The Way of the Runner - writing and running retreat, Devon, November 2021

Back in November, I headed off to Totnes to join the acclaimed writers, Adharanand Finn and Richard Askwith, for a running and writing retreat, alongside five other participants. I won’t go into detail about the retreat - as you can read about it on Adharanand’s website - other than to say that it was a wonderful weekend spent with like-minded strangers, in an incredible setting. I recommend it to all runners who write, and writers who run.

As part of the weekend, we were given the task to write about the run we did on the Saturday, up on Dartmoor. This is my effort…

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DARTMOOR, SENSORY MEMORY AND THE TRAIL RUNNER’S BURDEN

by Jonathan Bean

ARE YOU familiar with the surfer’s burden? The addiction that makes it difficult to do anything other than view the world through a surfing lens. It makes surfers feel they have to surf. If they’re anywhere near a decent beach, and the forecast indicates a favourable swell, they have to go. Not to do so would be to waste the waves, to waste the gift.

Granted, it’s not universal, and a beginner may equate surfing with little more than squeezing into a stale, damp wetsuit to get thumped in the head by wave after cold, grumpy, brown, Cornish holiday wave. Once the beginner has ascended to the level of basic competence and experienced the first glimpses of flow - literal, harmonious physics and hydrodynamics in action, but also the mental flow state - they risk being caught by the surfer’s burden. That brief moment where it all just clicks is enough to capture the new initiate for good.

Doubled over, laughing and heaving in oxygen, in a small Dartmoor car park, after one of the most affirming, vital runs I’ve ever had, I wondered if there was a trail runner’s burden. Once you’ve gone up, down, over and through the natural landscape, can you ever go back to striding on suburban streets?

Lydia said she loved watching me run as I looked to be having so much fun. She was right. I had a great time. But was that because of the novelty? It was a type of run I rarely get to experience, on new terrain, with a group that had come together for just this weekend. If I did this every day, would I have enjoyed it in the same way?

Committed trail runners often say they’d never run on road. It’s too boring, too flat, too monotonous. Personally, I don’t hold that to be true. The fewer external features there are, the sharper the focus on the internal challenge. I enjoy track racing as it strips the race back to the fundamentals of pure head-to-head competition. I’ve finished big city marathons and barely recalled the features of the route afterwards, as I didn’t notice them. They were incidental. A backdrop to the event rather than the definition of the event.

I wondered, are the road-eschewing trail runners drawn to the trails because they didn’t like roads to begin with, or has their benchmark of external interest been raised by the environment in which they run? Does a trail runner who lives at the foot of the mountain feel guilt if they opt to run on the road one morning, rather than the mountain? Would it feel like a waste to turn their back on the glories of nature in favour of man-made terrain? Where does their joy threshold lie? Can you tire of perfection?

Is paradise a burden?

I have lots of questions, but no answers. My mind was racing, bouncing between ideas.

Often, my thoughts wander on a run, especially when on familiar ground. I like that. It’s meditative and I enjoy spending time in my own head. This was a writing retreat, though, and I knew I’d be writing a piece in response to this run. With this in mind, I decided to pay attention and absorb everything. Nonetheless, my mind wandered during the drive up. How did the snails get stuck in the extractor vent in the bathroom? Had they crawled up there when small, then grown to the point where they could no longer descend through the grille, or had they fallen in from the outside? Did a bird drop them there?

Once out of the car and moving, my mind couldn’t wander. On the few instances it threatened to, the terrain interrupted. I have fallen over on flat runs, but the risk was higher here. A few minutes in, we reached Haytor and had the choice of climbing it. The part of the brain that exists to prevent death from misadventure fought with the rational. The granite is round, slippery and tall, but surely Adharanand wouldn’t take us here if it was dangerous. Right? In the event, ego won out. I didn’t want to be the person who stayed down.

Steps had been cut or worn into the rock. The altitude gained was mere metres, yet we ascended into the underside of a cloud and stood in the way of the wind as it harried and tilted trees. Everything that grows here must broker a deal with the wind. You can live here, as long as you remain short and slanted.

Back off the summit and below the weather, we made our own headwinds, racing down, losing height, gaining speed, cadence doubling, field of vision narrowing. Think fast, run faster, hope for the best. The view would have been incredible, looking over hills and out to sea, but at speed it was a blur glimpsed through wind-forced tears.

During slower, calmer moments of rest and regrouping we could raise our gaze and drink in the wide expanse of moorland we were part of. I tried to think how I’d describe the terrain in terms of watercolours, to commit it to memory. Burnt umber and sienna for the bracken. Black mud, not brown. Vermillion. Would the pony be inked in white, or masked to show the base colour of the paper? Stray bramble branches or sharply angled rocks quickly broke such chains of thought.

I didn’t take photos, and that’s OK. There’s no need for me to recall the view in precise, panoramic, technicolour detail as plenty of others have done so on Dartmoor. Besides, sensory memory is stronger than visual and I know how it felt.

I’m confident a sensation this strong will stay with me. The immediate afterglow may fade, and new emotions and memories will be layered over the top, but it will always be there.

It’s true of other experiences. Even if the set-list is forgotten, a gig is remembered as sound, light, heat, colour, strobes, sweat, bass and emotion. The music is absorbed into our cells. Just listening to house music when washing up can transport me to the South of France, dancing to Laurent Garnier on the beach.

In the same way, Dartmoor is part of me now. As much as I’d like to run on Dartmoor every day, I don’t need to. The sensory memory is there, ready to be triggered by a hill, the wind, or a suburban Southampton puddle. To me, this is what magic is.

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You can read this piece, as well as those by Adharanand Finn, Gavin Boyter, Heath Buck, Lydia Thomson, Nigel Crompton and Nigel Harding, on The Way of the Runner blog.