Book of the week: Running Free - A runner's journey back to nature by Richard Askwith

Running Free: A runner's journey back to nature by Richard Askwith (Yellow Jersey)

Richard Askwith is a serious fun-runner, if that’s not an oxymoron. Perhaps “dedicated” is an apter word than serious, because while he puts in many hundreds of miles each year, he does so for sheer pleasure, having rejected what he calls dismissively Big Running – the competitive, time- and kit-obsessed mindset of so many runners.

His book is in part a diary of the thousands of hours he has spent traversing the countryside around his rural Northamptonshire home through the seasons – how he manages to fit all that in with being a husband, father, executive editor of the daily Independent and author, heaven only knows. It is also a manifesto for “a de-commercialised, lo-tech kind of running”, a plea get closer to nature, to look around and learn to appreciate the sights, sounds and smells of your surroundings. He argues that this offers a far richer experience than pounding pavements and obsessively checking your watch while listening to your iPod (he notes that 55 per cent of British runners do so while wearing headphones).

In the spirit of fair play, he also examines, and takes part in, alternatives to his philosophy. Obstacle racing, which has become big business on both sides of the Atlantic, inspires modified rapture, but he has a lot of time for the northern pastime of fell running, a former passion of his he chronicles in an earlier book, Feet in the Clouds.

More obscurely, for several years he acts as a quarry for Farmers Bloodhounds, a pack trained to chase people not foxes, and later reverses the process by going hashing, which involves following a trail, “a bit like fox hunting, but without the fox, or the horses, or the hounds”.

Intelligent, evocative, passionate and above all enjoyable, this book may not get you running, but it will certainly get you thinking.

Published in hardback by Yellow Jersey, £16.99