Why the runner's high is the smug hill on which I'll die

We runners, like good churchgoers, are a community, we follow rituals, we try to convert everyone and, best of all, we finally enter the zone

- Margot Bertelsmann

I don’t have religious convictions. My approach to my own agnosticism is to argue that any all-powerful, ever-loving creator, if they exist, is unlikely to be perturbed by what I, one among the billions of life forms on an ever-increasing number of stars and planets, believe about them.

It’s more important, I think, for each person to start in their own sphere of influence and behave in a way that they can morally live with themselves among those closest to them.

So then why does having been to church feel so good?

Is it the sensory delight of smell and sound and sight, as bells tinkle, hymns resound, incense trails and stained glass reflects? Is it the soothing familiarity of the ritual, the call-and-response suggesting communality, solidarity, belonging? Or perhaps it is the sense that all the people around me have willingly taken time out of their busy days and lives to devote a slice of time solely to trying to become a better human?

It’s all of the above for me. And yet I never feel like going to church. In the abstract, sure, but not in practice, at 8.45 on a Sunday morning.

Another thing I don’t ever feel like doing is getting up at 4.25am three times a week to go running. Still, it’s something I’ve been doing for almost three years now so I don’t suppose I'll stop anytime soon.