Vybarr Cregan-Reid

Running is not just a sport. It reconnects us to our bodies and the places in which we live, breaking down our increasingly structured and demanding lives. It allows us to feel the world beneath our feet, lifts the spirit, allows our minds out to play and helps us to slip away from the demands of the modern world. When Vybarr Cregan-Reid set out to discover why running meant so much to so many, he began a journey which would take him out to tread Londonâe(tm)s cobbled streets, climbing to sites that have seen a millennium of hangings, and down the crumbling alleyways of Ruskin's Venice. Footnotes transports you to the cliff tops of Hardy's Dorset, the deserted shorelines of Seattle, the giant redwood forests of California, and to the worldâe(tm)s most advanced running laboratories and research centres, using debates in literature, philosophy and biology to explore that simple human desire to run. Liberating and inspiring, this book reminds us why feeling the earth beneath our feet is a necessary and healing part of our lives.

How Running Makes Us Human

Footnotes

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And when I touch the first grass of the Downs I feel like I have stepped onto a web; that my movement has set it tingling; that this is tightly spun fabric, all connected; that the past is suddenly tangible; that it is a labyrinth in which l am not lost. My absorption is so complete that I feel I am no longer seeing with my eyes, but with the pores of my skin. The last thing I feel is the desire for it to end.

This is where joy is to be found: in using one's body and its expressive impulse for its own sake, for no outcome but itself. During that run I realised that we need the receptivity of other life, for without it we are starved of that oxygen that enriches far beyond the boundaries of a single breath.

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