Following the river

This newsletter was originally published on Patreon on 21 June 2021

As soon as we saw Taz, we stopped talking. A deep hush seemed to fill the air. Here was a man in a different realm, leaning slightly to one side as he came down the trail carrying his stick, his jacket and hair dusty, his face intensely calm. 

Three days earlier he had been dropped off at a small car park up on Dartmoor, around 80 miles away. After finding the source of the River Dart, he had followed it on foot, sleeping out rough, under rocks, without a tent, until now, when we met him, just before he was about to reach the sea.

It was ultra running in part, but also a personal odyssey into what it meant to him to be a man, to be Sudanese, to be who he is. He had clearly been through a lot within himself to get to the point he was at when we met him, less than a mile from the end of his journey, but a key part of that transformation was the many hours of running and walking he had undertaken. When, shortly afterwards, he emerged onto the beach and saw his family and friends waiting to greet him, he fell to the ground and curled up in a ball sobbing.

It sounds dramatic, but anyone who has run an ultra marathon, or has read my ultra book, will know that running a long way does that sort of thing to you. It strips you bare. I had lived it many times, but I had never seen it from the outside. It was moving to bear witness to the end of Taz’s journey, it felt like a privilege, and I felt emotional too, just standing next to him.

He ended his three-day run with the release of jumping into the sea, and we all dived in with him.

There is something wonderful about following a river from the source to the sea. My three children had all made that same journey along the River Dart, half on foot and then by kayak, with their school as 10-year-olds (although sleeping in tents pitched by their parents!), and I had been lucky enough to join Ossian on his trip. Following the river for five days, as we did, feels somehow primal, like staring out to sea or sitting around a fire. It feels like you’re not only connecting with nature, but somehow being taught something by it. We all flow back to where we came from? The journey is always happening, whether we embrace it or not? The river doesn’t say anything, it just flows. But the soothing sound of the water, its constant movement, are all somehow full of wisdom.

Running also works on this level. Of course, you can run simply for fitness, or to race, just like you can use a river simply to cool off or for exercise. But like the river, running also has an inherent wisdom if you take the time to listen to it. And like following the river, the longer you do it, the further you run, the more it reveals to you.

Way off track

Back in the world of the sport of running, controversy raged this week after US athlete Shelby Houlihan was handed a four-year ban after testing positive for the steroid Nandrolone. At first the reaction online and by many in the media was in stark contrast to the reaction when a Kenyan gets caught doping. Instead of the usual claims of “they’re all at it”, many people were instead directing their anger at the authorities, who had clearly made a mistake and were ruining the career of an innocent athlete. Or, if they weren’t going that far, people were expressing confusion and sympathy for Houlihan’s explanation that the banned substance had been accidentally ingested in a pork burrito.

I was about to whip out my keyboard and tell Twitter about my indignation at these double standards, when others started to do it for me. Kate Carter wrote on Twitter: “I have no clue whether Houlihan is clean or not, and obviously if it’s a false positive that’s terrible. But Twitter reaction does seem to me: E. African athlete breaks WR: 'They must be doping.’ America athlete actually fails testing: ‘They must be clean.’”

This article headlined In the matter of Shelby Houlihan: white privilege confronts reality made the same point rather more, well, pointedly.

I also held back commenting because, well, maybe Houlihan is innocent. I didn’t really want to jump on the condemnation bandwagon any more than I ever want to when it’s a Kenyan. I certainly don’t relish these moments as an opportunity to grandly denounce the sport. Instead I feel only sadness. Either she doped - which I know is by far the mostly likely scenario here - which is bad for her, bad for her rivals, and bad for the sport. Or she didn’t dope, and her career is in tatters for nothing, which is also very sad.

What nobody, not even her most vocal critics, did, however, was come out with the line “all Americans are dopers”, which is the line (“all Kenyans are dopers”) I hear so often when a Kenyan gets banned. With Americans we can appreciate that each athlete is an individual, that training groups are distinct, that there are different coaches and that some are more honest than others, and that just because a few Americans cheat - and she’s obviously not the only US distance star who has been in trouble recently - it doesn’t implicate everyone who happens to share the same nationality. I’d just like to see that same basic understanding applied when a Kenyan is caught. As I put it in this article a few years ago: Don’t add one and one together and get two thousand doping Kenyans