I was, therefore, aghast when my parish priest recently told me he had seen me out running.

On the other hand, exercise isn’t a concept foreign to Christianity. St Paul famously exhorts the early Christians in Thessalonica to be “athletes for Christ”. Running has given me a deeper appreciation of what this entails. A runner has to listen to their body, and understand what it is saying. Your mind and your body must work together. The feminist writer Kathy Acker thought our culture disdains athletic pursuits because modern civilisation lives “under the sign of Descartes”. In what’s called “Cartesian dualism” the human person is bifurcated into body and mind. The mind is the seat of logic, rationality, culture, politics: it is where our real self resides. The body is a place of chance, lust, disease, and death: our dangerous and grubby “other” side.