A Time Traveller at the Saturday 5k

What eight hundred thousand years of human history couldn’t teach me — and one morning in Essex did

Photo by Mete Yıldırım on Unsplash

I had traversed eight hundred thousand years without incident. It was the Saturday morning in what the locals call Brentwood — or perhaps Basildon, I confess the machine’s calibration remains imprecise in these nearer centuries — that finally undid me.

The apparatus had begun to sing. Not unpleasantly, but with a persistence that suggested something required attention. A vibration in the quartz rod, I suspected. I drew back on the temporal lever with some care, engaging the retarding mechanism by degrees, and felt the familiar grey dissolution of the time-haze give way to solid colour: green, mostly, and brown, and the particular quality of May light I had not seen in some considerable while.

I materialised within a stand of trees.

I remained still and listened. There were voices — not the distant moaning of the Morlocks, nor the soft, childlike murmuring of the Eloi, but something altogether more vigorous. A kind of ordered excitement. I parted the branches and peered out.

What I observed gave me considerable pause.

Before me was assembled a great crowd — several hundred individuals at the very least — dressed in garments of extraordinary luminescence. Their legs were exposed from mid-thigh downward. Their upper garments were similarly abbreviated, the arms bare, and in many cases the fabric bore curious symbols and numerals I could not immediately interpret. Some wore coverings on their heads in the form of a visor arrangement. All were animated. Expectant.

A voice, amplified by some mechanism I could not locate, addressed them. The crowd responded with a cheering that shook the branches around me. Then came a count — deliberate, ceremonial — descending from three to nothing.

And at the zero, they ran.

I raised my field glasses. I swept the far tree line, the open ground beyond, scanning for whatever pursued them, whatever drove this mass flight. I confess my thumb tightened on the lever.

But there was nothing. No Morlock. No predator. No visible object of alarm.

They ran toward nothing in particular and appeared to be enjoying it enormously.

I was intrigued.

By degrees, I came to understand what I was witnessing. This was not predation. It was contest — but a contest of a most peculiar character, for the roles of hunter and quarry appeared entirely interchangeable. One figure would gain advantage over another, only for the advantage to be reversed, and then reversed again. I felt for the one in front. What would become of him when the hunter drew alongside? I watched with some anxiety as the gap closed — and then the hunter was the leader, and the leader had become the chaser, and no harm had come to either. I confess I unclenched my fist.

This overtaking was occurring throughout the entire group. The hierarchy was perpetually in motion. I found I could not look away.

They vanished around a low green building whose walls bore curious inscriptions — the markings of this tribe, I supposed. Near this building stood a figure in garments of an almost painful luminescence. The runners bore down upon her at speed, and I gripped the nearest branch.

But no harm came to her. She clapped her hands and called out — encouragements, I took them to be — and every runner that passed returned some form of acknowledgement. She cheered them all equally: the swift and the labouring, the tall and the small, the young and the considerably less so.

I was moved, I confess, more than I expected to be.

Presently, one of the leaders came into view on my side of the course, and I retreated behind my tree with some haste. He passed at a velocity I should not have considered possible. And then another. And then another still. I emerged cautiously from the treeline.

They did not appear to notice me. Their eyes were fixed upon some point ahead, their expressions those of persons engaged in a private conversation with their own limits. I found myself, quite without intention, beginning to applaud.

“Capital!” I said. “Capital effort!”

One of them glanced at me. I became suddenly and uncomfortably aware of my attire.

But she smiled. “Thank you, Marshall,” she said, and was gone.

I stared after her. A moment later, another: “Cheers, Marshall.” And another. They came in a stream now — tall and short, broad and slight, young and considerably weathered, representing a remarkable variety of human types from across the globe — and each one acknowledged me in passing. Some nodded. Some raised a hand. One elderly gentleman, breathing with some evident difficulty, winked at me.

I opened my notebook. I wrote the word Marshall.

I did not know what it meant. But I wrote it down.

Then two children came running into view — a boy and a girl, running together as if the distance were nothing at all, laughing at something only they could hear. There was a freedom in their running that I had not observed in the adults — something unguarded, something that did not yet know it was supposed to be difficult.

I watched them pass.

I had seen, in my travels, what the human animal becomes when it divides. When it organises itself by fear, by tribe, by the long, dark logic of survival.

This was something else entirely.

And then, quite without deciding to, I turned back to the machine.

I set the lever. Not far, by my usual measure. Sixty years, near enough. I wanted to know if this thing I had witnessed — this unlikely, unremarkable harmony — survived.

I materialised in the same trees.

They were taller now, but recognisably themselves. The green building remained. The path remained. And presently, to my considerable astonishment, so did the ritual.

Different faces. Different garments, though no less luminescent. And yet — the same. A boy of perhaps seven ran alongside a woman of seventy, and neither found anything remarkable in the arrangement. A man of considerable girth moved at his own pace and was cheered for it. Two young women ran, speaking rapidly in a language I could not identify, laughing at something between themselves. An elderly gentleman in a hat that served no obvious athletic purpose raised it to the figure in yellow as he passed.

Sixty years. And still they came — tall and short, swift and deliberate, carrying more years than I could readily count and running still, drawn from every variety of human origin I could identify and several I could not. Still in their stream. Still in their unlikely, unremarkable harmony.

I turned to go. The machine was where I had left it, patient in the shadows between the trees, and I had no reason to linger.

And yet, I lingered.

Something — I cannot account for it with any precision — held me at the edge of the treeline. I watched the stream of runners thin. The swift had long since passed. The determined had followed. Now came the ones who ran for other reasons entirely, and I found I could not look away.

Then I saw them.

Two figures, far back along the path. An older gentleman and an older lady, shuffling along together with the particular ease of people who have been beside each other for a very long time. I stared. My hand tightened on the notebook.

I knew who they were.

They drew nearer. Presently, they slowed to a walk. The lady stopped beside me. She looked at me — looked hard, the way a person looks when they are deciding whether to trust what they are seeing.

Then she smiled.

“Thank you, Marshall,” she said.

I said nothing. I looked down at my notebook, still open after sixty years, to the single word I had written on that first morning.

I smiled back.

— -

I have since been informed by a local resident that the location was Thurrock, in the county of Essex, and the ritual is known as parkrun. It occurs, apparently, every Saturday morning. Free of charge. Anyone may attend.