Right, I understand the irony of me ranting about runners and their updating of Facebook, when I write a blog that auto posts to Facebook and that no one really gives a flying toss about, but that doesn't change the annoyance it causes, so I shall continue.

The title of this blog is a pun on Haruki Murakami’s book on the subject of running. It really is a very interesting read, and I recommend it to anyone.

What I don’t recommend is the following:

Some MUG:

ran 10.1 km on 5/3/2011 at 11:00 PM 
http://go.sanctimoniouscock.com/

‘Look at me, I am healthy! Why you sat there, when you could be out running! You are wasting your life, whilst I am living it! ’

Maybe I am merely projecting here, and all runners are noble, selfless creatures. But I don’t believe in true altruism. And so when runners feel the need to tell everyone about their pace and progress, why? Because they know it makes them feel good to do so. Sometimes I feel like we are party to one of those speeded up pieces of footage in a nature documentary of a flower opening. Well bully for you, you’re a wonderful blooming flower. Well I am a tree my friend! A stoic, unchanging tree!

But it isn’t just the running the have to tell us about. It is the goal. Invariably there is some marathon, or 10k, or 5k coming up. I would love to be able to run a marathon, but do I have the will to do it? Hell no! Equally though, I don’t think it is the be all and end all of my existence. In fact, I would happily go through life not ever running again. I would be happy to stroll on through life.

Then we have to sponsor them ? At times, my Facebook thread is merely a churning mass of adverts for various fun runs.

Fun runs, surely an oxymoron if I ever heard one!

Now if you have been affected by cancer in someway, there is a tremendous dignity in your running. I understand the challenge, and its link to your will and wish for this terrible thing to be over come. In fact, anyone who is running on behalf of a charity is undoubtedly doing it for noble reasons (or a gold bond place so they can run in the bloody things), and I am not having a go at that. It is just its ubiquity. There used to be something personal in the way we used to gather sponsorship for things. You would physically go up to someone, and enter a discourse, and then sponsor them. Nowadays you get a just giving link, or a mass Facebook invite.

It is the equivalent of carpet bombing. Sure, you can write a little blurb about why you are doing it, but the chosen method is surely solely for expediency.

I have a lot of friends who run, I don’t personally get the pleasure idea of it. Hopefully they don’t think this is a personal attack as I think when they start, they are bitten by the ‘running bug’, and transmogrify into ‘runners’, and cease to be a single entity in their own right whilst running.

When they stop, they turn back into normal people. Of that I am sure.

- Anand