In Brief: The Bastardisation of Passing Time
William Penn wrote that "Time is what we want most but use worst." The more we want time to stop in its tracks, it races ahead of us, causing life itself to accelerate beyond our perceptions of the world. There is a slight irony in so bleakly forecasting a doomed struggle against time in the introduction of a piece that is, ostensibly, about a running race. But it is a race long enough for pride to be measured not in rankings but pace, though satisfaction as an amateur can perhaps only be accurately measured by lactic sensations. Today, at the Uppsala Half Marathon, there were inevitably too many. This morning, time was an embuggerance and a bliss. Looping repeatedly back on myself through the outskirts of Uppsala's old and new, time was all I could calculate - my head constantly contorting my distance covered and time spent in an almighty effort to estimate a resemblance of my final time. My head was full, yet empty, liberated from the banal stresses of the everyday, bo...