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Run Yourself Happy
On a morning run yesterday – about 5 miles in – the thought came upon me that I am happiest when my body is in motion. I was alone, running slowly along country lanes and forest tracks, letting my mind flit between big questions and trivialities, between my inner landscape and the outer one. I…
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The Hardest Thing About Moving On…
There’s a footpath opposite my house; it slips between two bungalows ending at a stile that takes you into the fields. In spring, it’s one of the first places you can spot cuckooflower and Jack-by-the-hedge; in summer, borage sprawls on to the path, humming with bees. I have walked and run along this path thousands…
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The Nature Cure
It’s a grey November day; rain gently pocks the surface of the tidal pools. There is not much to see in this East Sussex nature reserve – a few gulls, a little grebe, a solitary wader on the shore – but already my breathing has slowed to the rhythm of the water lapping the shingle,…
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The Sound of Happiness
Dusk is closing in on a Kent woodland. I am rooted to the spot, listening to a nightingale sing from somewhere deep within a thicket. His song is so exquisite, so intricate, so stupendous, it’s all I can do not to break into enraptured applause when the song gives way to silence. While not all…
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I Thought Fitness Was My Superpower…
I have Jane Fonda to thank for my fitness “discovery” in the late 1980s. Still in my teens, I wore through the carpet doing her workout videos in front of the TV. I also spent hours ploughing up and down the pool at the local leisure centre and honing my muscles at the gym. I…
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The Healing Power of Water
It’s dusk. I’d normally be at home, drawing the curtains against oncoming darkness. But tonight, I am floating in the English Channel, gazing up at the moon, her edges as sharp as a paper cutout. The water is silky against my skin; neither warm nor cold. All day I had felt adrift; but the business…
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How a few minutes’ exercise can unleash creativity
Need to get your creative juices flowing? Get moving. A long line of influential thinkers have instinctively moved their bodies to open their minds, from Darwin, who advanced his theory of evolution while accumulating laps of his “thinking path”, to Nietzsche, who in 1888 warned: “Do not believe any idea that was not born in…
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The Amazing Power of Running for a Good Cause
Trudging around the park can feel like a waste of time and energy. But what if the next time you laced up your shoes it was to put food on people’s tables or help preserve the environment? It is a cold, dark winter evening – the kind of night that can have even diehard runners…
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1066 And All That
Day 1 “Come far?” I turn from the bar, where I’m waiting to place my order, and two elderly ladies, seated at a nearby table, are surveying my sweaty running gear and rucksack with a pleasant air of enquiry. “Pevensey,” I tell them. “We’re heading for Battle today and then on to Rye tomorrow.” I…
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Running and Writing
In a year that has been characterised by the restriction, prohibition and curtailment of many of the things I enjoy, there are two activities I’ve found myself doing more of: running and writing. At first glance, these two passions seem to be diametrically opposite. When I write, I retreat into my head, where I mine…
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Is Your Injury Real?
One winter, my hip started to hurt when I ran. Fleetingly at first, but soon the pain decided to unpack its bags and settle in. It’s hard to describe exactly where it hurt; somewhere deep inside that I couldn’t touch. Sometimes the pain was raw and intense, other times, quietly smouldering, but it was never…
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Forever Young
Can running protect you from the effects of ageing? Death and taxes are said to be the only things that are certain in life. But it’s hard to disagree with Dr Hirofumi Tanaka, director of the Cardiovascular Ageing Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, when he says ‘ageing is an inevitable consequence…