Cross Country Runner explores the sound world of a single runner along the canals and fields of an English landscape. The sounds can be interpreted as signifying the runner's shift in focus between his internal state and the world around him. The sonic transformations from fields and bridges towards blood and breath serve as transport into a physical self awareness, and culminate at a "transcendent" singularity with runner and environment.
Its formal structure can also be seen as a meditation on some ideas from James Gibson's Ecological Psychology, in which an organism, embedded in its environment, achieves perception as a result of that interaction. In this view, the small epilogue, Glint, signifies the emergence of perception at the contact point between the organism and its environment. The sounds of leaves, tarmac, gravel, shoes and laces are left largely untransformed, non-representational, and direct. These sounds are the points of contact that conduct energy and make the runner's movement (and purpose) possible. Recognition of the sources can be achieved, but context may obscure them.
As an exercise in open form, Glint and Cross Country Runner can be listened to as autonomous works but, using Gibson's scheme, the two are interdependent; Glint existing within the other. A glint is "a brief or faint manifestation" or "a trace of emotion expressed through the eyes". This glint, of course, is expressed through the ears.