Running for dear life – An Irishman’s Diary about Bressie, Michael Harding, and Tarmac

An antidote to the springtime blues

I hope it wasn’t Bressie, musician and TV personality, who was the subject of that near-miss in Mullingar recently, as reported by my fellow columnist Michael Harding on Tuesday.

In case you didn’t see it, Michael described how his alter-ego “The General”, while driving in the Westmeath town, almost knocked down a runner who was on the road (to his consternation) rather than the footpath.

I immediately thought of Bressie, aka Niall Breslin, not only because he's a Mullingar native, but because his latter-day conversion to running is the subject of a very interesting interview in the latest issue of Irish Runner magazine.

In fact, it would be ironic if it had been him in the car incident, since the main theme of Michael’s column was depressive anxiety. And that, as it happens, is the theme of Bressie’s interview too.

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He explains to Frank Greally (as he has also done in a viral Youtube video) how running helped him out of a crippling series of panic attacks that used to strike, invariably, at 2am.

Galloping

As a last resort, he took to putting a pair of runners beside his bed every night. And when the panic struck, his medication was to go galloping through the dark, deserted streets of Mullingar, like a cross between a “gazelle” and “Forrest Gump”.

Oh well, whoever it was The General nearly hit, there was no harm done, other than a testy exchange about why the runner was on the road, not the pavement. On which subject, as a runner myself, I was amused by the driver’s incredulity at the explanation – that the tarmac was “softer”.

It’s just as well it was the hard-skinned General who had trouble understanding this, not Michael himself. It would be a bit rich for a prose-poet, from an art form where heightened sensitivity is an entry-level requirement, to question the fussiness of runners in this regard.

I can empathise with the Mullingar man. I too flee the unforgiving footpath wherever possible, and not just to exchange concrete for tarmac. There’s also the question of camber. I must have one leg shorter than the other, because sometimes I’m only balanced while running on the right-hand side of a road, where it slopes to the kerb.

Of course there’s tarmac and there’s tarmac.

The stuff on most roads now is actually asphalt concrete, which is softer than concrete-concrete, but not much. (If you live near an airport, by the way, don’t even think about running on the so-called “tarmac” there – that’s a classic rookie error.)

It hardly needs saying that you’re always better off on grass, where available. Short, sheep-grazed grass is best, although hard to find in cities. I must try that trail around the Curragh sometime, at the risk of being run over by a horse.

Getting back to running and depression, maybe Michael Harding should himself consider taking up the sport as an antidote to those springtime blues he was lamenting.

I know it’s not a thing you associate with writers, especially poetic ones. If Wordsworth had been out jogging that time, he might have been past the daffodils before he noticed. As for Frost, reborn as a contemporary running enthusiast, he would probably have compared those alternative paths on Map My Run, and killed the mystery.

But there can be poetry in the athletic too, sometimes. In his 1920 sonnet The Racer, for example, John Masefield finds a lesson about living in the moment. Inconveniently for my case, he's not actually taking part in the race (a cross-country steeplechase) – only watching.

Even so, he becomes transfixed by the amused expression of a runner jumping the last obstacle: “And as he landed I beheld his soul/Kindle, because, in front, he saw the straight/With all its thousands roaring at the goal/He laughed, he took the moment for his mate.”

Here was a model for life, Masefield thought: ‘Would that the passionate moods on which we ride/Might kindle thus to oneness with the will;/Would we might see the end to which we stride/And feel not strain, in struggle, only thrill.”

It spoils the poem a little for modern readers that the concluding couplet ends with an obscure word, viz: “And laugh like him and know in all our nerves/Beauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves.”

“Turves” is the plural of turf, apparently, here meaning “grassy ground”. And allowing that it had to rhyme with “nerves”, I’m a bit puzzled as to how the ground could be simultaneously dusty and scatterable. But that aside, it sounds like the perfect running surface.

@FrankmcnallyIT