The Stone Mountain
1976
I have a dream of myself as an old man. I’m in a house, and I have the feeling that I am packing up to sell. Through the years, the house has been progressively decorated in new styles, but at least one room has always been left as a souvenir of the previous vogue. One room is 1970s chunky teak and padded beige; another is 1980s pine and sleek tubular steel. The 1990s room bears the indelible stamp of IKEA. It seems to me so improbable that all these things should belong in the same house. Rooting through the long-neglected attic I come across a collection of photographs that I cannot remember taking. The photographs depict people and places that seem vaguely familiar, but no more than that. I suspect the photographs are mine. In fact, I am pretty sure they are. I live in this house alone. Whose photographs would they be if not mine? But when I turn these photographs over, there is nothing written there that tells me to whom they belong. On the question of ownership, it seems that reasonable inference is the best I can do.
It is life itself I can’t quite get: life in its breadth and depth. The longer I live, the more incongruous it all seems: the more trouble I have finding a place for everything — the more unlikely it seems that all these things should go together. Life progressively transforms itself from the natural and obvious to the gerrymandered and improbable. These memories I have, the ones that so enthusiastically thrust themselves upon me — they are mine. I have no doubt of that. It’s my mind, and I’m the only one here: whose memories would they be if not mine? Possession is, after all, nine-tenths of the law. I’m not insane. I do not believe these memories were implanted in me by aliens. But there is nothing brightly embossed on them that reads ‘Property of Mark Rowlands’. What strikes me as obvious is not that they are my memories, but that they couldn’t be the memories of anyone else. Sometimes, this is the best I can do.
Remembering is effortless in its early days. There is so much room for each new memory, and no design or fashion exigencies to satisfy. But when the house of memory starts to become cluttered, then more and more remembering becomes an act of will, one that is sometimes difficult to execute with any real satisfaction. More and more the coherence — the sense — of a life is not something that is simply given but something that has to be achieved through one or another ad hoc manoeuvre. Memories, I suspect, disappear not because we can’t make them any more — and not even because we no longer have room for them. They just become too incongruous, too unlikely. Perhaps, in the end, it will be my utter implausibility that does for me. I shall have become too improbable to be here any more — a hypothesis that can no longer be believed.
And so, from time to time but more and more, my attempts to remember are characterized by a strange sense of amazement. That these memories should all belong to a single life is a faintly surreal discovery. It strikes me as so extraordinarily unlikely — a fortuitous bonus — that they should all go together, bundled up in a single winding pathway through space and time. Was it really me that saw those things; that did those things? Even worse: I know enough about memory to know that the photograph model is deeply flawed. Memories are not replicas of past events. They are renderings: part replica, part fabrication. A memory is an artifice stitched together by me. I am not just the cameraman, but the editor, and often the CGI man too. According to a well-known philosophical theory, I am my memories. It is my memories that make me the person I am today, a person different from anyone else. But I suspect you will not find me in my memories at all — not in the content of those memories anyway. I am there only in the stitching, the splicing, only in the imagery I generate.
So what should I say of my memories of this day? The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that the most important memories are the ones that become part of your blood. The blood of memory is not what is remembered but a way or style of remembering and, I suspect, I am to be found less and less in what I remember and more and more in a style of remembering.
Mynydd Maen — ‘the mountain of stone’ — divides the eastern and western valleys of Gwent. It is, in fact, barely a mountain, creeping just a little over 1500 feet. But on a good day you can see all the way to England: Bristol is a twinkle to the south, clinging to the far shore of the Channel. To the north you’ll see the Black Mountains, the Sugar Loaf — Pen-y-Fal — and the Blorenge; and beyond them, if the air is exceptionally clear, the Beacons. They are called the ‘black’ mountains, but this name is ironic. Most of the time, they are green, turning brown in autumn when the heather dies. The real black mountains lie before them. When I was a boy, the dark residue of the Industrial Revolution clung to everything. The hills were almost uniformly black, covered, steeped, in coal dust. Indeed, some were hills of coal not earth — mountains of coal slag. These mountains would often catch fire, deep inside them, and these fires could burn for years. There was no way of putting them out. We had family in a town called Nantyglo — ‘the stream of coal’ — and one Sunday a month we would drive up the valley to visit them. Climbing over a thousand feet through Blaenavon, on through the tiny coal-stained village of Garn-yr-erw, I would be sitting in the back of the car with my brother. Sheer black hillsides glowered down on either side of us, dark coal smoke billowing slowly from them. The poet Idris Davies once wrote, of mountains very much like these, that he could ‘dream of the beauty lost and the beauty yet to be’. But it never occurred to me that this was unusual, that an artist might use such a scape to portray hell. It never occurred to me that this is what the end of the world might look like.
Mynydd Maen marked the point where the eastern valley opened out into coastal plain. There was little coal here, and so it had been spared the worst excesses of that brutal century. I am standing on, surrounded on all sides by, green mountain grass. To the south-east is Newport, where I was born. To the east is Cwmbran — ‘the valley of the crow’, a scabrous new town — where I am growing. The west — you can’t see that — not from where I am standing today. The mountain ridge is a broad one. I’d spent quite a bit of time on this mountain, and I knew the geography of the land to the north and south and east like the back of my hand. But the west was still a mystery to me.
This was a morning alive, wriggling, with possibilities in a way that is true only of the mornings of youth: a fine, powdery dusting of prospects, options, risks and opportunities. It must have been late spring or early summer. That is the best my memory can do in locating this day in time. But I know it was a Saturday, and I remember that school was still in session. So May or perhaps early June would be my best guess. If it had been April, the mountain would still have been frosted white at this time of the morning.
The Saturdays of my childhood were largely filled with the playing of sports. Sometimes these were the formal team sports of my school, mostly rugby and cricket, and if by any chance there was a Saturday where there was nothing formal arranged, my friends and I would fill it with informal pick-up games of soccer. Free Saturdays — Saturdays when there was absolutely, positively nothing arranged — were few and far between, and if one did materialize, the chances were I just wanted to take off on my own. Or not quite on my own — flying out of the door with me this morning, breakfast barely settled in our two stomachs, is Boots, the huge, pale, almost white, Labrador of my childhood. We started walking: down Chapel Lane, past the Bluebell Woods, Boots bouncing along beside me. I decided to start running, a steady jog. I wouldn’t say I had been a fat kid, but I was far from svelte — fattish wouldn’t be far from the truth. But this last year or two had seen me lengthen, and thin out, dramatically, like a chubby wad of liquorice pulled out into a string. If I had known that was the last of the lengthening I was going to do, I might have cherished it even more. That’s the way life goes sometimes. But on this day I remember our shadows. Boots — a squat ball of muscular energy. I, my profile newly effaced and elongated, projected onto the rooted and stony banks that ran beside us; my newly long hair — a triumph of deposition over my mother’s thirteen-year reign of short-back-and-sides terror — bouncing in the sun to the beat of my stride.
I ran, and Boots ran, not for any real reason: you don’t need reasons to run when you are a kid or a dog. Then, running is a perfectly reasonable option for transporting yourself from one place to another. You no more need a reason for running than you need one for walking. Indeed, sometimes it is positively uncomfortable not to run. My life was a patchwork of events, occasions and obligations, and running was the thread that held it all together. School was a mile and a half away: I would run there in the morning and run home in the evening. Sometimes I’d make the round trip at lunchtime too. That was already six miles; and it didn’t even occur to me to think of it as exercise. After school, three nights a week, was rugby training: two hours spent largely running. Then I’d run home to eat, do my homework and after that the hour of enforced piano practice insisted upon by my mother — a necessary counterbalance to the thuggery of the rest of my life, as she saw it. On Monday nights, when there was no rugby, I would sometimes run down to the boxing club for some training. When I arrived, they would usually send me out on a five-mile run. There would be a school rugby match most Saturday mornings in winter. And in the afternoons, I’d sometimes pick up a game with the youth team, run by the local rugby club. When summer came, things were slightly different. I’d play cricket for the local club instead of rugby for the school. There was less running involved. But I was a batting all-rounder, so there was still running aplenty, and club cricket took up all the weekend rather than just Saturday.
Things are different now, and the world is a different place. I gather that kids are driven to school, and they play computer games when they get home. I suspect I would have been climbing the walls if I had grown up today — a ‘problem child’. There is a certain type of boy — I can’t speak for girls, but I don’t immediately see why they should be fundamentally different — who needs to run. And if he doesn’t, then life is going to be a painful and confusing place. I was a boy like that.
To reach the top of Mynydd Maen — crowned with a tall radio mast — involved a steep, steep climb, in parts a scramble, of around three miles. When Boots and I arrived there, I was astonished to see my watch telling me that it had taken barely over half an hour. Even now, I think I must have got it wrong. Perhaps we set out earlier than I remembered? But, whatever the truth of the matter, when we arrived there, we just kept running, because it never occurred to us to stop.
The mountain-top was by no stretch of the imagination a treacherous one. There was the occasional sheer drop, and a few bogs sprinkled around. So you had to take care. But I knew this mountain well. I’d not brought water, but there was no need. You wouldn’t want to drink from the brooks. Mortality among mountain sheep is high, and if you drank from a brook, there was a more than negligible chance you’d find a dead one in the water further upstream. But I knew where the springs were; where crystal-clear, ice-cold water bubbled magically out of the ground. Me first, then Boots: I didn’t fancy the slobber. Boots and I kept running.
This was a little hard on the dog, you might think. Boots was no longer young. He would have been around eight years old at this time, and that is getting on a bit for a big-boned Lab. But as the children of yesterday spent their lives running, so too did their dogs. I had no worries about Boots. For two hours or so of every weekday evening of summer — when the demands of rugby and boxing had gone into their seasonal hiatus — we would play cricket. Bat in hand, I’d throw a ball — a hard, bouncy power ball was ideal — against the garage wall, and Boots would chase it off my bat and then bring it back to me. The grass beneath my feet had worn away to a dusty dirt patch. The ball, sopping wet from Boots’s saliva, picked up the dirt, and the wall, once gleaming white, had slowly transformed over the years to near pitch-black. Two hours every summer evening of chasing; hunting down the ball, and only reluctantly being coaxed back into the house when it was too dark to see any more. Boots could run all day. And apparently, on this day, so could I. On we ran, tramping the wiry mountain grass and springy heather.
A couple of hours later, we arrived at Twmbarlwm — the remains of an Iron Age fort that once stood guard over the hills that gaze down on where Newport is today. All that remains of the fort is a conspicuous mound of earth on the ridge of the mountain-top, clothed with thin grass. Later in life, whenever I arrived back to visit my mum and dad, I would see Twmbarlwm — ‘the tump’ — as the train pulled into Newport, or later as I drove down the M4, letting me know that I had come home.
Then, we turned around and ran back because we still couldn’t think of any reason not to. We arrived home from our day on the mountain at the beginning of the long twilight, in time for supper.
‘Where did you go today?’ asks my mum.
‘Just up the mountain.’
I didn’t bother to add that we had run the better part of a marathon. Boots was soon pestering me for an evening game of cricket — before it got too dark.
In some respects, this day anticipated certain themes that would dominate the runs of my later life. But in other respects, it was entirely unusual. The way I remember this day, it makes me sound like I was the Haile Gebrselassie — the great Ethiopian distance runner — of the eastern valley. But I really wasn’t very good at running, not compared to many of my friends. I may have spent a large portion of my young life running places, but so did they. And many of them were much better at it than I was. I remember well the unqualified ignominy of my first cross-country run. This was an annual school event, and my first one took place only a year or so before this run along the Mynydd Maen. To describe myself as a jock would, probably, be anachronistic — the expression certainly hadn’t reached the shores of Britain at this time. But I suppose that is what I was, anachronistically or not. A central figure in the rugby team, and captain of the cricket team, I’d expected to do well in this race — I don’t remember how long it was, but somewhere around five miles would be my guess. But little skinny kids, some of whom were my friends, some of whom I barely knew — but all of whom were not fit to lace my rugby boots — blew by me as if I were standing still. I finished in the middle of the pack — and that is only if we assume the pack had a large middle. As a consequence, I developed something of a love-hate relationship with running. I still did it all the time, of course. Running to school day in day out, or even running with Boots on that mountain, I never regarded as running. It was just part of life. But events — races — I did my best to steer well clear of those.
At least, I steered clear of them if they were above a certain distance. I did not mind the short stuff, largely because I was moderately good at it. I was on the track team in high school. That wasn’t quite right either. ‘Track team’ is also a transatlanticism that seems to have insinuated itself into my thought patterns. We didn’t have ‘track teams’ in south-east Wales in the 1970s. If there was a schools’ athletics event coming up at the weekend, one of the sports teachers would say something like: ‘Rowlands, you’re quite fast. Go to the stadium on Saturday and run in the hundred metres.’ Not fancying a Saturday spent hanging around the stadium waiting for my race, I would reply with something like:
‘What about Parkesy, sir? He’s faster than me.’
‘He is away this weekend — you’ll have to do it.’
Cwmbran had an athletics stadium — incongruously well equipped, given the ill-equipped state of Cwmbran as a whole. As a result, most athletics events in Wales were held there. So that is where I unenthusiastically found myself two or three weekends a year. I seem to remember I was once placed third in the Wales Under-15s One Hundred Metres Final — though I suspect there were lots of David Parkes’ missing that day.
The hundred metres was my, somewhat reluctant, speciality. And that’s only because there were not any shorter events on offer. I could do the two hundred metres at a pinch, but never the four hundred — in my view, that’s an event reserved exclusively for masochists of the most twisted kind. You have to run pretty much as fast as you can for four hundred metres! How anyone could enjoy that is beyond me. Even the hundred was far too long for me, really. I’m Mr Fast-Twitch. I’m at my best for the first five metres or so, and after that it all starts falling apart. If there was an Olympic event called ‘Out of the Blocks’, I’m convinced I could have gone a long way (to the extent it makes sense to talk of ‘going a long way’ in such an event).
In Why We Run, Bernd Heinrich, one of a vanishingly small number of people who managed to combine being a world-class biologist and a world-class distance runner, outlined the general anatomical characteristics of someone suited to distance running: ‘Distance runners have one common trait — the good ones are skinny. The distance runner must fairly float along the ground, sometimes for hours on end. Ideally, he has light, thin bones, and long, thinly muscled legs, like a bird.’ If that is the distance runner, then I am the anti-distance runner. I don’t float, I thud (I have what’s known as a very hard strike — apparently it’s a problem, the source of many injuries down the years). I am far from bird-like. I have short legs, big bones and I’m broad. I like to think of myself as a mesomorph with endomorphic tendencies. More realistically, I am probably an endomorph with mesomorphic tendencies — assuming there is a difference between the two. At my best, if I’m training hard, I’m big and heavily muscled like a sprinter. At my worst, I’m a fat boy.
There are two basic types of muscle fibre — slow-twitch and fast-twitch. The successful distance runner’s leg muscles are made of between 79 and 95 per cent of slow-twitch muscle fibres. The muscles of an average person’s leg contain a fifty-fifty split of fast- and slow-twitch fibres. For an elite sprinter, the ratio is more like 25 per cent slow-twitch against 75 per cent fast-twitch fibres. Slow-twitch fibres burn fat, and can operate only with a continuous supply of oxygen. They work aerobically. Fast-twitch fibres burn glucose and operate without oxygen. That is, they operate anaerobically. The lactic burn you get in your legs when you sprint is the byproduct of the anaerobic operation of your fast-twitch fibres.
The way you exercise has been shown to have a small effect on the ratio of slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibres. Gollnick and colleagues, in a classic 1972 study, suggested that rigorous aerobic exercise — he had his subjects run on a treadmill for one hour a day for four days a week for five months at 85—90 per cent of their maximum aerobic capacity (talk about earning your volunteer research subject stipend!) — could, at most, result in a 4 per cent rewiring of fast-twitch to slow-twitch fibres. This figure has been more or less borne out by subsequent studies.
Fast-twitch muscle fibres have, more recently, been discovered to divide into two sorts: FTa and FTb. FTa fibres have some of the characteristics of slow-twitch fibres. As fast-twitch fibres, they can work anaerobically, by burning glucose but, like slow-twitch fibres, they can work by burning oxygen too. The average person’s fast-twitch fibres are split evenly, roughly 50 per cent of each sort. Hard and consistent exercise is more effective in transforming FTb into FTa fibres than it is in transforming fast-twitch into slow-twitch. Elite marathoners end up having almost no FTb fibres. I’m pretty sure that is not something I could emulate. More than that, I’m not sure I would want to.
So I suppose the most important and obvious fact about me as a distance runner is this: I am not very good at it. I have little aptitude for it, and I suspect this lack of aptitude is grounded in certain features of my biological make-up. I don’t know what happened that day on Mynydd Maen. Then, I could not, for the life of me, see any reason why my legs should stop doing what they were doing — why they couldn’t keep going like this all day and through the night. But no matter how much I would like to, no matter how much I’ve worked and trained to do just this, I have never since quite been able to replicate the sense of freedom and power that I felt that day on the mountain of stone when I was somewhere between a boy and a man.
I suspect the iron bonds of inevitability hold us all, young or old. But when we are young, and on our good days can barely contain the power that sings inside of us, our chains seem so much lighter. I ran that day with the freedom of youth, a freedom that could think of no reasons to stop, and so for which there were indeed no reasons. The freedom of youth is the freedom of a life that is overflowing, of a power that can only with difficulty be contained within the bodily vessel. When you grow older, this feeling inhabits you less and less. You come to understand all too well that there are many, many reasons to stop: reasons that thrust themselves upon you vociferously — and the more tired you become, the more insistent are these reasons. But if you are lucky, if you are very lucky, you will one day come to understand that these reasons — no matter how savagely they snarl — have no authority over you. That is the freedom of age.
The appeal to bodily constitution — bodily ‘facticity’ as the French existentialist philosophers sometimes designate it — is it perhaps just an excuse? After all, I’ve never had a muscle biopsy done. Perhaps if I did I would be staggered to learn that I have the muscle constitution of a world-class distance runner, 80 per cent slow-twitch fibres with virtually no FTbs. But I doubt it. Connected with my lack of biological aptitude is another feature of that day’s run that became a recurring theme of the runs of later life: it was completely unplanned. When I woke up that morning, I felt like taking off for the day with Boots, that’s all. I didn’t plan to run up the mountain. I didn’t even know I was going to the mountain. I simply found myself running there. Sometimes I say I don’t like running. Sometimes I believe it too. But I doubt this can really be accurate. I’ve been doing it for so long that, on some level at least, I suppose I must like it. But it is certainly true that I hated the thought of running. Until very recently at least — things have changed now, and there are reasons for this — if I wanted to go running, I had to make sure I didn’t think I was going to go running. I had to sneak up on my runs.
If you read running magazines, they’ll sometimes offer advice on how to motivate yourself to go running when you don’t feel like it. For the businessman or woman, for example, the advice is to schedule your runs like you schedule a meeting, and then feel proud afterwards as if it was a job well done. For me, for a very long time, there was only one way I could get myself to go running and that was to convince myself that I wasn’t going running. There is a British film of the 1960s, Village of the Damned, based on the John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos. It is about some aliens who take the form of children. They have some rather nasty telepathic powers and apparently plan to take over the world — the usual alien stuff. At the denouement, the hero, who has planted a bomb, is being telepathically probed by the alien children, who suspect he is up to something but are not quite sure what. He must, at all costs, not think of the bomb. That is how I used to approach my running. No, I’m definitely not going running today: no sir, not a chance. I’ll just sit here and write. And then I’m up in a flash, tearing across the room: shorts on, runners on and out the door, one or more canines in tow, before my body has a chance to realize what’s going on and put together the usual objections or obstacles — a feeling of enormous lassitude is its usual strategy.
This hatred of the thought of running — not running, the thought of running — continued through my twenties, thirties and some of my forties. I’m very different now. Now I can’t wait to get out on the road. Perhaps it is because I now have two young sons: and, believe me, compared to spending a few hours with them — which, don’t misunderstand me, I love doing — running twenty miles is a relaxing break. Or perhaps it’s because I am starting to understand that, in all the injuries, niggles and general persistent low-grade pain that goes with the approaching half century, my life of running does not necessarily stretch out into the indefinite future. I have a sell-by date, stamped quite legibly on my dodgy knees, a rather boorish Achilles tendon, a questionable back and recidivist calf muscles. And in the light of this, I have come to understand that running is not just something I do. It is not even something to which I have a right. It is a privilege.
I run with dogs, not humans. That was the other feature of the run that was to be reiterated in the years to come. Humans run together for company, for encouragement, to talk, to shoot the breeze, just to be together. These reasons are entirely understandable and respectable ones. But they are not my reasons.
People sometimes assess the quality of their runs in terms of times, distances and also in more sophisticated ways: the AIs — the number, duration and intensity of the aerobic intervals they have inserted into the miles they have run; the TUT — the total uphill time and so on. But, as far as I am concerned, times, distances, AIs, TUTs — these are all just 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. They are 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, then it would be largely uninteresting (except to me, of course). But other people have described substantially similar experiences. For example, Joyce Carol Oates writes: ‘Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.’ And, in a similar vein, but with a slightly different emphasis, Haruki Murakami writes: ‘When I am running my mind empties itself. Everything I think while running is subordinate to the process. The thoughts that impose themselves on me while running are like light gusts of wind — they appear all of a sudden, disappear again and change nothing.’ Both Oates and Murakami identify important but different aspects of the experience. With Oates, the emphasis is on rhythm: the fleeing and pulsing of thought in tune with the swinging arms and moving feet. Murakami emphasizes the emptiness of the mind, and compares thoughts to gusts of wind that blow through this emptiness. I differ from Murakami in this respect: he claims that, for him, these thoughts change nothing. Sometimes that is true for me too. But occasionally, just occasionally, they can change everything. Then, rather than a feathery breath that gently caresses my cheek, they are more like a sharp slap.
Thoughts only come when they are ready. They cannot be forced, they cannot be hurried — they cannot be bargained with. They come in their time, not ours. In the many years that have come and gone since that day on Mynydd Maen, I have lost count of the number of times that a problem I have been trying to solve — and my business is hard, abstract, conceptual problems — has suddenly resolved itself, or if not that then dissolved before my eyes, during a run. Part of the explanation for this almost certainly lies in the idea of rhythm.
When someone taps out a regular rhythm, activation will occur in regions of the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex and right cerebellum. Just as important as the location of this activity is its frequency. This frequency is in the gamma band: 25—100 Hz, but 40 Hz is typical. Gamma oscillations are thought by many to be the key to optimal information processing in the brain, underlying processes like attention and perhaps conscious experience. Some think this is because of the role gamma oscillations play in binding activity together into a unified whole. Francis Crick and Christof Koch famously argued that gamma oscillations of around 40 Hz are responsible for binding information together in visual awareness, and so are essential to visual experience — although this claim is controversial. Nevertheless, the idea that gamma oscillations are implicated in efficient cognitive performance is now largely accepted. In fact, the technique of optogenetics, developed by Karl Deisseroth’s team at Stanford University, fairly conclusively demonstrates this. In optogenetics, one manipulates the rhythm of the brain through pulses of light directed at a type of neuron that produces parvalbumin — a type of protein that regulates the frequency of gamma wave oscillations in the brain. Using this technique, Deisseroth demonstrated that the right frequency of gamma oscillation will ‘enhance information flow among cells in the frontal cortex’. The frontal cortex is the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive functions like thought.
It is notable that the optimal frequency of gamma oscillations — around 40 Hz — can be induced simply by tapping out a rhythm with one’s finger. So it is not too much of a stretch to suppose that moving one’s entire body in an appropriate rhythm can produce the same effect. Indeed, one might suspect that if tapping one’s finger can induce the appropriate frequency of gamma oscillations, moving one’s whole body might do this a little more forcefully. It is therefore not implausible that there is a connection between the rhythm of the body involved in running and the presence of the brain activity involved in higher cognitive functions. However, rhythm cannot be the whole story. Tapping my finger at a frequency of 40 Hz for hours on end would, at most, lead to a sore finger.
Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist at MIT, also notes the beneficial effect running has on his problem-solving abilities. He describes this effect in terms of the idea of relaxation: ‘Some solutions are obvious, but they are only obvious when you are relaxed enough to find them.’ But I don’t think this is quite right — at least, that is not how it is for me. To begin with, to state the obvious, there are many ways of relaxing — I’m actually extraordinarily good at relaxing, especially if there’s a TV, a comfortable sofa and a bottle of halfway decent wine in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the solutions to difficult conceptual problems do not seem to announce themselves when I am doing this. Since they are far more likely to appear when I am running, I have to conclude that exhaustion rather than relaxation must play at least some role. Up to a certain point — there is a point of exhaustion that is the death of thoughts — the longer the run goes on, the more tired I become, then the more likely it is that a solution will appear. But this will only work if the rhythm has been established first. It’s not as if I can refrain from running for six months, start again, find myself feeling like death after two miles on my return, and expect all these worthy thoughts to appear as if from nowhere and solve all the problems I’ve been working on for those past months. It would be much easier if things happened like that, but they don’t. On a run like that, I never get beyond thinking — usually badly: thoughts have no wish to be associated with me. The reason, I suppose, is that my mind will not be empty. For that I need the rhythm, and to get that I need to be in shape.
So it seems that, for me at least, there are two crucial factors: rhythm and exhaustion. Neither will work in isolation. Having less empirical work to fall back on, I have to be more speculative with regard to the effects of exhaustion on higher cognitive functions. First, there are some general principles about how the brain works which might be pertinent. The brain is a creature of habit. It travels down the same streets and avenues, visiting again and again the same old cul-de-sacs, dead ends and no through roads of thought. The reason is that the brain is, in essence, an associative machine. Activity spreads in the brain through associations. If activation in one area of the brain has, in the past, produced activation in another area, then an association between the two is set up, and this means that, in the future, when another instance of the first sort of activity occurs, it is more likely that activity of the second sort will occur too. The tendency of humans to make, both individually and collectively, the same mistakes in thinking over and over again — and even a cursory glance at the history of thought will show that essentially the same, typically unsuccessful, ideas are revisited over and over again, in slightly different forms — is a testament to the associative nature of the brain.
Sometimes, the brain has to be persuaded to let go, just for a while, and when it is tired it is perhaps more easily persuaded. When I talk to someone who suffers from dementia or Alzheimer’s, I am often struck not so much by the extent of the memories they have lost, but of the power and vivacity of the ones that remain. Memories from a long time ago, from a lifetime ago, are uncovered once again, as if they were new-born moments before. Their brain is letting go, associations are breaking down and in this process we find the uncovering of things that were hidden. That, I suspect, is the sort of thing that happens when tiredness starts to insinuate its way into the rhythm of my run. Emptiness is the sign of the brain letting go — not letting go in general, but simply allowing its grip to loosen on its day-to-day executive duties. The associations through which its activity is channelled are loosened, just a little. And so, to an extent, the familiar but fruitless avenues and dead ends of thinking are left behind, and in this new desert landscape of the mind thoughts are uncovered, shining and pristine.
There is one piece of empirical work that bears specifically on this topic. In a study of Tibetan Buddhist monks, neuroscientist Sean O’Nuallain demonstrated a correlation between transcendental mental states and gamma wave oscillations of around 40 Hz. More than this, however, he also argued that what these monks have in common — at least the ones proficient at this sort of meditation — was the ability to put their brain into a state in which it consumes power at a lower rate than usual, sometimes approximating zero. According to his ‘zero power hypothesis’, lower power states of the brain may correspond to a selfless state, and higher power states correspond to the experience of the self. Gamma oscillations are more prevalent in lower power states.
This work is strongly suggestive of the role tiredness may play in thinking — or, more accurately, in the having of thoughts. Intense activity of the body results in the brain adopting a lower power state. The principle would be like feeling sleepy after a heavy meal. Blood has been diverted to the intestine to facilitate digestion, and as a result less blood, and therefore less oxygen, goes to the brain. On the long run, when you reach the point when you are struggling, all your energy must be directed to putting one foot in front of the other. To compensate, the brain — normally taking up more than 20 per cent of the body’s total energy supply — goes into a lower power state in the way described by O’Nuallain. The result is a ‘selfless’ state. Thinking is typically something I experience myself as doing. On the long run, I don’t experience myself to be thinking because the grip I have on myself has become more tenuous. In place of thinking, there are thoughts, seemingly not mine at all, that come from nowhere, out of the blue and into the black.
Thoughts come in their own good time — and this, I suspect, is what their own good time might look like: an increase in gamma activity coupled with a decrease in the overall power state of the brain. There is highly integrated activity in the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex and right cerebellum, coupled with the kind of tiredness that allows the usual associations of daily life to break down just enough. The result is a kind of emptiness: a clearing in the mind where thoughts can come to play. Maybe that is why it happens, maybe not. But, for me, far more important than why this happens is that it does, in fact, happen.
Talk is antithetical to thought. And so I run with dogs that do not talk. But they do more than that. They augment: they magnify the rhythm, enhance the essence, of the run. My heartbeat is magnified by those of the dogs that run beside me; my breath is magnified by theirs. The thud-thud-thud of my feet is expanded and enhanced by the pitter-pitter-pitter-pat of theirs and the chingle-chingle-chingle of the chains around their necks. This is the heartbeat of the run, a heart that beats outside me, not within. And when the run has done its work, I am lost in this beating heart. Before this point, the point when thinking stops and thoughts begin, I am not running, not really. I am only moving. The point where movement transforms into running: that is the point at which thoughts come to play.
That day on Mynydd Maen was perhaps my first experience of the heartbeat of the run — the heart that beats outside me, not within. I could not have understood, neither then nor for many years to come, that this experience would come to shape my life in some of its more important respects. To experience the heartbeat of the run is to have one of the most powerful experiences possible of what Plato would have called ‘The Good’. Many years will have to come and go before the heartbeat of the run will reacquaint me with a kind of value that the child knows best. The idea that life is the sort of thing that needs this value — that an adult who has lost it has become, in a significant sense, a diminished thing — is not something I could have known on that day when I ran with Boots on the mountain of stone, when thoughts that came from the beating heart of the run danced in the place my mind used to be, as the sun danced on the bright blue waters of the sea that lay to the south.