The runner

The runner

He locked the door behind him, pushed on the the door as a final check then tucked the small bunch of keys in their special pocket in his track suit bottoms. He was desperate to get going and find his overdue fix of his drugs of choice.

The iron railings had been taken during the last war, “to help the war effort”, but, no matter, he could still use the dwarf wall to prop up one leg and then lean forward, the leg kept stiff, to stretch his ham strings. The wall was made of expensive, red, engineering bricks and had a rounded top which had led the line gracefully into the railings above. He changed legs and repeated the stretch and then he was off, walking at first, then a slow jog followed by his accustomed slow running as his blood started to surge and his muscles warmed, driven by a climbing heart rhythm, his breathing  in time with his  striding, starting to cover the ground at a satisfying speed. After about five minutes of this he could feel his body responding well and the tensions leaving his thoughts as the work day in the office, trying to sell unwanted contracts to uninterested prospects. He was on song, an orchestra of muscles and sinues in close harmony.

This was the endorphins working, chemical messangers rushing to the pleasure centre in his brain, manufacturing the runner’s high he was so desperate for. This was the drug he craved, an addiction just as real as heroin, just as pleasurable and with just as devastating drop out leading to another round of craving.

He pounded the pavements at peak performance, a smoothly running machine, the tarmac like elastoplast protecting a wounded skin, but here, the tarmac was the wound, keeping the soft fertile earth from its destiny of growing crops beneath a golden sun. The tarmac made necessary to pave the streets that were needed to carry the goods to feed the city in cars, vans, lorries and pantechnicons. Without the tarmac the soft streets would be a nightmare mess of sludder – like the summer roads in Siberia when the permafrost is not.

He knew that running was good, good for his muscles, good for his lungs and good for his heart. He forgot he was in the city where part of the oxygen in the concrete canyons was replaced by carbon monoxide which was drawn deep into his lungs to replace the oxygen on the haemoglobin receptor molecules in the blood., where the air was full of fine carcinogenic carbon particles, ozone and dust. By running and breathing so deeply, there was not a surface in his lungs that was not free of the noxious mix. It was as bad as smoking 10 cigarettes a day.

Why did he not realise this, that it was better to slouch in an armchair and watch rubbish daytime television with the windows closed? Better indeed to escape from this polluted concrete human creation, to a place where the scent of spring flowers perfumed the clean air and it was quiet enough to hear the territorial song of the blackbird in the calm evenings. Better to decide to move away from the city and the avoid the lung cancer destiny that awaited him twenty years in the future.

Why did he not hear the mutterings at his funeral,

‘He was always so healthy, ate so well and always running?.