Loneliness of the Covid Run

As we head into a second nationwide lockdown with a ‘stay home’ order means once again millions of people will be unable or unwilling to exercise in their usual way. This first lockdown caused an ‘unprecedented’ fall in activity levels according to the Sport England Active Lives survey. The survey shows that up to 12 million people were inactive during this national lockdown, meaning they were doing less than a half and hours activity a week.

Many runners are not exempt from this inactivity syndrome as they see running not just as a way to enhance their health and happiness in the great outdoors but also as an avenue to make new friends and feel part of the local community, which lockdown restrictions curtail. None of this should come as a surprise as the reason for the success of the explicitly social ‘group runs’ is participants can meet up and have a coffee or a chat after the run.

 Whilst these new running tribes are to be welcomed for inspiring more people to take up running and to be applauded for their hearty camaraderie there, nonetheless, appears to be a failure on their part to see that the loneliness of running on one’s own is also one of its attractions. Not only will outdoor solo running carry a low-risk risk of Covid-19 transmission as ‘natural social distancing’ rules are not breached, it is also an opportunity to venture into the wilderness and retreat into a world of your own, unburdened by the pressures of work or studies and free from the obligation of social relations. This does not make you anti-social, it means you have the ability to embrace solitude as your companion.  

Training Tips: Long Run for Triathletes

During the lockdown and its restrictions solitude can be a runner’s solace just like ‘Smith’ the hero of Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ in which Smith says  “Sometimes I feel I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours trotting up the path.” Smith was not so much in lockdown as locked up in a reformatory as a juvenile delinquent, but the central theme of solitude, giving him a sense of freedom, should resonate with all runners in these restrictive times. 

Runners have the opportunity in lockdown to nurture their independence with no need to gather as a group to pursue their passion for running. There will be no ground rules to be argued, no leaders to follow. Alone you decide which route to take, the pace you go and how far to wander out. For a brief spell in your life, you are in charge of your own destiny and you can savour that moments achievement for yourself without the presence of others marring the experience.

So, before you hang up your running shoes and become a statistical member of the covid inactive, bear in mind that before the boom of new wave running groups there was a tribe of solitary silhouettes moving quietly through the still early mornings on empty roads. They were not outcasts; they chose the loneliness of the empty roads accompanied by nothing more than the dawn chorus and the wind in the trees.

“I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like,” said Sillitoe’s Smith. “As far as I was concerned, this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world.”