How To Play The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner By Iron Maiden

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner is from the sixth studio album Somewhere In Time. It was released on 29 September 1986.

How to play The loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner on guitar, written by Steve Harris. This lessons covers all the guitar parts recorded by Dave Murray and Adrian Smith.

“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” is a short story by Alan Sillitoe, published in 1959 as part of a short story collection of the same name. The work focuses on Smith, a poor Nottingham teenager from a dismal home in a working class area, who has bleak prospects in life and few interests beyond petty crime. The boy turns to long-distance running as a method of both emotional and physical escape from his situation. The story was adapted for a 1962 film of the same title.

Somewhere in Time is the band’s first studio effort following the extensive World Slavery Tour of 1984–85, which was physically draining for the group, lasting 331 days and comprising 187 concerts.

The resulting exhaustion is credited as the main factor in the complete lack of songwriting contributions from lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson, whose material was rejected by the rest of the band. Dickinson had written several “acoustic-based” songs, explaining that “I felt we had to come up with our Physical Graffiti or Led Zeppelin IV … we had to get it onto another level or we’d stagnate and drift away”, although bassist and primary writer Steve Harris “thought he’d lost the plot completely”, surmising that “he was probably more burnt out than anyone at the end of that last tour”. On the other hand, the record is also notable for the number of “fully formed” songs written by guitarist Adrian Smith, who wrote both of the album’s singles: “Wasted Years” and “Stranger in a Strange Land“, the former of which is the only song on the record not to feature synthesisers.

You can find the tabs below but before you go there if you enjoyed the lessons why not sign up for a free online guitar lessons with me.

Adrian Smith’s guitar Tabs:

Dave Murray’s guitar tabs: