It’s a breezy dry day in Amsterdam. It’s the morning of my first marathon.
I’m pulling a rubber toe protector over a blackened nail; spreading blister prophylactic over my feet; loading my shorts with gels, electrolytes, caffeine; lacing up my carbon-plated shoes.
And, confronted with the amount of kit on which I rely, I’m thinking about Pheidippides.
Pheidippides is the father of the marathon. Although historians differ over the detail, the traditional telling is that he was an Athenian messenger who, in 490BC, ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the defeat of an invading Persian army. On completing the 40km route, he burst into the Acropolis, shouting “Nike! Nike! Nenikekiam!”1 The story inspired a Robert Browning poem and, eventually, the introduction of the marathon to the modern Olympics.
The details of the shoes Pheidippides wore and the food he ate have been lost to history. But, from my limited classical education, I think there’s a good chance he ran barefoot, fueled by figs and olives. If so, I’m impressed - it’s a far cry from the support available to the modern runner.
Then again, he did die on arrival in Athens. So maybe he should try some gels next time?
Once you become interested in something, you start noticing it everywhere. This is the Baader Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency illusion - and I’m rather susceptible to it. I started drinking Negronis, and suddenly they were ubiquitous; I got into Talking Heads, and now they play in every coffee shop I visit.
So perhaps it’s just another cognitive bias that, when I started taking running seriously, it seemed everyone else was doing the same. But there is some objective basis for the feeling:
The London Marathon is now harder to get into than Glastonbury (or Berghain, or a Will Self novel): more than 840,000 people entered the ballot for the 2025 race - over 250,000 more than the previous year.
Parkrun has recently expanded to 23 countries, with 2,500 individual races and over 10m registered runners.
Running brands are thriving - both Hoka and On Running saw net sales increase by over 20 per cent in the 2024 financial year.
Runna - the effective, if childishly named, coaching app - has raised £8 million, and now trains hundreds of thousands of users over 180 countries.
Running is having a moment. And in real terms, this manifests in social media feeds full of ‘running influencers’; friends signing up to ultra marathons in far-flung deserts; and straight-faced discussions over dinner of split times and cadence and the dangers of heel-striking.
But what are we all running from?
I recently had lunch with some French colleagues and, in time, the conversation turned to endurance sport2: specifically, why a certain type of person - who did well at school, attended a good university, and then entered a respectable profession - is particularly inclined to take up long-distance running and cycling in their twenties and thirties.
We kicked around some ideas - excessive disposable income3, the futility of late capitalism - before the senior member of the group interjected, unselfconsciously: “I put it down to the decline of organised religion”. And, while this is possibly the most French statement I’ve ever heard (and I lived there), there might be something to it.
Earlier this year, a US academic published ‘The Church of the Sunday Long Run: Endurance Sport as an Alternative to Institutional Religion’ (an excellent title!). The study found that - yes - as the observance of organised religion falls and falls, many are turning to running to fill a faith-shaped hole. And there’s logic to it. Because what do people look to religion for? A state of meditative transcendence; a reliable community; a sense of meaning? If so, running might be a natural alternative to church.
The idea of running as a meditative act is not new. Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy and, in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami agrees. There is something about the repetitive motion, the state of endurance, that makes a long run a “contemplative, even meditative act”. At a certain point, you are not thinking anymore, you lose sense of time, you are running in a void. Murakami puts it more strongly: he runs “in order to acquire a void”.
Yet those who run with others are searching for something different: community. Our increasingly atomised society means this is hard to come by: as I’ve written before, pubs and clubs are closing; organised religion is declining; we work long hours but routinely do so from home, having been forced to for almost two years during the pandemic. So it’s no surprise that, post-lockdown, Parkrun and other running clubs have taken off in a big way.
I don’t go to my local Parkrun every Saturday because it’s a particularly good run, or because it’s a key part of my training (in fact, it’s horribly congested, and boggy for 10 months of the year): I go because of the community, because it feels good to be part of a collective thing. Similarly, other running clubs have been described as ‘the new dating apps’, as a generation burnt out by Tinder and Hinge turn to running for romantic connection.
But what about the sense of meaning people used to find in religion? Returning to the question that started this diversion - why successful professionals so often seek out the pain of endurance sport - I suspect the answer could be linked to this search for meaning.
In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford writes that, “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics”, most jobs in the knowledge economy suffer from “a lack of objective standards.” In that sense, running can offer something knowledge work can’t: a clear goal, uncomplicated by office politics, subjective judgements and other external factors - and a tangible, unarguable, sense of achievement.
As Crawford goes on to explain, the “satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy”. Perhaps running is an example of this manual competence, a concrete manifestation of ourselves in the world which can lead to meaning, satisfaction, and a feeling of fulfilment that is lacking in a promotion.
A fortnight after my first marathon, I was in New York - and, coincidentally, the marathon was on.
Americans are more emotive than the Dutch - but even accounting for that cultural distinction, there was a marked difference in atmosphere, particularly in Brooklyn. People lined the course with drums, makeshift DJ booths were erected, chants were voiced with genuine enthusiasm.
Staring into the grizzled faces of the passing runners, I can’t say they looked meditative - far less in a state of transcendent religious awe. But, among the cheers and group dances beneath the brownstones of Brooklyn, there was a true sense of belonging, a real community, and a feeling that something meaningful was happening.
extra content
I happened - for work and pleasure - to be in the US for the week of the election, actually flying from New York to Miami on the day of the poll. I had quietly hoped that the trip might provide content for a Substack post - ‘a view from the ground from the perspective of an Englishman’ (hardly novel, but a passable idea). Alas not. What struck me most is how eerily quiet things were, how no one was talking about the vote; even among taxi drivers and barmen, there seemed scant appetite for discussion. In fact, unless you turned on the TV, you’d hardly have known there was an election on. So you’ll be spared my take this time - except…
It’s easy to be wise in hindsight - but I wasn’t the least surprised by Donald Trump’s victory. Sam Kriss and Freddie de Boer (whose writing I enjoy but whose politics I don’t share) each called it exactly right: Kamala Harris was a flawed candidate, who stood for nothing, communicated poorly, and obsessed over celebrity endorsements. More than that, though, America clearly likes and wants Trump, for all his flaws and convictions - we’ll just have to see how that works out for them, and for the rest of the world.
Away from US politics, I’ve been on a reading kick. In the last few weeks, I have particularly enjoyed Requiem for a Dream (having been scarred by the film as a teenager), Foster, The Secret History, and The Secret Life of John Le Carré (scurrilous!). Most recently, I re-read The Great Gatsby for the first time since sixth form - I did so with not a little trepidation, having loved studying it, but I was still blown away by how good it is, both thematically and on a sentence level. The closing lines are some of the best.
All restrictions are off for ‘extra content’; it’s now just three bullets of … extra content, of my choosing, unrelated to the main post. Deal with it!
“Victory! Victory! Rejoice, we conquer!”
I suspect that was my fault - the old joke (“how do you know if someone has run a marathon? Don’t worry - they’ll tell you”) is fairly accurate.
A brilliant read, even if slightly too close to home!
Perhaps the physical pain of running on a Sunday morning is an equivalent to the guilt pain of confessing all your wrongdoings in the church service you've missed; the endorphin hit afterwards is the absolution?