The author Stephen King once described writing as telepathy – the writer takes a dream from their imagination and, using only written words, makes it magically appear inside the mind of another person. Like building a ship inside a bottle, the art isn’t just to know what pieces to put in but how to assemble them correctly from the outside. It’s keyhole surgery. As a reader, when you give yourself over to a great book, you allow the author to perform that miracle of reassembling their dream inside your mind. If successful, your imagination is reshaped in a way that endures long after the book ends. You carry the author’s dream with you and it changes how you see the world.
Like authors, runners have dreams too – imagined adventures they hope will come true. It could be running a famous race, a marathon or an ultramarathon. My own most cherished running dreams aren’t about races though – they’re about adventures with comrades on long-distance trails to distant places. When you reach another part of the country on foot, you arrive somewhere that just can’t be accessed by motor vehicle. The same point on the map exists as two different places – the humdrum one you drive to and the magical one your own feet carry you to (usually by a more scenic route). Passing over Cross Guns Bridge, the intersection of Drumcondra, Glasnevin and Phibsboro, I’ve often looked up the canal and thought, “I’d love to just start running up that towpath and keep going – see where it takes me.”
Dream of Running 100k to Mullingar
So, when Donal first told me his dream of running 100 km along the Royal Canal Way to Mullingar, it was as though he had uttered a magical incantation – no sooner had the words left his mouth than we were duty bound to make them come true. And I knew we’d be arriving into a Mullingar I had never been to before – the one you get to on foot.
Bringing James Joyce’s Dublin to Life
A lot of writers work hard to ignite the imagination without too much effort on the part of the reader, which is an art in itself, but James Joyce demands that you work with him to make the magic happen. He famously said, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” And indeed, Ulysses brings the Dublin of Joyce’s memory, and of his imagination, to life inside the mind of the willing reader. Clearly, many people will never invest the required effort, but, such has been the cultural impact of Ulysses, that even to those who don’t read it, it serves as a cornerstone of our shared cultural identity. Like a black hole, its gravitational field extends far beyond its event horizon. A world is contained within it, and it reshapes the world that exists outside it. As an Irish person, whether you read the book or not, its existence has defined the cultural landscape you inhabit.
As the dream of the Royal Canal Odyssey has taken shape in the real world, at times I’ve wondered if I’m on a runaway train. Originally, we imagined a handful of friends might join us on the day, but the dream of an epic Bloomsday run resonates with almost everyone we talk to about it, and now a whole throng of friends – old and new – have committed to joining us for the adventure.
As I see it, the point of committing to a running challenge is to achieve personal transformation. It’s a license to spend time preparing and, through that preparation, to be transformed. For me, what’s unique about my preparation for the Royal Canal Odyssey is that it involves as much research and learning as physical preparation. I don’t think any of us would claim to be Joyce experts – I certainly wouldn’t – but what I’ve discovered is that preparing for a run can be an amazingly effective way to learn about our literary heritage. It has given me occasion to read Joyce again – and to read about Joyce – in a way that feels much more authentically connected to my life.
When we finally touch Joe Dolan’s statue, the finishing point of our epic run, we’ll be arriving in a place where dreams come true. The Mullingar we’ll run into is a place that will be written in our hearts forever, as it was in James Joyce’s.