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For Slate, Stephen Lurie covers what’s known as Dawn to Dusk to Dawn, an ultramarathon in which participants run as many laps as they can around a 400 meter track in 24 hours. “D3,” as it’s known, takes place in Pennsylvania and is one of the oldest 24-hour races in the world. This past May, it attracted 36 participants aged 16-82.
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
For my second marathon, I ran Boston. I had planned to run the Chicago Marathon in October, but I ran too long through a hamstring injury and ended up having to take off for about eight to ten weeks. I remember being thrilled to come just a little bit close to my marathon pace at the Thanksgiving Drumstick Dash in Indianapolis. My first ten miler was January 1 and I was slow. I ended up with a training block I could be proud of, but I only had time (in terms of weeks to build up and before the race) to get in two 20- or 22-mile long runs. This season I added heavy lifting twice a week, which helped with rehab and with those Boston hills. Because of the injury, I was slow in my recovery and long runs through the whole block. I saw myself running paces I had never seen before, dipping at times to about three minutes or more off my MGP. I was delighted to hear Nell Rojas say on the Running Rogue podcast that she often does long runs and recovery runs at 3+ her MGP. But it did kind of get in my head. I was still generally hitting paces in workouts, but I don’t think they were quite at the same intensity and it often took more reps to get to the target pace. All this to say, it was a return-from-injury training cycle. I knew that. But also, at the same time, last July, I couldn’t quite see myself in Chicago. Even before the injury took a bad turn, I didn’t see it. But I did see myself in Boston. My teammate from Rogue’s She Squad, Colleen Reutebuch gave me a book, 26.2 to Boston: A Journey into the Heart of the Boston Marathon, when I qualified at CIM. Each chapter is the history and the terrain of each mile. When I read it, I could see myself there. I read it again this winter as well as every other podcast I could get my hand on that described the feel of the race and I could continue to see myself running those streets from Hopkinton to Boyleston.
I had a race plan that I thought was doable, but aggressive. I didn’t quite nail it, but I did BQ at Boston. And now I’m processing what I experienced and what I learned.
One lesson I learned is, for the love of all that is good and true, Adriel, pay for the race hotel and stop being so darn cheap. You may recall that my Airbnb canceled on me 28 hours before I was supposed to leave for Sacramento ahead of my first marathon. This time the problems with the place I reserved on Expedia, but which turned out to be run by an independent group off of VRBO. Everything that could have been a problem with it was. First of all, Expedia told me I could check in relatively early, and I still have the screenshot that says that, but the place said it was non-negotiable that check-in was at 3. Since I was coming in on Saturday I was concerned that I wouldn’t really have the time to relax that I wanted. I did eventually get them to agree to honor the 1 pm time. But when I got there — or, I should say, when I got to the shady sitch that was a series of boxes with keys about 3/4 of a mile from the place — I did not have access to the key until 3. Then I had to walk over to the place, which was near Boston Commons. I mean, was it cheap? Yes, for the location. Was it a good deal? No. The first night, which would have been two nights before the marathon and so maybe the most important night of sleep, the bar two doors down was loud until 2 and I could not sleep. And then someone who lives in the apartment complex sat on the steps outside my little apartment until 1 talking to his family — they were all on Facetime so it wasn’t even just like one half of a conversation — until 1 AM. Anyway, I didn’t sleep. Also, the shower dripped the whole night and the A/C was broken so it was not comfortable and maybe bordering on torturous.
I flew out on Saturday morning. A lot of people on my flight from Indianapolis to Boston were wearing running gear and many of them were wearing their previous years’ Boston Marathon jackets. I asked a woman sitting across from me in the waiting area if she was running the race and she turned out to live in my neighborhood and run with Indy Runners. She also ended up being on my flight back. I gave her my number and I hope we can run together. I went straight to the race expo with my suitcase, which they had dogs sniff out. The race expo was very crowded. The line to just get into the Adidas shop snaked through the huge room. I did wait in line for the recovery legs, which they let people sit in for 15 minutes and that was well worth it. I would buy them if they weren’t $800. I walked over to Newberry where the pop-up shops were and caught a Lyft to the key pick-up place and then went to my apartment. I don’t want to talk about the apartment anymore. I tried to put aside the negative vibes and not complain. I went and had some gluten-free pasta at a nearby restaurant. Then I walked back and watched some tv and tried to sleep and may or may not have slept.
Sunday I went to meet up with the Rogue Running folks for a shake-out run along the Charles and then to go take a photo at the Finish Line. I finally met Chris McClung in person, after listening to every single one of the Running Rogue episodes. I appreciated how welcoming the Rogue folks are. I felt like Chris thought of all the athletes there as important to the Rogue family, and I appreciated that. (I was training with a virtual group, but now I’m training one-on-one with a Rogue coach, which maybe feels sometimes less like being on a team, which I miss.)
I went back and showered and then met up with a philosophy friend who I also talked into coming out to cheer for me since she has lived in Boston for eight years or something and is about to leave and never went to watch the Marathon and now she knew someone running it. I’m glad she went because she ended up being the only one of the three people I knew who were cheering for me who saw me.
We had a nice long leisurely brunch and then I went to the Fairfield Copley for a pep talk with the Rogue team. Chris talked about the stories of people who had run the Boston marathon for someone or something bigger than themselves from Bobbi Gibb to Meb Keflezighi. He gave some advice, not all of which I can remember now. One thing stuck with me and kept coming back to me during the race: connect to the course. He meant that in all its valences: the fans, the history, but also, and what I kept thinking about as I was running it, the feel of the roads and the hills. Chris also told me to avoid walking around too much and to jog if I needed to get places, which is why I decided to take the T even for short distances.
I went back to where I was staying and then had an early dinner at a place around the corner — steak frittes with some vegetables. That’s become my pre-marathon meal. Turns out carb loading the night before a race doesn’t really work — to really carb load you have to do it with significant amounts the week before and really you should be getting significant carbohydrates through the training cycle. So I went back to where I was and talked to my coach who was very encouraging. She reminded me of successes in my training and shared her confidence in my ability to follow the race plan. My race plan had me about thirty seconds off my goal pace for the early miles that are mostly downhill, but also not fighting back on the downhills, and then steady cruising at marathon pace through miles 5 to 16, backing off the pace through the Newton hills and then trying to crush getting closer to half marathon goal pace in the final miles. The weather report said no rain through the race so we talked about whether to wear the hat I had just bought and decided against it. I’d regret that when it rained hard for forty-five minutes in the middle of the race, but at the time, I believed the weather report, and I don’t love to have extra pressure around my head.
So I went to bed hopeful, picturing myself feeling good and relaxed and ready. I didn’t really get to sleep for awhile because the place was warm. I eventually got out of bed at around 5:45 AM, got dressed, including in my thrift store sweatpants and the sweatshirt I got from that St. Patty’s Day run that read: Beer and Running, my favorite things. Then I made my oatmeal and walked over to the T which I took to the buses that held the gear check. I checked my post-race sweatshirt and sweatpants and walked over a block to Commonwealth to take a Lyft to the busses. Rogue teams up with someone who charters buses with toilets that you can sit on after you get to Hopkinton. So I went to the buses, which leave from the Cambridge side of the Charles. I was a bit early so I walked over to the Hyatt to get a cup of coffee, which I was very glad to find. I had forgotten to bring my caffeinated nuun so I only had regular sports nuun. I brought some bottles of water and I ate one of the Ucan bars on the bus about an hour before I had to move toward the Athlete’s Village. I met a woman from DC who was a delightful seat partner on the way to Hopkinton. She had the opposite trajectory that I had: she was in a Ph.D. program in Italian literature before switching to work in politics. We both brought the same issue of the New Yorker to read on the bus, but spent most of the time talking about running. I love how running connects people who are strangers around an activity that is somewhat absurd and hard, that challenges us and thereby produces a common bond. The best runners keep themselves open to that bond. I’m learning about myself that I can be shy and uncomfortable in social situations in a way that can make me distant and unconnected, but a little bit of openness can turn into real connection.
Long hard races require you to have a clear sense of purpose. What’s your why? people ask. During the pandemic running was an outlet, a project, something to focus on, and eventually, a way of pushing my edge, of learning what I was capable of. That’s a huge part of what it continues to be for me, but over the course of the last eighteen months it has become about experiencing myself as a whole person. In the Fall of 2021 my mother had some serious health issues that made her mortality and my own real to me. She’s ok now, but during that time I would go for runs and cry through the run. I’d come home and my husband would ask me how I was doing and I would say, I’m fine. I didn’t think I was trying to hide my feelings, I just didn’t know how to share them. Soon after I began seeing an EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapist to work on being more connected to my emotions and more capable of sharing them. I didn’t go to the therapist for the EMDR, she just happened to be a specialist in EMDR. EMDR is typically used for people suffering from PTSD. When the therapist told me that, I told her that I didn’t really have any trauma. Apparently, this is a common conversation I have with therapists because my last therapist told me I had high anxiety and I told her I didn’t think I was anxious. There must be a special class in which they train therapists not to laugh. She suggested that lowkey trauma from childhood is the source of the coping mechanisms people develop. We spent some time talking about the moments from my youth that I thought significant especially around my view of what it means to feel and to have feelings. Then we worked with the EMDR strategies to revisit those moments and reprogram them in my mind. If this sounds goofy, trust, I was a little uncomfortable about it at first, but whoa, it really did work. It shifted something in me and made me more comfortable having tears and feelings and sitting with them instead of running from them.
What’s running have to do with this? Running was a place for me to work on feeling. I listened to a podcast episode about the Boston Marathon where the podcasters talked about getting motivation from the spectators and it made me cry as I was driving to campus one day. And when after the race I went to the Rogue happy hour and Chris asked me how I felt about it, I let myself get choked up at my disappointment. Rogue Running describes its missions as, Connecting, challenging and inspiring each other to become better humans through running and yeah, I think they’re on to something. So I was open to the person who sat down next to me and was rewarded by conversation and fellow feeling.
I got off the bus by myself at about 10. My start time was 10:50. By the time I got over to the Athlete’s Village, I had time to go to the bathroom and they were already beginning to move people to the start line – 10:20 was the opening window for the 10:50 starters to move. So I started walking over as it began to drizzle and then at the start line I went to the bathroom again and peeled off my thrift store sweats and accidentally also peeled off my headband and gave that to the donations too. I didn’t realize until I started the race that I didn’t have it! It turned out to be fine because the rain just matted my hair down. I was a little behind my corral and maybe that is why the first mile was even slower than I had planned. I ate a salted peanut Ucan bar just before starting.
The start was a little anti-climactic. There isn’t a separate gun for each group. All of sudden, you are at the start line and then you are crossing and then you are running THE BOSTON MARATHON. It was a little unreal. People talk about the Boston Marathon as this lifetime goal, as an ideal, as something that exceeds mundane existence. But you know what? The Boston Marathon is a set of roads through eight towns in Massachusetts. The roads themselves are not magical or ideal. They are just roads. Realizing this made me have more belief that I could do it. For the first miles, I didn’t hold back too much but I also didn’t push. I started with nuun in two small water bottles and so I skipped the first water stations which were a little hectic. I was right where I wanted to be by mile 7. The crowds were amazing all the way along. I knew the family of a friend was looking out for me in the first several miles so I was looking out for them, but then at one point a woman yelled my name, which I had spelled in medical tape on my singlet, and I was like, hey, that’s me, and she looked at me very strangely and I realized we were miscommunicating. She thought she was just saying my name and I thought she was looking for me. I was a little embarassed imagining her recounting the story to other people.
I thought I could get faster between 7 and 16 then I could. On some miles I was under 10 seconds off (6 miles) and then others were under 15 seconds off (3 miles) and a couple were under 20 seconds off (2). That’s not that bad, but I worried about what it meant for my fitness. I thought those middle miles were mostly flat, but they weren’t really at all. The hills weren’t too severe but they were pretty constant rolling hills and that turned out to be harder terrain at which to maintain my HGP than I had thought it would be. I took my second Ucan salted peanut bar at mile 11.
I started looking for my sister and my mom around Wellesley. They thought they were going to be on the left, but most of the crowds were on the right, so I wasn’t sure if they were wrong or if they knew what they were saying to me when they told me left because they wanted to be away from the crowds. For the second marathon my Aftershokz gave out on me about an hour in to the race and the text that I thought would be read to me from them saying they were on the right never came through. I heard the Wellesley scream tunnel about a quarter mile out (people have said you can hear it a mile away, but I don’t think that is true). That’s when I started looking for them and I looked for them through Wellesley into the town but didn’t see them. I was kind of bummed because I had been looking forward to the energy from seeing people cheer from me, and I felt bad that they made the effort and we didn’t connect. It did start to rain pretty hard through Wellesley for — I mean I don’t know it’s hard for me to gauge time in a marathon — I think it was about 45 minutes, which maybe also explains my slowing through those miles. I was pretty soaked and my singlet was sticking to me, which was not particularly comfortable.
I took my first SIS isotonic gel at mile 16. Through the four Newton hills from 16 to 21, I focused on not pushing the hills and then not overdoing the downhill but relaxing into it. I was about 30 seconds off what I thought my slow down pace would be in miles 17 and 18 but only ten seconds off at 19, and then 20 seconds off at 20 and then 50 seconds off at 21 which is Heartbreak Hill. My plan had been to come back down to MGP and then even 20 seconds below MGP at the end, but again it wasn’t really flat as I had hoped, but still rolling. Only one of those miles was under my MGP. I felt pretty strong, though. Then at mile 23, my right quad started to hurt. Those downhills really do a number on you. I was nervous, but I ran through it and the pain dissipated. Turns out that they are right that just because this mile hurts doesn’t mean the rest of the race will. I had other friends around miles 18-19 that didn’t see me. My friend at mile 23 did see me, even though I didn’t see her, but hearing afterward that she saw me felt validating.
The last mile was the fastest. The last half mile was the fastest. I did have a kick. The last half mile was approaching my 10k pace. I was proud of that.
I was under nine minutes off my goal and a little under 6 minutes off my PR. I was disappointed. (In the clip above, if you look over the shoulder of the reporter on the right, you can see me hobbling past talking on a red phone on MSNBC.) I appreciated the well-wishes from family, friends, and colleagues who had been following me on the BAA app. But I was disappointed. I don’t think I realized how much until Chris asked me at the happy hour how I felt and I choked up. When he told me to feel all the feels, it seemed like the lesson of this training cycle. I did feel them. I am proud of myself for another Boston qualifying time, and this time at Boston. But it did not come as easily as CIM did. I wondered if I had pushed my edge through those middle miles. My hamstring never bothered me at all through the whole race, and I was so pleased that it had come through for me. And yet, I thought I had more. I did have some doubts about myself: Did I back off because of fear surrounding my injury? Was I too worried about wanting to finish my first Boston Marathon that I didn’t push myself to the edge of what was possible? I’m not beating myself up here, I’m trying to be honest. I’m trying to think about why the race didn’t go as planned.
I think the heavy lifting helped. The recovery this time was much less painful than after CIM, which might have also been supported by the carbon-plated shoes (New Balance FuelCell Elite v2). I think the fewer ≥20-mile long runs affected my performance. And also, I live in a pretty flat city. I spent some time in hilly neighborhoods, but if I were to run Boston again, I’d run every medium and long run in the hilly neighborhoods.
I appreciate all the people who have told me I should still be proud of this performance. I did keep a pretty steady pace. I was smart about the hills. I finished fast. I think I still have a 3:35 marathon in me. My coach thinks I have a 3:30. I don’t currently want to return to Boston. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it pulled me back eventually.
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Running is a sport of contradiction. Finishing a marathon is at once extraordinary and unremarkable: Running 26.2 miles is an exceptional achievement, but it’s also one that 1.1 million people complete every year.
In running, themes of life and death coexist. On one hand, it’s a celebration of what the human body can do and achieve. Some events, like cancer charity runs, are associated with the will to survive. But at the other end, in the sport’s most extreme races like the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon in California’s Death Valley, participants teeter on the edge of mortality. The truth is, the marathon was born out of, quite literally, death.*
* The first marathoner, an Athenian man delivering news of a Greek victory after a battle, collapsed and died after finishing his journey.
Other contrasts abound. Sociological analyses of running culture also show how it can be egalitarian and unequal at once: Theoretically, running has no barrier to entry, and all you really need is a good pair of sneakers, but the socioeconomic and racial disparities in the world of competitive running are hard to ignore. The median household income of the Runner’s World print audience in 2022 was $120,050 (well above the 2021 national median of $70,784), implying that running is somehow associated with wealth. (A study on the meaning of running in American society looks at how running perpetuates ideals of capitalism and consumerism.) On the other hand, the simple act of jogging by yourself, in your own neighborhood, can be deadly for those less privileged; the most high-profile running stories in recent years haven’t been about heroes, but victims.
All of which is to say, running can be a complex subject, and essays and features about running fascinate me, especially after I became a runner myself.
The appeal of running isn’t always obvious to outsiders. Until I became a runner, I had been mystified why people would subject themselves to such a tedious kind of suffering. Masochists, I thought, whenever a group of runners passed by me in college.
But now the joke’s on me. I’m that guy running with a varicolored Dri-FIT running tank, six-inch lined running shorts, a Garmin feature-packed to conquer K2. My face is smeared with sunscreen, enough to trap dirt and insects that land on my face.
My transformation from an unbeliever to that friend who guilt-trips you to cheer for me on a Sunday morning happened two-plus years ago, thanks to — what else? — the pandemic. One fateful day in March 2020, after indoor gyms shut down, I decided to run across the Queensboro Bridge in Queens, New York. Back then, I didn’t have a smartphone, so I put my iPad mini in my polyester drawstring bag and ran across the bridge, listening to What We Talk About When We Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. What started that day as a lockdown pastime evolved into something more, and thanks to Murakami, I’ve since added marathon entry fees as a line item in my annual expenses.
I’d like to think that all runners have experienced that moment when they cross over from “someone who runs” to a “runner.” The more you run, the more you experience moments of endorphin-induced glee. But one day you achieve escape velocity — and feel the euphoria of the “runner’s high.”
As the pieces below will show, runner’s high is not the only reason — nor is it the most meaningful one — writers run. If you’re Murakami, the reason can be as mundane as to stay fit after committing to a sedentary job. For other writers, it’s more complicated. The stories in this reading list highlight six writers’ insights on the act and art of running.
Longtime fans of the Murakami Cinematic Universe will find familiar elements here: baseball, jazz, understated prose, and non sequiturs. For a time, before Murakami became a novelist, he was the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo. In this piece, he describes how — and exactly when — he decided to write and how his early habits and commitments allowed him to do so prolifically for decades.
Running a jazz club required constant physical labor, but when Murakami started to spend more time at his desk, he started gaining weight. “This couldn’t be good for me,” he writes in a deadpan statement. “If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape.” Being metabolically challenged helped Murakami develop his work ethic.
Murakami drops writing advice while making parallel points about running. But the way he does it is frustratingly tantalizing — he’s not the one to share his tips openly à la Robert McKee. Murakami suggests that writing, like running, relies less on quick decision-making skills than patience and long contemplation: “Long-distance running suits my personality better, which may explain why I was able to incorporate it so smoothly into my daily life.”
Murakami calls himself a no-talent — a colossal understatement — but readers who have encountered unreliable narrators in his novels know better: We shouldn’t be so naïve as to take his words at face value.
Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins.
Murakami doesn’t debunk the myth of an artistic genius but shows that with a sustainable routine, the genius can be prolific. If you’re reading for concrete advice on writing and a neat analogy comparing running to writing, you won’t find it here. Rather, we get something better: a portrait of the artist as a young runner.
Don’t let the title fool you. Rachel Richardson has no unconditional praise for Thoreau; she politely defies him. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau spoke to an audience of men as he opined on nature. To him, women were symbols — “for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters,” writes Richardson — rather than his target readers.
To read Thoreau’s essay in 2023 is to be startled by his problematic view of women and puritanical sense of “capital-N” Nature. He would not approve of the urban environment that Richardson describes while she runs: “I was born in a California he didn’t imagine, in a hospital in a town laid out with lawns and gardens.” Her piece is a bracing tonic against the writer’s anachronistic thoughts.
Richardson, like many other runners like me, was not always a runner: “How or why anyone would do this for pleasure was beyond my ability to fathom,” she thought when growing up. But in her 20s, she discovered running as a refreshingly guilt-free activity to do in a world that made her anxious. (People who started running during the pandemic, like me, might agree. Unlike going to the gym or participating in a team sport, which were risky at the time, running was easier to navigate and do on our own.)
Richardson writes that she never knows what her running route will be. But that uncertainty brings relief. Freedom. Inspiration. Running rewards runners with a sense of uncomplicated happiness and goodwill, which Richardson details in this delightful passage:
When I run, I smile and people smile back. Kids wave at me and cyclists nod as they zoom by. Other runners raise a hand of hello or, my favorite, flash a big grin. Sometimes we’re wearing the same race shirt—me too!, I point. Sometimes they’re in a zone I can’t penetrate, with their earbuds and podcast or playlist keeping them company. I still smile, even when they don’t look up. Hey, we’re out here, doing this beautiful thing.
When the endorphins start kicking in, around mile three, I love everybody, even the sourest-faced walker or most oblivious group of teenagers taking up the whole trail and dropping Doritos on the ground. Nice dog!, I shout when I see a dog happily panting at her runner’s side, or You’ve got this! to the struggling jogger stumbling to the end of his route. … I am an unrepentant dork when I run.
I have beef with running memoirs that try to overburden the sport with dramatic insights. Not because insights can’t be found in running, but because execution without sentimentality is no easy feat. Thompson’s essay — which deals with, among many things, family relationships, parental abuse and influence, sexuality, ambition, and mortality — is a clear-eyed piece that demonstrates what can be done in the hands of a dexterous editor and writer.
I’ve read this piece many times, and like a good novel, I’m drawn to different themes every time. In my most recent read, two ideas resonated: defining one’s identity separate from one’s parents’ and identifying with one’s masculinity without being poisoned by it. It’s an all-consuming narrative that spans four generations of men in Thompson’s family.
As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn’t failed at in front of his father.
I sent an early version of this essay to my older sister, who saw something clearly that I hadn’t identified yet. “Running solved nothing for [Dad]. You’ve had a longer journey with it, and used it in ways that are much more productive. But I have this nagging sense that your story of needing to follow footsteps (the schools, the running) and needing so much not to follow footsteps (the overindulgence, the flameout, the irresponsibility and failure) are more complexly interwoven.
Whereas Murakami’s piece, detached from romanticism, was not a very effective sales pitch for running, Joyce Carol Oates’ ode to running may intrigue any writer who could use more literary imagination; she writes about running as a consciousness-expanding activity, allowing her to envision what she writes as a film or dream: “I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.”
This piece was written more than 20 years ago. Oates, one of America’s most renowned storytellers, has published more than 70 books in her literary career. For her, running certainly seems to work.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind’s eye, the pages I’ve just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.
Though I can’t claim the same level of inspiration, something similar happened when I first started running. During my daily runs, I experienced breakthroughs where I felt stuck: A connective sentence or a word I’d been looking for would pop into my head. On some days, this happened so often that I needed to stop every few minutes to record it on my phone, which disrupted my run. Eventually, I learned to run with a waterproof pocket notebook in my left hand and a retractable pen in my right.
The May 2020 timing of this piece on Jim Fixx, the “father of recreational running,” was wonderfully apt for pandemic-inspired runners. It was as if Chris Ballard, a seasoned sports writer, was inducting new runners into the history of the sport.
Ballard observed that more people started running during the pandemic, believing it “would in some way do them good, or make them feel better about themselves or the world, if even for a moment.” But the belief that running is good for your body and soul wasn’t always accepted wisdom but once an argument, even a radical and contrarian one.
It may sound glib to say that “running saved my life.” But for Fixx, it really did. And, in a tragic irony, it also killed him. Fixx was one of the central figures of the running boom of the ’70s and whose book, The Complete Book of Running, became “the most lucrative nonfiction title ever published by Random House,” writes Ballard. It was a hit, and the media couldn’t get enough of him. As Ballard writes, “a fad had become a craze,” and for the first time in a year, 100,000 Americans finished a marathon. The book was noteworthy not just because it was an encyclopedia of running; it heralded a certain kind of running memoir, one in which an author details their salvation by running.
Ballard writes both a pocket history guide on how running became a major sport in America and a personal history of the man who made it possible. Although this story has been told many times, Ballard’s reporting is enriched by Fixx’s journals, to which his family offered access for the first time.
After his death, the sports world changed profoundly. Running was no longer a craze, or a miracle cure. But neither did it die. Instead, it evolved. In 1977, 25,000 Americans finished marathons; By ’94, more than 300,000 did. In ’94, Oprah ran, and completed, her only marathon, spurring a boom among those who felt the feat previously unreachable. By the turn of the century, how you ran mattered as much as whether you did. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run spurred thousands to tromp through the woods barefoot. Ultramarathons gained in popularity. Rock ’n’ roll marathon and fun run entered the lexicon. By 2011, women accounted for close to 60% of the finishers in half-marathons.
It’s not exactly a light read, so let me leave you with an irresistible detail: Fixx’s father was born a Fix but added a second x to his name. Why? He thought, “a person’s name ought to be a proper noun, not a verb.”
I couldn’t think of a better piece to wrap up this reading list than a meta-essay about writing on running by Kathryn Schulz who is, after all, a master of meta-writing. (Her piece about Oxford’s “A Very Short Introduction” series is a good example.)
What do runners think about when they run? In the first part of this two-part story, Schulz looks to scientific research and lays out the uninspiring results. She writes: “Like a fair number of psychological studies, this one confirmed the obvious while simultaneously missing it.” But she continues:
Of course runners think about their route, their pace, their pain, and their environment. But what of everything else that routinely surfaces in the mind during a run? The new girlfriend, the professional dilemma, the batteries you need to remember to buy for the smoke detector, what to get your mom for her birthday, the brilliance with which Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson (if you are listening to the soundtrack to “Hamilton”), the music, the moment (if you are listening to Eminem), the Walter Mitty meanderings into alternate lives: all of this is strangely missing from Samson’s study. The British author Alan Sillitoe got it right in his 1958 short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”: “They can spy on us all day to see if we’re … doing our ‘athletics,’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves.”
Then, Schulz points out, with a knowing wit, the shortcomings of contemporary writing on running. Writing about running without schmaltz — like Murakami — is no easy feat, which makes it hard for people to find books that “address the mind of the runner in descriptive rather than inspirational or aspirational terms.” You could also argue that Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, despite being enjoyable, reads like gonzo journalism. And some running memoirs that read like redemption memoirs, such as Robin Harvie’s The Lure of Long Distances, follow the same formula.
Later, Schulz champions Poverty Creek Journal, a book by literary-critic-cum-runner Thomas Gardner, as “the only one to uncover the literary possibilities inside the terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative genre of the running log.” After reading this piece, I read this strangely profound book — it’s a mix of literary criticism, running logs, and thoughts that range from complaints to grief.
When Schulz says running logs are “terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative,” she doesn’t intend it as a criticism. Running is, admittedly, an incredibly understimulating sport to watch, so much so that I suspect even the most avid runners probably don’t sit down to watch the Boston Marathon from beginning to the end.
And here’s a pitfall of sports writing: There’s often too great a desire to imbue a grand meaning to the sport. “Life is a marathon,” goes the cliché. But the thing is, life is like a marathon. So writing about running becomes a balancing act, one in which — without sufficient craft and self-awareness — can be a challenge. But here, Schulz (and Gardner) masterfully explore the essence of running, in all its glory and tedium. A sport of contradiction indeed.
Sheon Han is a writer and programmer based in Palo Alto, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read his work at sheon.tk.
The running industry is booming, and it seems like these days, running 26.2 miles is no big deal. The number of people running ultra-marathons has nearly quadrupled in the past decade, so for some competitors, even these longer-distance races aren’t challenging enough. For Experience, Brown reports on the rise of quirky and extreme running trends, and how some people, looking to stand out or do something different, find their niche. Beekeeper Farai Chinomwe runs backwards. Moshe Lederfien races while balancing a pineapple on his head. “The motives of these chain-smoking, backwards-moving, produce-aisle-masquerading runners are diverse,” writes Brown, “but weird running’s raisons d’ȇtre tend to exist at the intersection of personal growth and public spectacle.” This is a light and breezy read on how runners up their game and transform the act of running into something else entirely.
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