Dancing with the morning sun,

Paul Lightfoot, 2005
CoastPath
Even now there is something magical about running in the early morning, I don’t know why. Perhaps it is the loneliness and the surreal feeling of being only half awake. It could be the anonymity or the sense of joining a conspiracy of familiar strangers avoiding the ordinariness of the working hours or gathering themselves for the day ahead: children going to school, early commuters, retired and widowed dog walkers, road repair men setting up their equipment, cheerful drivers of post office vans who’ll give a friendly beep as they squeeze past you in a narrow lane, milkmen, newspaper deliverers, farmers in Land Rovers taking feed to their sheep, occasionally another jogger. Or sometimes nobody at all, not a human soul to share with you the farm track or woodland footpath, just lugubrious cows, startled lambs running to their mothers, a cat darting ahead then turning to crouch anxiously as you pass, a pheasant hooting in protest and shuffling into an inelegant takeBanganIfugao off, a dog sent out to mark its territory and barking to speed you on your way.

For some reason the magic works best if you are out there literally every morning, which seems counter-intuitive. You would think jogging less often would make each sortie more special, while constant, relentless, grinding repetition would dull the experience, but in fact the opposite is true. Greater frequency might bring better physical fitness so the effort needed is less of a struggle, but I don’t think that is the whole story. There is a discipline to postponing your breakfast every morning and instead heading out into the pre-dawn darkness, accepting the rain, hail, gales, slip-sliding frost or whatever else may be on offer, and the discipline accumulated over time is like paying your dues and being let in on the magic. Anyway, magic it is, whatever the explanation.

TerracesClouds
As it happens my work has taken me all over the place for much of my adult life, so I have experienced the magic in a lot of different guises, not just at home in Cornwall. Among the most magical was Ifugao, in the middle of northern Luzon, Philippines, where I would go out to see the darkness fade revealing that morning’s pictures that the clouds had painted across the mountainsides. They were always different, always unpredictable. Sometimes the trees on the highest ridge would be picked out pin-sharp against a clear sky while clouds drifted like lost children along the valley below the road. Or those clouds might close in and obscure everything more than a few meters away or swell up to form a bubbling ocean stretching to distant peaks as far as I could see, as if I was literally running on top of the world.

Cities, of course, are another matter. How many times have I set off from some hotel in an unknown town looking for a route that will provide a reasonable work-out without getting hopelessly lost. Sometimes I get lucky and find a jogging path around a lake and join the local regulars. Otherwise it is a choice between a straight out-and-back route or a circuit within sight of the hotel or a nearby landmark. Almost worst of all was Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, where the stories of muggings were so frightening I daren’t venture outside the hotel grounds, and ended up day after day doing endless laps of the parking lot. Even that was better than the hour I once spent on a treadmill in a windowless corner of Singapore airport.
BhutanMen
The bigger the city the less friendly it usually is to runners, except when the streets are closed to host a big race. The sight of thousands of runners striding, shuffling, waddling, sweating, grimacing, burping and farting their way along the boulevards and past great national monuments and statues is indeed awesome. On more normal days you can only hope for a park or some other traffic-free area.

Mekong In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, thousands gather before dawn along the promenades that line the rivers and you have to pick your way around impromptu volleyball squares, badminton players and street vendors as the sun rises above the Mekong. Or there’s Lumpini Park in the middle of Bangkok where you weave a path between the fiercely energetic aerobic dancers, graceful pairs of ballroom dancers gliding in figures of eights around their portable tape recorder, statuesque tai-chi experts, muscle-bound weight lifters single-mindedly pumping iron and a 50-meter diameter circle of middle-aged men bending and stretching in unison and once every minute or so letting go a voluminous, deep-throated groan that you could hear surging and dying away clear across the far side of the circuit.

Running is not always a lonely business, like it or not. In Bhutan I used to attract groups of schoolboys who wanted to race with me in their colourful little knee-length jackets that are their national dress, calling in a rapidly growing number of their pals. Then there was the army platoon that tried to keep up, in step, in a column three abreast, but fortunately soon fell behind. On the other hand several years ago in Windhoek, Namibia, a local guy decided to join me and to my dismay had no trouble matching my pace while dressed in his street clothes and carrying a briefcase. I tried to speed up to shake him off, usually a reliable tactic, but soon had to duck into a side-road to slow down and avoid complete humiliation.

BeachSo the competitive spirit dies hard, much as we might deny it. But I don’t believe it contributes much to the lift that morning runs still give me. However fast or slowly we may go, for a runner there is nothing quite like an undulating coast path overlooking the waves breaking against the cliffs, or a beach after the tide has dropped, leaving the sand firm and a clear view for a mile ahead where the sun is rising over the surf.