Tab Guide to Exam-term jogging

In the heat of this oh-so-stressful term it’s important to get out of the library and into the open air before you get scurvy or typhus or something.

As I’m sure you’re aware, jogging is a great way to spend some time with yourself, get immersed in nature and burn a few calories. It also raises your metabolism, making you more productive for the rest of the day. This guide aims to make the experience as enjoyable as possible:

Step 1: Go to the Mill Pond

It’s important to get out of the city, to leave the psychologically claustrophobic streets behind you and try to relax a bit. Cambridge is hardly a sprawling metropolis. In a very short time you will be in the country. Enjoy the scenery, and the fact that you are not working. Begin to jog. Let the sounds of the countryside sooth you.

Feel free to bowl tourists over with your speed

Step 2: Run

You pass a cow and marvel at the simplicity of its existence. While you rise at 8am and stay up till 2, it just eats, shits, and chills out. Try to remember the last time you did the same. Even shitting is stressful these days, metamorphosed as it has into prime essay-reading time.

You envy the cow

Step 3: Keep Running

Question why you applied to Cambridge in the first place. Is academic pursuit even worthwhile?

Realise you do not have long on this earth. Realise you are wasting this precious gift of life being needlessly pensive and miserable.

Step 4: Run Faster

Hum the words to “I Want To Break Free” as you go. Attempt to jog in time to them. Wish you had brought your iPod. Deliberate over returning for it. Decide that you cannot. You have left it behind, along with the pain. There is no going back now.

Nothing can stop you

Step 5: Don’t stop

You are now at one with nature. The beautiful river Cam is to your left, flowering pastures are to your right. Behind you, the fires of hell lick tendrils around thousands of beleaguered souls who cry out from dingy libraries and clinical exam halls – you are not one of them. Before you, there is nought but open country, peace and freedom. You press on.

Clearly walking back from a food shop. You shall not succumb to these human frailties.

Step 6: You have to escape

Think for a moment of all the friends you are leaving behind, all the people who will care you’ve gone. Doubt yourself for a second. Console yourself on the fact they would have done the same in your position. Resolve to write to them from whichever paradise you end up in.

Realise that sentence ended with a preposition. Realise that, outside of Cambridge, no-one cares.

Fuck this. Fuck all of this.

Step 7: Don’t look back

Notice another jogger running in the opposite direction. Be bemused. Why would they go back? Watch that confusion become anger. They probably enjoy exams. They’re probably one of these people who’re “on it”. They probably read other people’s exam results as they are put up for public display and gloat. You realise they epitomise everything you are leaving behind.

Watch that anger turn to pity as you begin to understand they are simply a pathetic creature, devoid of love, in need of grades for affirmation. Watch that pity become smugness. You are a Child of Nature; Enlightened and free. You need no such affirmation.

Nothing can come between you and mother nature

Step 8: Keep. Running.

You become tired, but you cannot stop. You can never stop running, for it is impossible to be far enough away from that place. Be grateful you made it out while you still could.

Here is a pictorial representation of what your journey will have looked like:

Run forest. Please God, just fucking run.

Image credit: Trainer Academy