Before I tell you the question, here’s the bottom line, it’s my best shot at an answer. It’s the closest to the truth that I’ve found so far.

It goes round and round in my head, like creating cake mixture, the form slowly bonding together though remaining incomplete. The answer goes something like this:

Because it’s the most honest place I’ve found.

Because I am fully me and can be no-one else. There is no pretending. I’m no longer ’Project Director’, ’Trustee’, ’Coach’. Even my most precious roles are suspended for a while. ‘Dad’ and ‘Husband’ become hushed.

I get to choose where, and when, and how. I get to press the buttons. This is why. There’s no quick fix, it’s just this foot then that foot. Basic stuff. I’m forced inside myself to feel with cold honest hands my limitations and shortcomings. The boundaries of my physicality press in on the fences of my thinking. I remember all over again to be thankful. For a body that mostly does what it’s told. For horizons I can peer at and reach for.

This is why. This is why I run. Why at unearthly hours I sneek out of bed, down the stairs like a man on a mission for a mars bar, listening to the November wind howling outside and the stairs creak-creaking. Why I grimace because I’ve woken the kids.

This is why I run: To feel the weather decimate my comfort. To throw my body at the elements. To shock my life out of ‘auto pilot’ and jerk it into the reality of a new day. To remind myself that I am living.

Because there on the road I can leave my disappointment, my anguish and my anger, and know that I have not been judged for it. The road is a place that accepts me, and with every step, sparks again the wildness of my dreaming.

And whatever else happens that day, those two hours alone with the road are a gift to myself. Sometimes they come blessed with the sight of a heron in flight, or a stark Silver Birch tree down bare-hedged country lanes. Sometimes it’s just a big open sky above me which on good days I believe may even be calling my name, as if I’m known. Somedays, I just run because I can.

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