My thanks to my editor, Sara Holloway, for her patient and invaluable advice over the months as this book slowly took on its final form, and for encouraging me to follow the emerging thoughts wherever they led. Thanks to Anne Meadows who was kind enough to read an entire draft of this book and made some very useful suggestions. Thanks also to Benjamin Buchan for his excellent copy-editing, and to Miranda Baker for excellent proofreading and more.
Thanks, as always, to my agent, Liz Puttick. My thanks also to the magic fingers of Bruce Wilk, the physiotherapist who succeeded in breaking down decades of scar tissue in my left calf — efforts without which the events that formed the basis of Chapters 1 and 7 would never have happened. No doubt, I shall be seeing you about my right calf in the not too distant future.
I’m almost convinced that running is a place where I channel long-forgotten thoughts: of thinkers read and largely forgotten, of thinkers buried long ago and whose thoughts have similarly been buried somewhere in my brain while it goes about its day-to-day business of keeping me alive and mostly sane. Many of the thoughts which brushed by me when I ran, almost like I was standing still, and which find their way into this book in various ways, are the thoughts of people such as Plato, Moritz Schlick, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Aristotle, David Hume and René Descartes.
Most of all, my greatest debt is to the pack that has been good enough to share its life with me, and helped me understand the difference between a life spent chasing what is important and a life spent immersed in it. Thanks, first, to my canine pack. Thank you Boots, Pharaoh, Sandy, Brenin, Nina, Tess and Hugo, for sharing the trails with me over the years: lazy so-and-so that I am, I probably would never have run them without you. Thanks to my human pack. Thanks to my mother and father, for ensuring my life was never going to turn out dogless. Thanks to my sons, Brenin and Macsen, for reminding me, each in your inimitable way, of something I had long forgotten — something, indeed, that I was destined to forget. And, finally, thanks to Emma, whom I believe I once described as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met and the kindest woman I’ve ever known. I wasn’t wrong.