Run. Listen. Repeat.

Thinking about chaos, silence and running-while-listening.

Things got busy again. Publications to complete, a presentation to prepare, a conference to travel to, an increasingly problematic work situation to grapple with, a running event.

Last July, I posted a text called ‘How the Landscape Feels (with Music)’, an attempt to connect my newfound practice of running with the fresh lease of life my writing had gained, and to say something about my relationship with landscape and music.

When I wrote that piece, I was training for the 2024 Great North Run. Much has happened since then. I ran the Great North Run and enjoyed it. So strange to run along motorways I’d driven so often, to have freedom of the roads from the city to the sea. So exhilarating to have those legendary Northeast crowds cheering us all on, to finish with a sense of achievement.

I got the bug. I started the new year with a 10K trail run around Druridge Bay on the Northumberland Coast. In bright January weather, we ran around lakes and along the beach. In February, I ran a half marathon up the Northumberland coastline from Craster to Bamburgh. A few weeks later, I completed the Lisbon Half Marathon.

These felt like memorable achievements in and of themselves, but they were also stepping stones towards my major challenge for this year, which was the Edinburgh Marathon. This was my first marathon, something I couldn’t have imagined doing a year ago, something I still wasn’t sure I could do even after weeks of longer and longer training runs.

I did it. Not as quickly as I’d liked, but I made it. I felt good for half the race (perhaps I’m a half marathon runner?). We were blasted by gale force winds and hail storms on the final stretches. It was brutal, but the crowds lining the route were amazing and helped me pick up speed for the final push through Musselburgh.

That was three weeks ago, and now I’m back to regular runs around my local neighbourhood. Getting back into writing has taken longer, but it seems appropriate that my first piece in a month should connect to something that was taking up increasing amounts of my time during the first half of this year. And that it should be a version of a text I meant to publish weeks ago, something that started as a book review, then veered into something else as I racked up the miles through the woods and waggonways of North Tyneside.

To the book. Given my interests and my attempts to connect them through writing, it’s no surprise that I was intrigued by the appearance earlier this year of Ben Ratliff’s book Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening. It’s what I was reading in the run-up to Edinburgh, along with some other books about songs which I’ll cover in a future post.

Ratliff’s book has many quotable sentences and passages. Here are some of my favourites, which I think explain his project.

1. On the shakuhachi player Takahashi Kuzan:

You can listen into another’s breathing and lose track of your own, just as you can assume another’s stride. Kuzan’s breathing is careful and imposing, even while it is barely there. To the extent that he’s become the bamboo, his playing reminds me of the day, a month or so after I began running, when I realized I hadn’t thought about my breathing once—when a runner’s breathing, which can seem to be everything, became nothing. (p. 64)

2. On Ratliff reconciling himself with the music of Alice Coltrane, which had previously ‘pushed [him] out’ of its orbit:

Running has clarified things. Because the direction of Alice Coltrane’s music doesn’t change course decisively, I feel as I run that I am not simply reacting to its positions, I am moving with them. If I still sometimes find the music dense, if I can’t get into the spaces of it, I can run alongside it. (p. 67)

3. On trying to understand his students’ reliance on earphones when navigating the streets of New York:

I think they talk this way because they have learned that older people will disapprove of the fact that they are walking around with earphones on all the time, and they better have an inarguable response to the disapproval … If they characterize listening as armour, as a defense against a world that is hostile to them, which it is, then I’ll understand that they’re bracing themselves against the force of the world that older people—me—have made for them. (p. 74)

4. On the challenges of writing about music (something that frequently preoccupies me, as I’ve related before):

Music is difficult to write about, for the simple reason that it must always be caught up with. Music moves from here to there; it is running away from us. The fact that it runs away from us is a source of joy but also of displeasure: a song can drive you crazy, or beguile you, or perplex you, or threaten you. For this reason, many ignore its motion, or are asked to, and write about music (or are asked to) as if it were a finite historical event, which has to mean something; it’s better if that something can be sharpened to a weapon-like point.

Amen to that one.

As much as I found myself agreeing with, learning from and being inspired by Ratliff’s book, I was also curious to note where our running and listening paths diverged. This seemed more evident in the first half of the book, and I started making notes about perceived differences in our experience, only to find out later these were not always as significant as I’d initially thought. That’s partly about the course the book takes. Like a run, it offers an initial landscape that subsequently and subtly adapts to something a bit different.

For example, there was a stark contrast placed early in the book between running while playing music through earphones (which Ratliff does) and running without music (which I have been doing), which was described as running in silence. I felt sure that Ratliff was as well aware as anyone (and perhaps more than many) that not running with music playing in your ears doesn’t equal running with silence. I thought again about the sounds I hear when I’m out on my routes: birds, vehicles, human voices, dogs, footsteps, the hum of electricity cables overhead and to my side, the wind in the trees, running water, the sea, the voices in my head, my breath.

Connected to this, I was curious about the related ideas of running-as-chaos and not following a script. Ratliff contrasts chaos (which he initially seems to favour) with repetition, routine and the kind of formalised training an event-focussed runner might do as preparation for a race. But for me, the chaos comes from the myriad voices, thoughts and sounds I find rushing through my head precisely because I don’t have a prepared running soundtrack. However last-minute or random Ratliff’s listening choices might be, they still constitute a track to run along.

Even if you run the same route every time, are you really running the same route? I thought about John Cage’s compositions and his writings on silence and repetition. Running is, of course, repetition. There’s little that’s more repetitive than putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again. I’d go as far as to say that to really listen to the ground beneath your feet and the space you move through, you need to go over it again and again.

There are subtle variations that only come through when you get to know a territory well. Thinking of my most-repeated long run, I know where certain tree roots will emerge as hazards, where a trunk that arches over the path is just high enough for me to pass through without stopping or slowing, the anticipation of an approaching set of steps that will sap the energy from my legs, the foreknowledge that I will soon be enveloped in a lush green corridor, that I will switch from rough ground to soft to smooth, the points I’m likely to encounter more people or none. And the sounds, of course, never fixed the same way in the same spaces, but still subject to tendencies, likelihoods, expected sonorities and those that seem out of place.

Reading the first half of Run the Song, I felt the absence of a deeper engagement with ‘silence’. I should have realised that Cage would show up eventually, and he does (p. 118), at which point Ratliff also refers to Susan Sontag’s 1969 essay ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’. These passages are as compelling as Ratliff’s account of his more explicitly musical soundtracks, and I felt us drawing closer together as runners and thinkers about sound.

I sometimes felt that Ratliff had a romantic view of running which I envied. By ‘romantic’, I don’t mean the association with earphone listening and ‘main character syndrome’ that Ratliff refers to by way of a New Romantics example (p. 71). More like an eschewing of the trends, practices and paraphernalia that are now associated with running as lifestyle and competitive sport.

Ratliff doesn’t train for or enter running events, nor does he measure running data. I’ve done all these things in the past eighteen months. The reason I say I sometimes envied the freedom he’d created from all that was because I could easily imagine myself as someone who got into running in ways similar to those Ratliff outlines at the start of the book. Like him, I took up running in middle age (later in middle age in my case) at the suggestion of someone else and with no great expectations of changing my life. Unlike Ratliff, however, I became involved in a more socially structured running practice, first by weekly involvement in one of my local parkrun, second by taking up my wife’s suggestion to enter the Great North Run.

For me, this became about accountability: being part of a small group who travelled to and from parkrun together, following a semi-structured training plan to increase my chances of completing the half marathon. And so it continued, with me designing day trips or weekend breaks around running events like those I mentioned earlier. At some point during all of this, caught up in the enthusiasm that attends a newly discovered interest, I acquired decent running shoes, a FitBit and other bits of equipment.

When I say I envy the romanticism I glean from Run the Song, it’s largely because, if you’d have told me even two years ago that I would become the kind of person who wore any kind of sportswear beyond trainers, let alone a hydration vest, fitness tracker and hi vis gloves, or who steered nearly every conversation with colleagues to running, or spoke earnestly about heart rate, inclines, trail shoes and personal bests, I’d have had to sit down for laughing.

I think part of why I dived into all that stuff was a fascination with just how foreign it was, how other it felt to most of what had previously dominated my waking hours. I was interested to see myself become that person, curious to see what he did.

As I say, it’s been about accountability for me, about challenging myself to do something and keep doing it. As I’ve written here before, my discovery of running began at the same time that I took up new practises of daily writing and regular sharing of what I’d written (i.e. this Substack). At a time when, professionally, the opportunities for new achievements and the kind of goal-setting that would make them reachable were drying up or excluding me, running and writing felt like something I might control.

There has still been great freedom in both. Here is where I connect back to the possibilities to be found in repetition, to how I find freedom in structures and patterns. I have applied more discipline to my writing in the last eighteen months than at any time in my life and yet I’ve been able to steer that writing to a range of topics that are freer than before: looser, more organic, closer to the kinds of patterns and connections my mind has always wanted to follow.

The same goes for running familiar tracks. Threading my way yet again along the twisting woodland paths of Seaton Burn, feeling the now-familiar cold blast of air as I emerge from the woods to meet the clifftop paths between Seaton Sluice and Whitley Bay, recalling the speed I’d picked up on the firm, flat stretch from Silverlink to Shiremoor, wondering if I can muster that pace again as I hit the seafront promenades of Cullercoats and Tynemouth: within predictability, I found the freedom I’d been seeking.

Unlike the quotations I’ve taken from Ratliff’s book, I’ve signally failed to write about music in this post. That’s okay. There are plenty of song posts planned. For now, I’ll leave a link to last year’s running piece (which almost wasn’t about music either) and I’ll note that my days of running without a prescribed soundtrack may be coming to an end. As I finish writing this, my wife has bought me a pair of running headphones as an early birthday present. I got them today. I’ll run with them tomorrow. Let’s see what changes that may bring.