THE 1975 hit song Born to Run is generally considered to be Bruce Springsteen’s signature song.
In the magazine Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”, it was ranked number 27 while it was also included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll”.
It would seem therefore that the song itself was born to run and run and run.
It may well be in a completely different context but we all know that wonderful saying that "Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up and knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed.
Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up, and knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle — when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."
Each of those animals was born to run, whether it was away from something (danger) or towards something else (safety). For many, they run to survive.
The example emphasises that we all face pressure, whether it is to perform or work, and that if we do not run we are going to fail, whether we are at the top of the scale or at the bottom.
There will be many, however, who feel strongly that running is firstly pointless and secondly painful — when it is both these, it loses any appeal entirely and exclusively.
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It seems we spend our whole time running, not walking, chasing faster after something that often appears to elude us and all the time it hurts, physically and emotionally. Run, run, run…
The fact is though that we are all born to run, with the innate ability to run.
Indeed, children often step into running, though perhaps that is often because they have to keep up with older, bigger adults who walk faster.
Yet they run; they love to run. They tear around the playground, playing ‘Chase’. Very often, and certainly initially, it is not very fast nor is it very pretty but ‘run’ it is!
Why is it therefore that we find adults saying they cannot run — or worse, they will not run? Look at any marathon, any ultra-marathon even, and see who is running.
People of all different shapes and sizes are running, day in, day out, in readiness for the race itself where they pound their way along the road, kilometre after kilometre.
They run. They do not claim any boast or excuse about their size but they just run – not very fast, necessarily, but run they do. They can run. They are born to run.
It is interesting that many expressions and life lessons refer to running.
We are always encouraged to “hit the road running”, in other words, we need to go out hard, enthusiastically, intentionally, purposefully, immediately, if we are to be effective or productive. We do not walk; we run.
We need to go out, running, as we mean to go on. Then we have the expression, referring to running, about the “rubber hitting the road”, or as some put it, the “tackie hitting the tarmac”. We need to land (or start) running and the real test is answered when we run, when things start to happen.
The fact is we all need some degree of motivation to run. Although it is an extremely natural gift with which we have all been born, we find it hard to run.
Some may well run because there is a prize at the end. Others may be motivated purely by the threat of punishment if we do not run, the threat of consequences to our inertia — in that way we begrudgingly run, purely to avoid any penalty for ourselves or for our team or company.
But then others still (as we all should) will be motivated by the pleasure, satisfaction, delight in running, in achieving targets quickly, in reaching goals fast.
The story about the lion and the gazelle is often seen as a metaphor for “life's challenges, showing that everyone, whether predator or prey, must constantly adapt and exert effort”.
The sooner we learn the importance of running, at school but not just at school (what we learn in school sport is as relevant and important to us when we leave school and all through our life), the more effective we will be.
We do well to remember too, that every day, just like the lion and the gazelle, we run — in fact, not just every day but every week, every month, every year.
This term is usually the term for running, with cross-country and athletics, but running is for life and the more we are trained and equipped to run when we are young, the more effective we will be.
We all need at the start of a new term and year to hit the road running.
‘Born to Run’ is fifty years old and still running; so should we at that age, whether we feel like a lion or gazelle.
That must be our signature: Born to run — and run.
