Stop running

Running is not a part of my repertoire – nobody with a bosom of even a sliver above the average size would dream of subjecting it to such horrendously jolting treatment – and I am disposed to be suspicious of anyone over the age of 12 who considers it a good way of getting around except in a case of dire emergency. I am therefore a touch dubious about Martin Creed’s new work at Tate Britain, which involves runners sprinting through the Duveen Galleries – where such an activity is usually and thankfully prohibited – at 30-second intervals. All the same, it does sound slightly more sane than the activities planned in North Norfolk next weekend. More people than seems reasonable are embarking on a hideous pile-up of sporting endurance. Starting with a crack-of-dawn one-mile swim in a choppy, freezing, jellyfish-laden North Sea, competitors then clamber into kayaks and paddle like fury against the tide, disembark and go for a 38-mile bike ride (yes, I did say 38 miles, presumably such a preposterously long distance just to get the competitors out of the way while everyone else goes back to bed or settles down to a good breakfast), before topping off the whole ludicrously agonizing enterprise with a 7-mile run.

I would like to direct the attention of  those involved in this, or any similar event, to Richard Ford’s acutely observed The Lay of the Land, the third in his trilogy of novels after The Sportswriter and Independence Day, in which he describes the participants in a Thanksgiving Day marathon:

‘The runners – string-thin men and identical females in weightless shorts, expensive-as-hell running shoes, numbered racing bibs and plastic water bottles – are dedicatedly goading themselves into road-race mentality, stretching and twisting, prancing and bending and ignoring one another, hands on hips, heads down, occasionally erupting into violent bursts of in-place jogging to fire their muscles into exertion mode. […] Most are in middle years, all obviously scared silly of serenity and death, a fixation that makes them emaciate themselves, punish their bones and brains (many of the women quit menstruating or having the slightest interest in sex) and cut themselves off from friend, foe and family’.