The End of the World Running Club

Before the first step, before the first muscle twitches, before the first neuron fires, there comes a choice: stand still or move. You choose the right option. Then you repeat that choice one hundred thousand times. You don’t run thirty miles, you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.

That beast inside you, the one you think is tethered tightly to the post, the one you’ve tamed with art, love, prayer, meditation: it’s barely muzzled. The knot is weak. The post is brittle. All it takes is two words and a siren to cut it loose.

It wasn’t a return to a simpler life; it was a version of a simpler life. A version that replaced cholera, dysentery, freezing winters, lost harvests, frequent stillbirths, domestic violence and incest with underfloor heating, Sky Plus, solar panels and plump trust funds. It was just another decoration: wallpaper, not a return.

Do you know why people tell stories, Ed?’ he said. He waited for me to speak, but I didn’t. He sniffed and went on. ‘Because the truth doesn’t really have any words of its own. They’re not enough, see? Stories work … good stories … because they make you feel something like how the truth would make you feel if you could hear it.

I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid.

Writing is just a trick, after all; you turn images into words that you hope will trigger similar images that already exist in the reader’s head.

You don’t run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.

Man Caves. Shed, garages, studies, attics, cellars. Places for "men--or at least their twenty-first-century equivalents--to hide. To tinker, potter, be creative, build things, hammer bits of wood, listen to the music that their families hate. Drink, smoke, look at pornography, masturbate. The subtext of the man cave, of course, is that men don't want to spend any time with their families. For some reason this is perfectly acceptable; every man deserves his cave. It is my right as a tired parent.

I felt like a child. I was a child; I am a child. Because we don’t grow up; we grow over, like weeds over new grass.

the perpetual struggle with other objects that existence sometimes seems to be.

We’re all born screaming, Ed. The moment we pop out our throats open, and the same scream bursts out that always has. We see all the lights and faces and the shadows and the strange sounds, and we scream. Life screams, and we scream back at it. After a bit of time we learn to be quiet; we learn to muffle it. But life doesn’t stop. It just keeps screaming. All. The. Time.” He tapped his finger on the table three times and sat back.

That other beast inside you, the one you rarely see? You have it tethered tight. It watches and waits while you mess up your life, fill your body with poison and muddy your mind with worry. For some it takes just one call to free it. For others it takes five hundred miles of agony.

We’re not really supposed to be on our own, Ed, we’re not built for it. Spend too much time running away from reality and that’s exactly where you get.

it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.

What’s there that’s so great? Internet? Television? Department stores? Fast food?” Richard leaned forward and began counting on his fingers. “Medicine, clean water, sanitation, midwifery, roads, transport, everything that pulled this world out of the dark ages and took the nasty, brutish, and short out of life.” He rabbit-eared his fingers. “You think that ‘going back to nature’ is going to make your life more enjoyable? You’re a fantasist, Ed, and a selfish one. What about your kids and your wife? You think they’d be all right? You think you could really support them and protect them? You probably couldn’t even keep a cactus alive, let alone feed your family from a vegetable patch.” “And what’s that supposed to mean?” I said. “I’m saying society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother, or both. Pain, filth, famine, and war were everywhere, and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or thrown in a dungeon to rot. People didn’t live in some blissful utopia where everyone had an allotment and looked after one another. We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time. The last two hundred years have seen us grow, understand, build systems and infrastructures that keep us healthy and happy. We can dive to the bottom of the ocean, fly around the world, go to the moon, Mars, beyond. And all you want to do is go live in a cave. We’re not supposed to live in the fucking dirt, Ed. We’re not.

don’t get into the habit of letting people tell you what to believe, son. That’ll get you into all sorts of strife.

You can’t run five hundred miles just by clearing your mind,” I spat. Harvey shrugged. “You can’t do it without it either.

Perhaps there was a reason why we had filled our world with distraction after all. Perhaps there was a reason why we surrounded ourselves with plastic and light and excess. Perhaps our collective consciousness remembered all too well what it was like in darkness, surrounded by wet, rotten wood, mud, and nothing good to eat.

one you’ve tamed with art, love, prayer, meditation: it’s barely muzzled. The knot is weak. The post is brittle. All it takes is two words and a siren to cut it loose.

You want to know how long it takes for the fabric of society to break down? I’ll tell you. The same time it takes to kick a door down. I once read a book about Japanese veterans remembering the darkness of the Second World War. They seemed like old men with happy families at peace with the world, but they could still recall the hunger that drove them to kill and eat Chinese women. More often than not they would rape them first. Ask anyone who has been in a crowd that becomes too strong, where bodies begin to crush you. Is your first instinct to lift others up, or to trample them down? That beast inside you, the one you think is tethered tightly to the post, the

The truth is I was tired of it all. I was tired of the clamor and the din of a world that made less sense by the day and a life that had me just where it wanted. The truth is that the end of the world, for me at least, came as a relief.

You want to know how it feels to run thirty miles. You want to know how it feels to run thirty miles straight through mud and across scorched earth, dodging sinkholes and crawling beneath toppled trees, when you’ve already run the length of the country, when your ankle’s sprained, your fingers are broken, you’re blind in one eye, and you’ve only had half a can of baked beans for breakfast. I’ll tell you. It starts like every other run. Before the first step, before the first muscle twitches, before the first neuron fires, there comes a choice: stand still or move. You choose the right option. Then you repeat that choice a hundred thousand times. You don’t run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.

I had read once that we were just vehicles for our genes to propagate, nothing more than hosts for a parasite with a much bigger plan than any of our own. Maybe that was true.

In the end, I thought, this is how we all end up: running alone through our own wilderness, the landscape of disjointed events that form our lives, with nobody to make sense of it but ourselves. The road is ours, and ours alone.

We’re like hermits living in the attics of big houses on lonely hills, watching one another with broken telescopes.