I always thought running might be bad for you, especially once you were older than 30. And I'm not just talking about physically. The news from Britain confirms it.
Last week British police arrested, then released, a 41-year-old man following the incident where a jogger had pushed a woman in front of a bus in London's Putney (the man arrested, an American investment banker, was freed after he told police he'd been in the United States at the time).
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Arrest after woman allegedly pushed into road
UK police arrest a jogger who is suspected of knocking a woman into a road, where a bus swerved to miss her.
Video of the incident was captured by a camera mounted on a passing van. The footage shows a man jogging along a footpath beside a bus lane. He looks like any other 40-something jogger – shorts, T-shirt, runners, cropped hair. A man in a suit walks by going the other way. Then a woman comes along, also going the other way, and he veers towards her and shoves her in the chest, sending her tumbling to the edge of the footpath. A passing bus swerves, narrowly missing the woman's head.
Reports say the woman was only slightly injured, thankfully. But she must have suffered a terrible shock.
What on earth was running man – whoever he was – thinking? What went through his mind in that split second before he stepped ever so slightly to his right and made what looks like deliberate contact with a hapless passerby?
Maybe almost nothing. Humans are designed to run for two reasons: to chase prey or flee a predator. Running is triggered by emotions deep in our reptile brains: fear and hunger, emotions that can overwhelm our higher-order thought processes if we don't recognise they're at work.
All subsequent running in human history is an elaboration on this theme.
What is an Olympic sprint other than a simultaneous chase (for the line) and flight (from the other competitors and the danger of the starter's gun)?
Why is AFL so violent, if not because of the fear and anger aroused by being chased and caught, of chasing and catching?
Conversely, why do we admire a soccer player – Andrea Pirlo springs to mind – who never runs? Because we understand he is playing the game in the higher part of his brain – thinking it, not reacting to it.
There can be exhilaration in running, too, when we run just for the pleasure of it. "I run in order to acquire the void," writes Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. In the long Buddhist tradition of quelling the reptile brain by meditation, Murakami is able to use running to attain a state of serenity.
But Putney's Running Man seems to have aroused, not quieted, his reptile brain. He was running angry.
Matt Holden is a Fairfax Media columnist.
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