Running is good, we all know, at loosening the knots we’ve tied in the laces of our shoes. (A run in the rain, I have been astonished to find, may loosen even a double knot.) And even if the invention of Speed Laces proves eventually to be the end of the running shoe knot, we may count on there always being stubborn knots at which running may work: knotted stomachs and knotty problems. Many are the seemingly indissoluble puzzles that have proven soluble after just one hour of running. Had Alexander the Great been more of a runner, he might have undone the Gordian Knot without ever having needed to raise his sword to it, thus forfeiting the rope to brashness.

Why an hour? Why not more? Dr. George Sheehan spoke as if there were a sort of number magic in running for sixty minutes. An honorable physician, Sheehan prescribed an hour of running a day to keep the likes of him and his colleagues away; no man was ever happier trying to work himself out of a job. For regular folks with careers and children, an hour most days of the week seems about right. Any more, and how to fit the run in becomes a knotty problem in itself. Any less, and the purity of the act seems tarnished by our breaking a nice round unit of time into a kind of petty change, like digging in our pockets and purses for a tip of $8.53 when we might instead offer a crisp ten-dollar bill for services earnestly rendered.

Some of us are morning runners. Others prefer to run in the evenings. Still others are lunch-break runners. The most dedicated among us are all-of-the-above runners. To an untold extent, necessity and Circadian biorhythmicity decides the when of our running. Any time might be a good time to run, but I myself am partial to evenings. Much of this preference has to do with a fringe benefit of evening running that I like to call running on it.

The solitary runner whose designated hour falls between the end of her workday and the call to dinner runs in a world of long shadows. And not all of these shadows may be accounted for in terms of her person and her surroundings. Though she hears the fall of but one pair of feet, she is not alone. She is trailed at every turn by the unfinished business of her day. But didn’t she swear to leave all of that at the front door? The child who plays at shaking its own shadow has no easier task than the adult who works at shaking the hangover of a “rough day at the office.” How much of a rough day’s dialog do we play back to ourselves as we run? And why can’t we just turn it off? Just when we think we have, we catch ourselves ruminating on it again. Mama said there’d be days like this. With any luck, she handed us a pair of running shoes as well.

What can we accomplish in just one hour of running? In our hour we can rehearse the replies we’ll give tomorrow to the questions we left unanswered today. In the chess match that is life, we can gain the advantage that an adjournment affords, having our hour to masterfully plan a move that will turn the match’s momentum in our favor. As for heated conflicts, we have long been advised to walk away from them. As runners, we can go one better. We find that not only the tread of our soles is worn thinner by running. With a brisk run, the indelicate tread of others is often smoothed away. We do well to remember that psychotherapy too proceeds an hour at a time—and is a great deal more expensive.

At a renewable energy fair, the runner will find the pedal-powered projector to be no very great revelation. Her daily running is a dynamo that powers the reel from which the record of her day is projected. All day long her retinae had been busy filming, and her auditory cortex recording. Here, for the first time since she woke, her attention is not being called to the scene of some new fire. In this hour her mind is finally at leisure to study the day’s frames, and to critique, summarize, tag and archive the work. For this kind of viewing, she finds that the “best seat in the house” is no seat at all, and in no house. “The benefits of daydreaming,” according to psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, “are most potent when the external environment is undemanding, and our minds are free to roam our rich internal landscape of emotions, images and fantasies, and to consider our more distant aspirations and plot our paths toward them.” And rest assured that when we encounter a stretch of external terrain requiring all of our wiles, the executive network of our brain will jolt us from our reveries more effectually than any proverbial rap on the knuckles.

With so much work to be done in these hours of ours, can any miles we run in them be termed “junk miles”?  “Know the purpose of each workout.” This has become a hot tag-line in athletic coaching; it speaks to the weekend athlete’s need for optimal efficiency. We need only to reconstitute our thinking to know that while not every workout translates to running a faster marathon, no workout is without purpose. “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night,” Thoreau said of certain hours of his life that others were quick to deem idle. “They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.”

Much of this kind of personal growth we’ll find to have taken place though we were unconscious of its having done so. Our running journal records that it was just a run. The elevation of our mood suggests that it was more. While our ears heard every word of the wind, and while our eyes read the trail as closely as a favorite poem, our brains apparently had been running scans and fixing errors in the background. We rarely can say just why the world seems a better place after a run. It is enough that it does. We run for more reasons than we know. When all is said and done, it was our unconscious—and not our conscious—minds that chose running for us. Racing, the pursuit of prize purses and scholarships, weight loss, fitness, life-extension, charity and community are but a few of the reasons I have heard conscious minds give for their running. While any of these reasons would be sufficient, the whole lot of them may be little more than an ad hoc defense for appeasing the uncomprehending and unconverted world. There is good medicine in running. Our unconscious minds knew it long before our conscious minds began vouching for them.

For most of us the expression, “sleep on it,” is a familiar one. The phrase was coined in the dark ages before the popularization of running. Sleeping on a thing—providing that thing doesn’t prevent one’s sleeping in the first place—requires eight or nine hours. And why does it so seldom occur to us that the five or six its we are sleeping on at a time may be why we aren’t sleeping much at all? We runners may do better than to sleep on it. We may run on it. The latter requires a single hour only. More importantly it allows our heads to hit our pillows a great deal emptier (in a good way) than they might otherwise have been. Is it any wonder that regular runners claim to sleep better?

As adults we understand that we can’t outrun our shadows. As runners we know that we can at least tire them out.