When he is caught by the police for robbing a bakery, Smith is sentenced to be confined in Ruxton Towers in Essex, a Borstal (young offenders institution) for delinquent youths.

Smith is offered a light workload for his last six months at Ruxton Towers if he wins an important cross-country competition against a prestigious public school.

He lets the other runners pass him and cross the finishing line, thereby losing the race in a defiant gesture aimed against his Ruxton Towers administrators.

It was associated with writers who created "belligerent and opinionated" characters, and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" suggests a confrontation with the class issues of the time.

[4] It has been suggested that Sillitoe was never simply an "Angry Young Man" but had a deep and abiding hatred for the British class system, and that his and Smith's views were not very different.