ground give a rhythm not unlike the joints between the rails. And so I would run around the playing field at school and imagine that I was driving a train, or was the train. This I did frequently. Is anyone else that weird? Looking back I wonder what my peers thought or maybe, hopefully, they never figured it out.

Even more strange is that I still imagine this, sometimes, whilst jogging. Indeed I would go as far as to say that this is one of the attractions of running for me. Is anyone else this weird?

Sometimes running is akin to flying: once warmed up try a steep downwards slope with occasional bumps or boulders, and at full pelt jump high off each rise - that's the nearest thing to personal flying I have experienced (I am too chicken for extreme sports like base jumping).

Kiplings "The Jungle Book" has been one of the foundational texts of my upbringing. In the Second Book we have the following quote which I can partially identify with on a good day. This is such a good description of the joy of running:

"Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he settled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, for he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes through the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadened the fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way with many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli's muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather... So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, the happiest thing in all the Jungle that night, till the smell of the flowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay far beyond his farthest hunting-grounds."