Pavement pinball – Frank McNally on the perils of rush-hour running

One Friday evening recently, I hit “send” on my last column of the week and then braced myself to go for a run. The bracing took longer than usual because, outside my warm room, it was raining and air temperatures had plummeted.
While I was burying my head in a laptop, it seemed, the last days of September and all of October had been cancelled. We had somehow gone straight to November instead. It looked bleak out there.
But even in the best of weathers, if you go running in the city after doing something quietly cerebral indoors for several hours, you need time to gather your wits (assuming you have any left) before plunging into the streets.
It’s all right if there’s a nice, quiet park nearby. Unfortunately, this is less and less possible as nights close in.
Come autumn, for me anyway, an evening run means emerging, bleary-eyed, from the columnist’s cocoon into the chaos that is Dublin at rush-hour. Do that too abruptly and the shock (or a mistimed attempt to cross the road) could kill you.
It’s partly age, no doubt. But it seems to me that city rush-hour is even crazier these days than it used to be.
It was once a relatively simple matter to calculate the different speeds and trajectories of pedestrians, bikes, and motorised traffic as you weaved through crowded footpaths or crossed streets.
You’d be constantly thinking things like: I can pass that hand-holding couple on the inside, then the dog walker on the outside, then tack back hard right at the group of slow-moving American tourists.
From there, if I sprint, I can get on and off the road quick enough to avoid that queue for the 15A, while letting your man on the 10-speed racer pass first and then swerving back onto the footpath before the 39B reaches me. Etc.
But that was then. Modes of transport have since multiplied to include e-bikes, scooters, monocycles, trams, and of course electric cars that creep up soundlessly.
Meanwhile, even pedestrians are less predictable than before.
Remote working means that many are still mentally at their desks, with all the distraction that entails.
Many others are too busy reading phone screens to do anything as old-fashioned as look where they’re going.
The computations of running in such conditions are so much more complicated. It’s like going from conventional mathematics to quaternions, as you attempt split-second calculations involving three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of what all the moving objects might be thinking.
Add the effects of rain – the smallest amount of which affects Dublin drivers the way full moons affect werewolves – as well as wind and nightfall, and the communal craziness is complete.
My regular autumn-evening route includes a long stretch of the Grand Canal, from the relative calm of Inchicore to the metropolitan madness of Leeson and Baggot Street bridges.
At the latter, I always pass a bronze Patrick Kavanagh, sitting where he once peacefully contemplated “a swan [go] by head low with many apologies”.
But there’s not much peace there now when you’re trying to jog across the nearby bridge at rush hour.
You clock the positions of pedestrians, push-bikes, scooters, cars, taxis, and buses. Then you’re about to make a dash for it, when out of nowhere, a Deliveroo e-biker goes by, head-low with no apologies, threatening to go through you for a short-cut.
Of course, all this can be fun too, as it was even on that bleak Friday night. Irish weather is rarely as bad it looks, once you’re in. And running in rush-hour can energise you as well. If you don’t get killed – which has always been my experience (so far anyway) – the effect is sometimes exhilarating.
Still, where possible, I prefer to get out earlier in the day. I can’t bring myself to run before breakfast, alas: it takes strong coffee, accompanied by banana on toast, for me to function it all. But an hour of two later, work allowing, I’m good to go.
Then, of course, you can use the parks, the glorious Phoenix Park in my case usually; or sometimes the smaller ones of the city centre.
It’s true what the song (nearly) said: Dublin can be heaven, with a caffeine injection before eleven, and a run in Stephen’s Green.
I ran there last Monday in fact: the one weekday I don’t have to write a column. It was getting on towards lunchtime by then. And negotiating the paths was not without challenges.
The lovely autumn weather, bright and cool, had brought big crowds in. Birds too. As I weaved through one group of tourists, a flock of startled pigeons took off in our direction, flying so low that one of them clipped my head with its undercarriage.
But pigeons are the light aircraft of Dublin birdlife, so there was no damage done. If it had been a fully grown seagull, I might have been decapitated. Instead, I jogged on happily through the sun-dappled trees, with a carpet of yellow leaves underfoot. And the experience bordered on blissfulness. There was a moment when, I swear, I thought I’d died and gone to paradise.