I hope this is not too pornographic
But I enjoyed taking my shirt off in the park
A meteorological event of such startling improbability it causes flushing elderly ladies on benches to fan themselves with folded copies of the Guardian magazine; it causes grown adults to hurl themselves around on “skateboards”; the death-throe daffodils are trembling with surprise: it is a warm and dry, sunny day in North London.
I find myself jogging the verdant perimeter of Clissold Park, a modest emerald set in the N5 sprawl, scrunching my face against these unforeseeable beams from the sky. The park is named after the Quaker philanthropist and anti-slavery campaigner Eliza Clissold; her ghost, I fancy, watches with bewilderment as joggers torture themselves for fun around paths that once guided the gentle perambulations of Victorian ladies. It angles itself – neither labyrinthine nor straightforward - before the runner in green, brown and concrete grey, and the black and blue of wrought iron against a naked sky; the paths curve and meander with the jovial deceptiveness of the nearby estate agents, occasionally revealing glimpses of the Victorian mansion at its heart – more property you’ll never be able to afford - now repurposed as a café where the privileged of Stokey wistfully consume overpriced organics and ignore their whiny kids.
I had begun my circumambulation, as I always did, fully clothed. The sombre get-up of the serious athlete: I am promised technical fabric of moisture-wicking properties and ultraviolet-deflecting capacities.
The first few kilometres (the first few “kay”, please) pass beneath my feet with dishonest ease – a honeymoon period before the body remembers its fundamental objection to voluntary discomfort. I navigate the northern edge of the park, passing the tennis courts where all-the-gear fathers instruct reluctant offspring in properly executed backhands. A dog – one of those improbable crossbreeds with a Frankenstein name (Labradoodle? Cockapoo?) – darts across my path in pursuit of a squirrel whose ancestry, may well have remained untampered with by human design, but whose very presence on this island has not. One lap of the park, two kay done.
It is during the second lap, as I round the eastern perimeter where the park abuts the street named for regicidal Cromwell (an irony surely not lost on the residents of these regal terraces, now valued in the multiple millions), that the heat begins to announce itself insistently. Helios, inconstant companion of the English outdoor enthusiast, has decided to perform his role with a surprise commitment. He beats down so as to make the air heavy and still, so as to effect a magical realist translocation of the London Borough of Hackney to tropical climes.
Sweat begins to gather and pool in the geological formations of the body: the valley between shoulder blades, the canyon of the lower back, the deltas of the temples - salty rivulets descend to sting the corners of the eyes. My shirt begins to surrender to the elemental challenge of perspiration. It darkens in expanding continents of moisture, clings with desperation to the humid topography of my torso so that, by the time I approach the southern boundary, where the park meets the junction with Petherton Road, the discomfort has evolved from whisper to animal groan. O my body – you assemblage of cells and systems, you temporary habitation for consciousness and wit, you machine for converting oxygen and carbs to forward motion – you register your suffering in each inhalation, drawing superheated air into lungs that crunch as if with glass.
It is then – at precisely the moment when the running application in my pocket chimes to announce the completion of six kay – that the idea presents itself with the clarity of drone strikes. The fabric adhering to my torso with limpet-like determination is not, after all, mandated by law or metaphysics; it is no material prison. I slow momentarily, my pace reducing from the ambitious clip of the dedicated amateur to the hesitant shuffle of the morally conflicted. For the prosecution: public decency, the potential discomfort of others in the glare of pink and white flab, the shadow of English reserve that falls across the park like the shade of all those handsome, ancient oaks. For the defence: personal comfort, the precedent established by countless male runners before me, the fundamental absurdity of covering human form in which God has made no mistakes. The verdict is read with a single fluid motion (the most graceful movement I execute during the entire run): I grasp the lower hem of my shirt and pull upward. Cool liberation. For a moment hung from my hand like a surrendered flag, I then tuck the Great North Run 2024 winner’s shirt into the waistband of my shorts.
The sensation is immediate and revolutionary – a tactile epiphany, a dermatological freeing. The air, hot though it was, moved across the newly exposed landscape of skin with the gentle caress of river water. Perspiration, no longer trapped between fabric and flesh, is free to perform its evolutionary function. My body, partially uncovered, feels suddenly lighter, as if I have shed not merely a few grams of technical fabric but some greater metaphysical burden.
I resume my pace with renewed vigour, conscious now of a different relationship with the universe through which I move: a theory of General Relativity equates all round me. The park, which moments before was an opponent to be conquered, now feels like the body in which I am some vigorous corpuscle. The sun's heat, no more an adversary, becomes a catalyst in the alchemical process of transformation – photons strike melanin, vitamin D synthesises in the fizzing epidermis, and sweat beads and evaporates in the liquid cycle of thermodynamic rapture.
As I enter the final two kay of my circuit, bare-chested now like suburban Tarzan (though lacking the physique and (literal) simian companions), I become acutely aware of the social dimension of my disrobing. A middle-aged woman walking a Pomeranian (a dog whose evolutionary journey from wolf to animated bunny represents perhaps the most extreme example of artificial selection in the canine world) glances at me with an expression that hovered in the indeterminate space between disapproval and appreciation. Do I imagine a slight increase in the attention my running form receives? Perhaps: the human ego is an ardent narrator and immune to pedestrian truth. More likely, I register as nothing more remarkable than one of the many half-dressed males who populate parks on unexpectedly warm days, a temporary member of that brotherhood of the bare-chested whose membership swells and contracts with the mercury and whose only admission requirement is the possession of a Y chromosome and the absence of excessive self-consciousness.
Yet in my subjective experience – that universe of one that each of us inhabits with the absolute conviction of the absolute monarch – the transformation is profound. My stride lengthens, my breathing deepens, my consciousness expands to encompass not just the mechanical act of running but the sensory totality of it all: the dappled shade beneath the London plane trees, the vapour art of the supra-London planes, distant laughter from the mud-chucking kids, freshly cut grass, vehicle exhaust, coffee from the café.
As I completed the final circuit and get back to my starting point near the gates that open onto Church Street (named for St. Mary's and her elegant spire, though this is a postcode where worship centres on house prices and sourdough), I feel a curious reluctance to conclude the experience. Some work of noble note may yet be done? For a moment I consider an additional lap, an encore performance for my audience of disinterested dogs and their perambulating owners.
But then the running application announced, with digital certainty, the completion of my 10k. Reality reasserts itself with the inexorability of gravity. I am not a mythological figure but a mid-thirties lawyer standing shirtless and sweating in a public park, heart rate elevated, water bottle empty. I retrieve my shirt from my waistband and, after a moment's hesitation, pull it back over my head, knocking the air pods from their ear sockets. The memory of liberation begins to recede.
But something remains – perhaps it was nothing more profound than the reminder that pleasure resides in the simplest of transgressions or the most minor departures from routine. Or perhaps it was the recognition that the body, so often relegated to the status of inconvenient transport, occasionally deserves acknowledgment as the primary instrument of our being with the world. As I pass through the park gates and returning to the grid of streets and obligations that constitute ordinary existence, I carry with me not just some physiological benefits– the endorphins and strengthened cardiovascular system and the modest caloric deficit – but also the memory of those two final kilometres, bare-chested under an improbable English sun, when running had briefly transcended mere activity to become something approaching joy.