I’m just sitting down after a run. My plan this morning was to go for a run, and then sit down to write this. For the past week I’ve been noodling with different pieces of this essay, trying to figure out what to say about running that isn’t obnoxious or boring or pointless. I’d saved the actual introduction for last because I couldn’t figure out how to write it. This essay is about why most writing about running falls short, and figuring out how to not fall victim to that same thing sent me into a tizzy. The run was supposed to inspire me, or unlock something, allow me to become the person who wakes up early and then writes. The problem there is that when I was about halfway through it (this run, if you’re interested) trying to figure out how to get into all this cleanly, this thing that happens sometimes on runs happened. My legs just didn’t have it. For whatever reason, they didn’t have the juice. Luckily, even though a run may not give you the thing you’re looking for, it normally gives you something that turns out to be useful. In my case, it was a reminder that running usually has a lot more to do with accepting the limitations of your body on a given day than it does tapping into the sublime. Writing, like running, is about slow accumulation over time. It’s about putting in the work, not so that you can run the perfect mile or write the perfect sentence, but instead because it’s worthwhile to put in the work. This essay is about meeting something where it is, not where you want it to be. It’s about getting out the door and letting your legs go, even if they don’t feel great. Nobody sets out to write a sub par book about running. Instead, the bad ones feel like they got away from their author little bit by little bit. You end up thinking you’re going to write this grand treatise on the beauty of locomotion, and instead you’re talking about how your therapist is the pair of sneakers waiting by the door. This essay is about that and how the best running writing avoids it.
This all started because I’ve been thinking about running journals recently and toying with the idea of writing one. Successful writing about running is fantastic, but there’s precious little of it. I eat this stuff up, and there are maybe three books that I’d recommend without any caveats. I have a very particular form of procrastination that involves wanting to research a thing to such a degree that I convince myself I’m never ready to start. That felt especially true with this one, so I kept reading book after book and really got to understand why bad running writing is like listening to someone describe their usual order from Panera Bread. And let’s hope that work keeps this thing on the tracks.
One of the things that you’ve got come to grips with if you’re a runner (whatever that means) is how much time it takes, and how often it’s boring. You’ll spend hours a week doing it, and though there may be things you can do while running to take your mind off it, inevitably you’re going to have to spend more than a little bit of time thinking about running and your relationship to it. The more of that you do, the stranger it all feels. So we seek out books to try to understand this thing. And, more often than not, those books don’t get us any closer. When I come home from a run, my wife will often ask me how it went. Unless I saw a fox or something, I’ll almost always say, it was fine. That’s what reading a lot of these books feels like. I learn a lot about the runs these people went on without actually learning anything new about running. Too infrequently they drill down on the fundamental weirdness of it all. How entirely non-essential running is to the way we live now, and yet how on certain days, when the legs are loose and it’s not too humid, you feel connected to your body. You are doing exactly the thing that thousands and thousands of years of evolution pushed you to do. And doing it well! Everything that’s problematic about our big dumb brains falls away and you become a body that’s taken energy from the earth and is giving it back one footfall at a time. I know, I know, I know. I’m becoming one of those people, and this is becoming one of those essays. I’m Chris Traeger talking about how the human foot is the greatest invention. And you, dear reader, are Ann saying that sure running’ll help you live longer, but at what cost?
So even though I feel a special bond sharing a wave as I pass another runner in the near dawn hours and believe that he and I are part of some imagined brotherhood. I can also see the reality that we are two incredibly uncool dudes wearing tights who will go on to spend our days sitting at desks and looking at computer screens. That inherent absurdity is where the problem with most running writing lies. People think the elusive runner’s high is what they should be seeking in writing. Trying to capture the experience of running as this pursuit of the sublime belies how often it’s boring or disappointing, how in the winter your hands are either cold or sweaty and there is no in-between. I have yet to read a piece of writing that can accurately depict the amount of sweat that my body seems to contain. I want writing about running that can capture why we keep coming back to it despite all that.
One of the most successful books about running is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I read it and remember really liking it, but I can barely recall anything specific about it. It’s a pleasant haze in my memory, kind of like the way you might remember a really good soup you made once. By chance, I was reading the most recent Murakami book earlier this week Novelist as a Vocation, a collection of essays about being a writer. One of the essays is about physical health, and Murakami talks about the impact running has on his physical and mental well-being. He goes on to add that “as I run, I feel that’s not all there is to it. There’s something more important deeper down in running. But it’s not at all clear to me what that something is, and if I don’t understand it myself, then I can’t explain it to others.” And this is coming from the guy who wrote the best book on running around. One of the only things I remember from it was him describing how comfortable your bed is on the mornings when it’s cold but you’re supposed to go out for a run early. By exploring that border between running being something we enjoy and something we dread, Murakami is trying to figure out makes running special, so even if he can’t say with certainty what the thing is, trying to find it makes for a good book.
So with all that being said, I’m going to try to write about running over the next few months. I’ll be running a race in the spring (The Cherry Blossom 10-miler) if the lottery balls bounce my way, and if I’m going to put all that time into a training block, I’d like at least to understand myself a little better at the end of it. I’ll also include some recommendations in those pieces. To that end here are some of the books about running that I think are worth reading:
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
- Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance - Alex Hutchinson
- Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery - Christie Aschwanden
- The Incomplete Book of Running - Peter Sagal
- The Rise of the Ultra Runners: A Journey to the Edge of Human Endurance - Adharanand Finn
- “The Immortal Horizon” - Leslie Jamison (An essay, but maybe the best writing on the list)