In a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, I actually agreed to run a 5k in early December. Although I love sports and have played soccer for years, I'll admit that I must possess a certain canine quality. Because the truth is that I'll chase a ball for hours, but simply running, just running, drives me batty. However, I did agree to take part in this charity run so I've been forcing myself to plod around my local park as part of my training.

I've never much believed in "the runner's high" but I have enjoyed the solitude and quiet on my early morning runs. And my thoughts have often returned to the first man on earth concept discussed in Alan Sillitoe's 1959 short story The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.

In this classic, the narrator is serving time for breaking and entering but he's allowed to run by himself to train for a race so he can fill up the warden's trophy case. The narrator explains, "When on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o'clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before bells go, I slip downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once, if you can believe what I'm trying to say."

He then descibes the peace and quiet and solitude that accompanies a nice run. "So as soon as I tell myself I'm the first man ever to be dropped into the world, and as soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven't the heart to whistle, I get to thinking, and that's what I like," he explains. "I go my rounds in a dream, turning at lane or footpath corners without knowing where I'm turning, leaping brooks without knowing they're there, and shouting good morning to the early cow-milker without seeing him. It's a treat, being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do or that there's a shop to break and enter a bit back from the next street. Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end."

Sillitoe's classic story manages to juxtapose the positive feelings running can bring with the frustrations expressed through the Angry Young Man movement in British literature. It is a classic time capsule of 1950's literature.