The Bowland Ultra wasn't as hard as last year, but it wasn't easy. Instead of snow, sheets of ice lay scattered around the course. The climb to Fiendsdale Head was a skating rink beside a sheer edge. Slopes grassy enough to be *probably* ok if you fell - far enough down that you don't want to find out. 

The hard freeze having solidified the Bowland bogs, this course may never be more runnable. Let’s not pretend anyone finished the race with dry feet, but terrain that’s usually slop was rock solid and fun to run. For the first ten miles I was skipping along.

Training had been thin, with this only my second long run since the Backyard Ultra in October. It wasn’t surprising I started to question my choices miles in. Why do I keep doing this? It’s stupid. I'm not even halfway.

From checkpoint three (Chipping) to checkpoint four (Dunsop Bridge) I gave myself a pass to walk anything that even smelled of hill. Who cares what time I get? Who cares what position I’m in? It’s a beautiful day, isn’t that enough?

Simultaneously: I wonder if I can finish under nine hours? Am I still fifteenth? How far can I get before I need my head torch?

I waddled out of the last checkpoint, fell into step with another runner, and chatted for a bit. Then he fell behind. That was unexpected. Maybe I’m actually doing ok. And is that another runner up ahead? It looks like Phil. It can’t be Phil, he’s an hour faster than me. Let’s see if I can close the gap.

I’ve never felt good on the final climb of this race, but sans snow or bog it was as easy as it’ll ever be. I passed the other runner – it was Phil! - feeling good and pushed hard to the finish, to come in just over eight and a half hours, thirteenth, head torch still in my pack.
 
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Huge thanks to the race organisers and volunteers. I’ve done this event three years in a row and love it so much that I am now one of those race organisers I’m thanking. Needless to say everyone else did much more useful things than me.
 
Photos: Mark Attwood

Type One Fun: fun to do at the time, and fun to talk about afterwards.
Type Two Fun: fun to talk about afterwards - no fun at all at the time.
 
A year ago this weekend I ran forty miles in the snow, which was as difficult and unpleasant as you might imagine.

It was beautiful, but mostly it was difficult. Every third step your foot plunged through the fickle snow and kept on plunging all the way down to the waist. There you'd wobble on one leg like a shit flamingo, overbalance, and fall flat on your chest. Pushing up to regain your feet, your hands would punch through and now your face is buried too. More than once you wonder whether you'll be stuck here forever, like an increasingly frosty Buster Keaton rehearsing an increasingly unfunny routine.

For forty miles.

It was beautiful though. It wasn’t the Bowland fells, it was Narnia. It was so beautiful, I said so aloud to a fellow runner. Then I immediately fell over and banged my shoulder on a fence.
 
I know intellectually that I was miserable for much of the day. But whenever I remember the day I remember the beauty. The images, the feeling of moving through the images, the intense full-body beauty. It was the purest experience I’ve had of Type Two Fun.
 
I’m running the race again tomorrow..
 
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“What’s my motivation?” asks the actor. “Find your why” says the ultrarunner.
 
Actors are easy to mock for this question. I’ve done it myself, often while being the actor I’m mocking - but the answer is useful. It’s hard for me to plausibly tell Ophelia to get to a nunnery, or to tell Polonius I enjoy walking like a crab, unless I have some notion of what lies beneath it. If the reasons feel incoherent then the production might too.*

The problem with ‘what’s my motivation’ acting is not that answering the question is a problem in itself but that it can lead to a very narrow and simplistic understanding of what motivates anyone. If everything about Hamlet is squeezed through a theory about curdled ambition or Oedipal desire or scholarly fineagling then we end up with an expensively-staged essay on the character, the play viewed through a crack in the library door.
 
“I have that within that passeth show”, he says. The reasons don’t have to be as visible as duelling scars, they throb beneath the surface. We all regularly have little or no idea why we’re doing anything. We all have that within that passeth show. With the benefit of a good therapist we can usually figure out a convincing story, but it's a simplification. The scar is not the wound. It's not even the story of the wound. An answer to 'What's my motivation' might be a necessary condition for drama (I'm not even sure about that) but it's miles from being a sufficient one. 'Why do you run ultras' is the same.

Here are some of the standard answers:

• - I want to challenge myself
• - Doing something hard shows me that I can push through in difficult times
• - I just love being in the mountains

 
All of these are true. None of them are true. We have that within that passeth show.

Tell someone you’re running a marathon and they’ll often ask what you’re doing it for. Offer one of the answers above and they’ll look blank: they didn’t mean what’s your motivation they meant who are you fundraising for. For most people running twenty-six miles or more computes only as a very noisy way of rattling a charity bucket. 
 
On his attempt to break the Fastest Known Time for running the Pennine Way, Damian Hall wrote FFF in marker pen on his hand. It stood for Family, Friends and Future. After one of her Olympic marathons Paula Radcliffe revealed that she’d spent much of the race simply repeating her daughter Isla’s name to herself. Before my first 100-miler I got my daughter to write me a note (pictured above) to be opened at the halfway point. These sorts of things are conventionally regarded as the endurance athlete’s ‘why’. (Although as Boff has pointed out, you might do better to find a ‘because’.)
 
But if it was really about expressing our love for our families then we might do something other than run away from them for hours or days. The source of one’s strength when the race gets hard should not be confused with the reason for running it in the first place. John Kelly raised a lot of money for flood relief with his attempt to run the Appalachian Trail - but he’d been planning the attempt since before the Storm Helena hit. So committed was he to not disappointing his supporters that he nearly didn't quit even when it could have led to amputations - I'm not saying this stuff isn't motivating - but it's not the reason for starting the run in the first place. That note from my daughter rang in my head for the last fifteen miles but it isn't why I stood at the start line. On my last 100-miler I had no note, no acronym on my hand, and I was miserable but I kept going anyway. 
 
I have that within which passeth show.
 
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My main race for this year is Lakeland 100 at the end of July. In this blog series I’ll tell the story of the buildup. I’ll talk about training, but also about theatre and writing and art and politics and family. The start line of the race is the finish line of this journey, but training is only part of the journey.

Trying to run 100 miles is a creative endeavour. It's a problem-solving task and the problems multiply. It is, as Julie Carter said about something similar, a form of land art. It’s an exploration into human psychology. It’s a reminder of the things and people you love. It’s a reflection on motivation and persistence of the sort you need in life, beyond obviously pointless pursuits like running a big loop of the Lake District in the vain hope of feeling better than last time you did it.

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To end, here's one attempt at explaining why. I'll make more in the coming months. But what is it about type two fun that keeps me coming back?

I remember the snow. I remember the beauty of the snow. I also remember what it cost. I'm prepared to go that deep again, to go deeper again, to create a store of memories of having been really desperately alive. I'm prepared to? I want to.

Pinter once said of (I think) The Birthday Party something like "the play is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point it stops being funny, and it is because of that point that I wrote it."

Running ultras is fun, up to a point, and it's because of that point that we run them. It's to outwardly extend that point, to dance en pointe on that point.

And then to topple gracelessly into the snow.
 
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* We could argue about whether this concept of human psychology has any relevance to early modern plays that predate Freud and Jung by four hundred years. Maybe not. But it has at least some relevance to performances of those plays that are taking place now. We could also get into a debate about the way anglophile theatre is so hung up on psychology as opposed to image or gesture, on theatre as treatise about human nature rather than as performance art. I don’t think these things are necessarily in tension, for what it’s worth. If you watch (say) German actors at work then yes, they’re more physically committed and image-aware than many British and most American actors, but they’re also adept at making whatever they’re doing feel like it’s being done by a person, not by the director’s mannequin – unless that’s the effect the director’s going for, in which case the motivation is “because the director told me to” and that is legible to the audience and that’s fine.

You can now buy a collection of my solo plays, published by Type Two Press.

It is a lovely thing.

Between them these plays have been performed over three hundred times across three continents. Their commissioners and producers include HOME, ARC, Leeds Playhouse, Oxford Playhouse, Unity Theatre and many more.

The volume contains a new introduction. Each of the plays is extensively annotated with contextual material on their inception, creation and performance, along with wider meditations on the place of performance in the contemporary political world.

​It's only eight quid. Two quid a play!

To buy, go here:

www.typetwopress.co.uk

Where did the idea come from?
When people ask writers questions this is always the first one. The honest answer is usually that it started as six different ideas and only very slowly and painfully distilled itself into something coherent. With this one, I do remember that early on I was thinking about the voices of conscience in peoples’ heads – those nagging voices that tell you something is or is not the right thing to do. And then I thought, how do we know to trust this voice? It’s just as likely the voice of fear or avarice or pain as it is the voice of something honest and good and true. And then I thought, who’d be the very worst people we could listen to? Piers Morgan was top of the list so he's become a major supporting character in the show. Don't tell him.

Do you really rewrite bits for each show?
The show is kind of a satire on satire and for that to work, a little bit of the satire needs to feel broadly current. Two or three big sections are now totally different to when I premiered the show a year ago. And there are another three or four shorter sections that I rewrite on a roughly weekly basis. In Bristol this week there was some Papal Conclave material, hot off the press. It went surprisingly well so I'm hoping to be able to keep hold of it for a week or two.

The show is also about grief. What's the balance between the personal and the political and is it hard to maintain that balance?
I love satirical comedy but I’m ultimately unsure whether it really makes any difference at all. In some ways it's little more than a howl of grief at the monstrousness of the world. If you don't laugh, you'll cry. And it makes us all feel better, which is something, but does it actuate change? I genuinely don't know. If I did I probably wouldn't have needed to make the show!

The central character’s grief wasn’t present in early drafts of the script, but something wasn’t working. To take the plunge into making choices as bad as the ones he makes in the story, he needed a bigger push. And at the time I was writing it, my best friend was dying. Callous as it sounds, as soon as the thought occurred to me of incorporating that experience into the show, I knew it would work. Everyone has some experience of grief and the ways it affects our choices. It humanises this character who could otherwise just seem pretty extreme. And in threading this through, that's when I saw the parallel between his behaviour in grief and the behaviours I see and am drawn to in satirists and oppositional commentators. The publicity asks if it's ok to go too far when you're on the right side. I don't know. I'm drawn to these extreme responses to extreme times, but do they help? Again, I don't know.

After seven years since your last solo show, what’s it like being back on stage alone?
It’s a bit like coming home. I love the purity of the relationship between me and the audience with nothing between us. Since making that last show I’ve written a lot for other people, directed quite a bit, and toured one show in which I appeared with someone else. Every one of those experiences has given me something that’s informed how I now approach the solo work. But in another sense, it’s like getting back together with an old friend – everything’s changed, but also nothing’s changed.

What’s next for you after this tour? Any new themes or formats you’re itching to explore?
My next new work is an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz for the Dukes in Lancaster. It’s on this summer! And it’s got a weird amount in common with Imaginary Friends – someone in an emotional crisis enters a fantasy world and goes on a crazy journey in which they learn an important lesson about themselves. The Wizard of Oz obviously has a more unambiguously happy ending than Imaginary Friends - but they still illuminate one another in startling ways.

As well as that I'm working on a new play about endurance (in some ways back to the terrain of These Hills Are Ours) and a novel for children. Watch this space!

 

On the way back to my digs I saw a man rooting through bins by the light of an iphone. My first thought, absurdly, was the News of the World. What dirt is he digging, on whom? But the News of the World takes no interest in the people of Stockton on Tees, not least because it no longer exists. So what is he looking for?
 
He discovers a pristine orange plastic carrier bag, folds it with an expert twist, and pockets it. What will that net him, 2p? How many plastic carrier bags will it take to buy what he needs? I immediately imagine that what he needs is drugs, but there’s every likelihood he’s just hungry. He's methodical, focused, not obviously desperate.
 
What else will he find? My imagination reaches into my own bin for what's lucrative there, and comes up empty. But this man knows things I don't. In what looks like a fruit punnet he has a whole collection of bits and pieces. His phone torch hardly catches them and I can’t see what they are.
 
I drift into the street off the pavement. I don’t want to alarm him so I've hit the middle of the street before arcing back to my side. His focus takes no dents. What jackpot does he hope to hit? I want to stay, look longer, learn something. I could even ask him, a possibility I never take seriously.
 
He wouldn't want to be embarrassed, I tell myself, by my questions about going through bins. The truth is I don’t want to be embarrassed by asking them. What would I be doing but going through the bins of human experience? I fear turning into that man, driven to the desperation and abjection I presumptuously assume for him. Is writing plays about human failures any less furtive? But I envy his focus, his expertise. His process is better-honed than mine.
 
At dinner that night Scott had told a story about a friend’s dog finding a pork pie under a bush in the park. Now every time the dog goes to that park it tugs its lead at that exact bush, certain it'll find another pie.

We’d been discussing what kept us doing what we do, making the work we make, when as often as not the result is a post-show walk back to a budget hotel alone, having entertained nineteen people in a crumbling arts centre in Worcester. Why do we do it? We keep going through the bins hoping to come up with a truth the world never meant to throw away, hoping to be rewarded with a pork pie.

The plan had been to watch A History of Paper during the Fringe but then I learned it was on in Glasgow and that seemed safer. Olly and I spent our twenties taking plays to the Edinburgh Fringe, him writing, me directing. We watched more plays there than I can possibly remember and were vicious about most of them with the confidence and certainty of youth. There are other reasons I’m skirting the Fringe for a while, but this emotional motherload is the main one for watching this elsewhere.

In Iz, the first play we took to the Fringe, three men attempt to reckon with the loss of the woman they all loved. One of them, her husband, finds a book, her diary of notes and scraps and hopes, and realises – shocked - he barely knew her at all. I thought of this scene while watching A History of Paper, in which the experience is inverted: the tragedy here is that though the husband knew her so well, their time was still too short. This month it’s twenty-six years since Olly and I met on our first day at Leeds University, but our time was still too short.

Watching A History of Paper was strangely like the experience it described. Even the stuff about Pizza Express, a chain Olly introduced me to in 1998 and remained obsessed with for the next 25 years, is echt  Emanuel. I loved this feeling of being close to him, of recognising him in his rhythms and obsessions. At the same time I yearned for something of the Iz experience. I wanted him to surprise me as he did so often, with a completely untenable opinion or an outrageous statement. My knowing my friend was not yet complete. Our time was too short. And of course I wanted to be hurt by this play, which I deserve for remaining alive. 

Such is grief. No-one knew that more than Olly. People often say that he wrote a lot of plays about grief. Actually all of them are about love. But there’s no love without grief, and loss makes love shout louder.

So I went in prepared for emotional bruising, but wasn’t the obvious things that hit me. When she died I was unnerved by being unmoved. But every time I laughed out loud I was suckerpunched. Is this the last time Olly makes me laugh? Every moment of beauty was outrageous in its finality. How dare this be the last audacious pulling together of disparate threads in a joke that makes me laugh and choke? How dare the universe.

Everyone filed out at the end and I couldn’t bear to leave the theatre. In the final sequence of the play the male character had made faltering steps to move on with his life. Even though he wrote it before he knew he was ill – before he was ill at all, maybe - it’s too tempting to see it as Olly’s message to us. ‘Feel grateful for the time we had, not the time we didn’t. Take a deep breath and do it.’ But I’m not ready for the play to end.
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Finally dragging myself from the room, an usher outside was packing up from selling copies of the text. I asked to buy one and it took what felt like fully five minutes for her to get the ipad back online and connect it to the card reader. She kept apologising. I would have stayed all night.

When answering the question of why so many dramatic writers are fans of Test cricket all sorts of theories come up. Five days allows the stakes to ratchet ever higher. Narratives can ebb and flow like a Homeric epic. There’s even a theory that the supposed longeurs of Test cricket are the birthplace of the Pinter pause.
 
I think it’s simpler than that. A sport that lasts five days – what better vehicle for procrastination? You can tell yourself all of the above is true (and all of the above is true) while getting absolutely nothing done whatsoever. It’s as tactical as chess - played out in a series of explosive athletic bursts! It’s a team game – played in a series of individual battles! The richness, the complexity, how Shakespearean! Oh look, it’s Thursday. Oh well, might as well tune in for the final day, then I’ll have three days to catch up on work before the next Test. 
 
When Pinter and Beckett were writing a lot less cricket was played. Now games of cricket come not as single spies but in batallions.  It would be so much more convenient if they could start at 5am, and clock up a couple of hours’ play before the kids get up.
 
This Arts Council application will have to wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The script will still be there after a pause. How did I get to 87 without meeting a single deadline, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything?

On Thursday 8th June at 8pm I'll be premiering two new short films.

The event will be online and you can book via Eventbrite here.

Attendees will get to see both films, followed by a Q&A with me and filmmaker Bevis Bowden.

If you're unable to get to the premiere, the films will be on YouTube from that same evening. You can watch them below if you like.

Here's a bit of blurb for the curious:

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​Bevis Bowden and Daniel Bye present world premieres of two new films.

AS IF OUR LIVES DEPENDED ON IT. A group of fell runners play out a thrilling game that brings centuries-old manhunting adventures into the climate crisis era.

LEARNING TO FLY (AGAIN). In this meditation on illness and recovery, writer Daniel Bye returns to run a favourite hill after a long period on the sidelines.

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​They are both really gorgeous things. I hope you can come.

 On Saturday 1st April I'm making a film. Wanna be in it?

In the film a mixed-ability team of runners will run up High Cup Nick, in the north Pennines. There'll be a game format to the chase up the hill. The film is being shot by the brilliant Bevis Bowden. It'll be an absolute blast.

What's it all about? In Edwardian times, and even now, runners have played 'fox and hounds' type manhunting games in the fells. Academic Jonathan Westaway has written extensively about these, thinking of them (among other things) as rituals of post-imperial anxiety. 'What if', he said to me one day, 'we were to devise a comparable game that got people to engage with anxieties about climate breakdown?'

So that's what our game will aim to do. We'll have some fun running up and down the hill. We'll also play out a scenario that pushes us into confrontation with the consequences of man-made climate change. Fun, and meaning.

The finished film will be shot to very high standards, and beautifully scored. We intend to enter it into festivals such as Kendal. For examples of two other (very different) films I've made with Bevis in the past, see below.

We'll gather in the morning of Saturday 1st, to film through the day. It being film-making, there'll be a certain amount of stopping and starting and retaking, and an inevitable amount of waiting around in the cold. We will look after you, though! We'll confirm exact times with people as they express interest, but we anticipate needing people roughly 10-5. More on the details of this, and what to bring and wear, to follow for those who express an interest.

We can cover people's travel expenses and will also provide some food.

To express an interest, send me an email.

For what may be the final time, These Hills Are Ours is back out on tour for one week only, at the beginning of December.

6 December - Greenwich Theatre, LONDON
7 December - West End Centre, ALDERSHOT
8 December - Ventor Exchange, ISLE OF WIGHT
9 December - Forest Arts Centre, NEW MILTON
10 December - Guildhall Studio, PORTSMOUTH

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