Running has not featured much – if at all – on these pages, not because it’s unimportant, but precisely the opposite. In truth, the last few decades’ messing about with bicycles, weights, swimming and yoga have all stemmed from your correspondent’s wish to be a better runner. As my old dad used to say, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Or in this case, if wishes were runners, Jeremy would be Heile Gebreselassie.

Let us zoom past the faltering, humiliating school years, where running featured heavily as part of annual sports days, rugby training and ritual punishment, never achieving the obsessive, meditative heights it can. We are at a small university in Africa, about 1987. The student illusion that one can live entirely in one’s mind, fuelled by beer, comes under extreme stress as a long-standing romantic relationship ends and academic demands chain me to a desk for long hours.

A friend suggests we go for regular runs to clear our minds and sweat out the beer. It is an easy transition — it seems the intellectual’s kind of sport. My father, a daily runner during my teenage years, set the example, but I’d been too effete to do it. So we began, daily, pounding around the oak-lined streets, making all the newbie errors – starting too fast, wearing tight cotton rugby shorts, never stretching.

And it worked: an obsession was born that persists to this day. The attraction is strong: no hitting or catching a ball; no charlatans espousing the fake virtues of teamwork; no expensive equipment.* Just a person, the open road, and the atavistic drive to get moving.

What started as an exam-swotting stress-reliever rapidly escalated into a multi-decade obsession that survives to this day; it encompasses runs on numerous continents and umpteen cities, a clutch of races (including one marathon), and stepping out with some very good friends. It also involved some truly terrible shorts, but what can I say? Fashion’s fickle fingers reach every corner of our culture.

There was a time that taking part in races was important. Being part of a huge mass of people all striving toward the same end is powerful, and if you have something to aim for, it certainly motivates you. Again, doing it with a bunch of friends is also fun, starting with the carbo party the night before. Pizza and beer — what’s not to like?

Of course, there’s no chance of winning the thing, so the popular cliché is that you’re racing yourself, being the best you can be, and such. But I can tell you, there are a million races within a race, usually at the very end, when you decide you absolutely have to beat the person just ahead of you and calibrate your final sprint to that end.

In this manner, I once defeated the winner of the women’s over-65 category with the sheer ruthlessness of my attack over the last 50 metres. Well you may scoff, but I’m taking any victory I can.

Singapore proved a challenge to running: heat is OK but humidity makes it feel so much hotter. I would come home from a short shamble around the block soaked as if by a hose, with droplets trailing from my fingertips. Shorts became saturated and clung unbecomingly about one’s manhood. But worst of all, the heat seemed to build up within the cranium, imparting a feeling that it may well burst.

I took to treadmill running in large, soulless gyms, which in turn required a headset and a playlist of podcasts to stave off the boredom. Another great thing about running: you are truly in a place when you run outdoors and the scenery unfolds steadily, presenting fresh sights to partner with your random thoughts.

It took a while to venture out after landing in Braidwood. We arrived in the depth of winter, which (as now) has too few hours in the day and too few degrees in the atmosphere. It’s not an attractive prospect. Don’t get me wrong: I have run in the snow and ice, but doing it just takes so much more. More clothes, more warm-up, more stretching. And more motivation — it’s much easier to cop out when you know it’s going to be a chilly, lung-burning slog.

Anyway, eventually the urge took over and I stepped out into the mean streets of the village. Perhaps using the nerds’ notepad, Strava, helped. It certainly gives you a motivation to get better — and in a tiny community with few runners, you can be a ‘local legend’ with minimal effort.

And the best thing about it, at which I have hinted, is that when you’re running, you really can’t be anything else. I’m sure lots has been written about the zen-like state you can achieve when shambling along in a welter of sweat, but there’s more than a grain of truth to it. While the body is engaged in forward propulsion and the breathing settles into a regular tidal rhythm, the mind is free to wander.

Dare I indulge in a moment’s rabbit-hole spelunking? It’s just that running seems to tap deeply into the animal core of who we are as humans: in the words of Bruce, baby we were born to run. Our prehistoric ancestors would apparently run long distances as they hunted their food, relying on relentless stamina to run down wounded prey.

And as Chatwin speculated in the Songlines, covering distances across the land provides us with a mnemonic for structuring complex thoughts, including songs and rhymes that, pre-writing, enabled us to preserve and transfer knowledge.

Sometimes at night I use a version of this method to put myself to sleep. I’ll mentally follow one of my old running routes — it needs to be one I covered many times for all the details to remain, tracing every corner, landmark, slope or street until Morpheus steps in or boredom takes hold. Sometimes these memories will bring back whole conversations that have lurked in the recesses of memory for three decades.

Hell, I could just go on and on, like a cross-country club athlete on a training run, one part of the route unfolding seamlessly into the next, building a narrative with a beginning (the early, slightly jarring initial kilometre), middle (the warmed-up, easy-rolling bulk of the route) and end (bringing it all back home, literally, ramping up the effort in a final burst).

Someone once told me that every runner is fleeing from something. I think this might be true, but it’s not the problem they implied it may be. Yes there are health benefits — but it’s really about what the exercise does for your psyche. More than those endorphins, a run gives you structure, completeness, and time out of your head, however briefly. It’s better than any drug and cheaper than therapy.

*Of course, while the minimal requirement is a proper pair of shoes, costs can escalate rapidly once you include the many accessories, doodads and whatnot that can come with the turf.