In recent years, psychogeography has experienced something of a fervent influential resurgence, to the extent at which it has now become ambiguous by its very elasticity. You can trace the origins of psychogeography back to writers like Defoe, Blake, de Quincey, and even Dickens with his ‘night walks’. In the mid-20th century it gestated into a niche and transgressive pursuit at the hands of the Paris Situationist movement with writer-flanuers like Guy Debord; before progressing, through the work of contemporary writers such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Peter Ackroyd, into a somewhat mainstream concern. All manner of people are now liable to reassess their relationship with their urban environs, to grab hold of the mechanised snow-globe in which they find themselves confined and shake it into flux.
Yet if I could loosen the psychogeographic belt from around its expansive girth by one more notch to force feed another mouthful of interpretative theory, I should like to argue the case for an alternative aspect that I think has been, heretofore, downright ignored.
This alternative strand to which I refer is urban running; or, as I think it should be coined, ‘psycho-vascular geography’. My feeling is that this practice has been neglected for too long, almost like the dinner party guest that all other attendees are complicit in refusing to acknowledge or engage in conversation. Perhaps condemned as inappropriate or not at all relevant to the intrinsic hypothesis; insufficiently high-brow to pique the imaginations of the common practitioners.
Merlin Coverley, in his book ‘Psychogeography’, attempts to tie down the flailing limbs of the term into a concise definition:
‘…this act of walking is an urban affair and, in cities that are increasingly hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion…the act of walking is seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city.’
Despite this, it remains the case, in most cities, that walking from point A to point B is still a necessary activity, however inconsequential or perfunctory those distances may be, and however sternly into the narrow matrices of habit and routine they are fixed. (I say most cities, although in places such as Los Angeles the act of walking has been subjugated in favour of vehicular transit to the point of it now being almost taboo to partake in it.) Indeed, it is my conviction that running holds that illustrious status of being contrary to the spirit of the city, kicking against the transitory conventions and orthodoxies, as the more profound act of subversion.
Fundamentally, cities are not designed for extensive aerobic activity; they are congested (with both motorised and pedestrian traffic), polluted, and often their very design tacitly dissuades with its miscellany of bus shelters, walkways, railing, ramparts and barriers. Areas are annexed off so as to maintain the fluid dynamic of the streets, the steady motion of people flowing to and from their allotted destinations.
Not only this, but human traffic itself becomes a substantial impediment. Only when locked into a run and weaving through the fray do you gain a glimpse of peoples’ often maddening lack of fluid movement, or sense of assertive direction. Instead, people tend to drift at random across pavements; others will veer into a change of direction with the exaggerated turning circle of an oil tanker. Others, locked into their technological appendages, torpedo their way along without recourse to anything around them. The runner must be uniquely attuned to and be able to read the developing narrative of the road ahead with the same malleability as the cyclist, or else all rhythm and pace will sporadically be curtailed.
By its very nature, the city negates the concept of easy running and, therefore, seeks to limit such activity to specially demarcated hubs within the urban landscape – public parks for instance – or that other much more troubling, and yet commercially-viable, zone of contained and prescribed exercise, the gym.
All my experience of gyms can be summed up as a sensation of mild horror. It isn’t after very long spent in one of these places that you come to see them as little more than sweaty sanatoria, populated by inmates imprisoned by their collective delusions at self-improvement, desperate to increase their personal shares in the physical stock market. They are a commodified means for people to feed the illusion that, firstly, they can take effective control of their lives, and secondly, that they can remake themselves into a more socially acceptable mould.
Leaving aside the cardio-vascular and venturing inside the weight-lifting area, you are suddenly plunged into a homoerotic menagerie of (predominantly) men, reduced to their basest instincts of brawn and the notion of being in physical contest with everyone else in the vicinity. Indeed, I always felt it was possible that the toxic cocktail of testosterone and insecurity could at any moment ignite with everyone either greasing up and fucking each other, or tearing one another limb from limb as though they were suddenly back in gladiatorial Rome. In my eyes, the act of formation running on a treadmill, gazing up at a bank of TV screens, is scarcely more biologically advanced than a hamster going round and round in a wheel.
Gyms are to urban running what paperback chick-lit is to literary fiction – socially acceptable responses to a barely-suppressed sense of self-guilt, homogenised and diluted of any subversive value or individual merit. Entering a gym is akin to entering a supermarket or an airport terminal; it is another of Marc Auge’s ‘non-places’, in which humans transiently and affectlessly correspond to the environment in which they conduct a particular activity.
I am similarly wary of that annual event at which London gives in to the might of the urban runner – the Marathon. Marathons seem to me to be the tacit justification of an inherently obsessive activity by the means of mass participation. Yet further evidence of the enforced collectivism of entirely solitary pursuits – writing courses and literary festivals being other such examples. There’s no denying the motivating spirit a spectacle such as a marathon can instil in people, but that doesn’t change the reality that on Marathon Day, all that happens is that London’s streets become a giant treadmill for the masses, a prescribed gym with its own shifting scenery. As a side note, I don’t feel this comparison between long-distance running and writing is entirely spurious. Indeed, Haruki Murakami wrote, ‘…most of what I know about writing fiction I learned by running every day. You need to find a balance between both focus and endurance.’
For me, the main crux of my reasoning for running’s subversive supremacy over walking is precisely that which has been commonly attributed to the latter pursuit. It represents the abandonment of the windshield mentality which has developed drastically throughout the last century with the dominance of the car, cinema and television. The power of the spectacle is writ large by film glamour and reconstituted by the modes of our mechanised transit around the urban environment. My claim in terms of the prestige of running is that this effective abandonment is heightened in intensity many times over the experience of a long-distance city walk.
When running, your immediate surroundings become newly animated with an almost reified intangibility. The familiarity of places and infrastructure, their functionality and purpose, become diluted in their potency. The environs become almost reimagined in the mind of the runner as being there to serve his or her purpose. Every obstacle or impediment, each zone of prescribed pedestrian access designed to funnel easy migration, becomes ever more lucidly defined from its usual artifice; in a way is only really visible to the runner, who must adapt and respond to them with much more urgency.
Each gradient change, ground type and topographical feature becomes amplified beneath the pounding feet of the runner; who, through necessity, must react to this changing terra firma, however negligible it might be to the walker, as though your feet were consciously tracing every contour line of the geography around them. Simply by accelerating the tempo at which you actively perceive the space around you, it is fulfilling a new role and functionality.
At this juncture, please let me be clear. I am not one of those insufferable fitness fanatics who wear shirts several sizes too small for them in all seasons so as to accentuate their heaving musculature; I began running home from work purely for financial reasons. Now though, I enjoy finding disparate points of intrigue on a city map and using running as a means of linking them together. My motivation for this is the conviction – correct or not – that scarcely anyone else will have run (or even walked) the same route and for the same purpose.
My more conservative running route home from work, from just off of Portland Place to Brixton Hill, embodies most of the illogical follies of the urban runner. I attempt to dart through the tuna fleet of consumers on Oxford Street and down Bond Street, inhale the noxious pollutants belched out by buses along Millbank, before the final furlong along Brixton Road and up the hill as, with every pace, aching tendons and ligaments grind against bone, ingraining the fissures for future injuries. But then again, how many can say they check their time progress by the hands of Big Ben whilst making a diagonal dash across Parliament Square?!
When the run, for whatever reason, is going badly it can feel as though you’ve submerged yourself in a painful ice bath, a thousand needles jabbing away at your muscles with the incessant rhythm of a printing press. Each pace suddenly becomes enmeshed with a viscous fatigue, as though you were trying to run through glue. At its worst, your lungs can feel like knives are being slowly inserted just below the ribcage. You can sense this dreaded ‘stitch’ setting in long before it fully takes hold; the lactic acid corroding through any endorphins or residual energy. All you can do is zero-in on the metronome of your own breathing, focus on the mechanical principles of your own fuel economy, and compel yourself forwards, as though the very act of giving in and stopping were some heinous, unforgiveable crime.
On runs like this, the environment around you shrinks into the very periphery of your consciousness, leaving the most negligible of impressions. I often think of it in comparison with Ballard who said of his stance as a futurist - ‘I’m only interested in the next five minutes’. Similarly, the fatigued and suffering runner is only interested in, indeed can only visualise, the next five paces. Everything else is irrelevant, divested of all tangibility.
On the flip side though, you may at times experience that elusive sensation ‘the runner’s high’. Not being au fait with hallucinogens, I can only make a vague comparison in ignorance. The endorphins released through cardio-vascular activity serve to alleviate pain. Should the activity be sufficiently rigorous or intense, it can elevate you into a kind of transcendental, meditative state in which you feel completely purged of exhaustion or discomfort and are inflated with an air of invincibility; a feeling that you could continue running for many hours and that you would be unable to stop even if you wanted to. In this state, the landscape feels imbued with an almost fluid translucency, shimmering with heat-haze ripples, everything is tinged with a faint euphoria. You feel as though the city streets are almost being dictated by your own imagination. Ideas, metaphors, aphorisms, images, all pinwheel through my mind as though they were competitors overtaking me in this physical race. As Alan Sillitoe wrote, ‘…I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realising that as far as I was concerned the feeling was the only honest and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me’.
At risk of appearing to use poetic licence too liberally as a means to exaggerate, I must emphasise the difficulty of conveying this sensation to a non- or inexperienced runner. All I can say is that those familiar with the more sedentary narcotic ‘rush’ will have a closer understanding. Of course, this adrenaline rush could also be attained by engaging in perhaps the only other forms of ‘subverting the spirit of the city’ that I am aware of. ‘Base jumping’ – a daredevil pursuit in which no urban structure is exempt from being adopted as a launching platform, the jumper going to more extreme measures to reconstruct the city for his or her own journey. Then there’s ‘urbex’ (urban exploring), whereby intrepid adventurers gain entry to out-of-bounds, often derelict or subterranean places and record their experiences. The most notable ‘urbex’ targets in London are the disused tube stations such as Aldwych and Battersea Power Station.
Of course, such a high whilst running is frustratingly elusive. It may flower and evaporate into an exhausting drudge in a matter of minutes or even less. But once experienced, I believe it is the potency of this ‘natural high’ that keeps people running. Certainly, the way in which it can melt the rigid and mundane opacity of the urban into something altogether more dream-like is what keeps my feet pounding the harsh pavements day after day.
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