Runner's Low

In the late summer of 1983, the consulting firm Business International Corporation hired a young Columbia University graduate named Barack Obama. Some of his coworkers found the young Obama, they later told the journalist David Maraniss, “aloof, with an arrogance that bordered on condescension.”1 Some, learning that Obama had attended the elite Punahou School in Honolulu and an Ivy League university, assumed he was a trust-fund kid. He didn't eat lunch with the others or tag along for bar crawls. His coworkers didn't know him well, and he left the firm after a year.One anecdote stuck with them, defining, in their minds, the future president they encountered when he was twenty-two. A fellow Columbia graduate in the office heard that Obama was, like him, a runner and invited him for a “jog” in Riverside Park. Obama turned him down. “I don't jog,” he said. “I run.”2Maraniss recounted the anecdote in Barack Obama: The Story, a bestseller in 2012, as an older Obama secured his second term in the White House. Most readers wouldn't have noticed or remembered it. But runners did, and a certain kind of runner—me and other assholes—loved it. I was then a twenty-five-year-old graduate student, three years removed from an undecorated college track career. I ran seventy miles a week, raced a few marathons a year, and followed international track and field and road racing with the kind of obsessiveness you might associate with a Knicks or Eagles fan. I, like the Barack Obama of 1983, recognized a rigid distinction between jogger and runner. I didn't jog and wouldn't go trotting through Riverside Park with you. Obama the runner had, thanks to Maraniss, won the smallest of constituencies.Obama's coworkers misread his class status, and it wouldn't be the last time that the future president, an Ivy League-educated Black man with an almost eccentric lack of vice (a ritual dessert of seven lightly salted almonds?), would be accused of elitism. In his classic and still unavoidable Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), Pierre Bourdieu observed that the French middle classes of the 1960s and ’70s gravitated toward athletic activities that conferred health benefits (a slim waist and long life) and social advantages (networking).3 Obama's coworkers read the young man's refusal to go jogging as anti-bourgeois. He didn't care about burning calories or climbing the social ladder. He was above that, above them. He ran fast, alone.Did Obama ever run much? It's hard to say. If he did, he never made a show of it, as had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before him. But we know he read. The former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani once described Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father as “the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president.”4 The memoir tells the story of a young man navigating the world through books. “I would close the door to my room,” he writes, “and there I would sit and wrestle with words, locked in suddenly desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth.”5 Obama released his first list of summer reading recommendations in 2009, months into his first term, and has continued to act as one of the book business's biggest brands. (His 2023 list, announced on X, included novels by Lauren Groff, Paul Harding, Benjamin Labatut, and James McBride.)Obama has, as Bourdieu might say, a definable taste. He doesn't jog; he runs. He doesn't skim; he reads. But Obama has never recommended a book about running, and I would guess that he never will, because the literature of running is bad. As a runner and a reader and teacher, this has long bothered me. Running does not have a Fat City (1969) or a Netherland (2008). Bernard Malamud wrote his baseball novel, Gish Jen hers, Don DeLillo his football and baseball novels, David Foster Wallace his (sort of) tennis novel. A running novel? No chance. Boxing, in long decline, continues to serve as the material for great writing (and, of course, film). But far more people run than box. Few of us will ever know what it feels like to get hit in the face by a gloved fist. But many of us know the struggle of a few lung-burning miles around the neighborhood or on a Planet Fitness treadmill, and there is evidence that we will shell out thirty bucks to read about it. More than three million readers have bought Christopher McDougall's 2009 book Born to Run, a “playing Indian” fantasy of running barefoot through the high sierras of northern Mexico.6 When I asked Carlo Rotella, coeditor of this forum and a marathoner, what he thought might account for the relative lack of decent running fiction, he observed, that, well, there's not a lot of variation in distance running, is there? Left, right, left, right, and on and on. Turning the runner's long grind into a page-turner is no small task. Rotella also noted, in a 2022 essay in the Washington Post Magazine, that running “reeks of allegory.”7 Even the best of us can't fight off the clichés. Few works of fiction capture what Rotella's own nonfiction does: the pure, simple pleasure of moving through space under your own power, your muscles and tendons and vascular system all recruited—for a minute, an hour, 26.2 miles—to the same basic mission.Another reason for the lack of good running lit stems, I think, from the absence of an audience for the sport. Americans may run, but most don't follow running. You can see it in the strange way that TV networks cover the three major marathons held every year in Boston, Chicago, and New York. The 2023 Chicago Marathon featured two of the greatest running performances of all time. Twenty-three-year-old Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya, who would die months later in a car accident, smashed the world record with a time of 2:00:35. He seemed to accelerate mile after mile, as if he were running downhill. Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands ran the second fastest women's time ever a mere six weeks after racing the 1,500, 5,000, and 10,000 meters (and winning two medals) at the World Athletics Championships. But as Kiptum entered the final mile of his world record and Hassan battled with two-time defending champion Ruth Chepngetich, the NBC team turned first to two morning-talk-show hosts drinking prosecco and asking onlookers trivia about Chicago neighborhoods and then to a reporter interviewing people holding signs along the course about who they were there to support (“boyfriend,” “daughter,” “so inspiring”). The NBC producers could have broadcast an exciting running event, but they didn't, it seems, think that enough people would care who won the race or in what time. They could have broadcast a thoughtful jogging event, but they didn't, it seems, believe that people could handle more than the blandest human-interest stories.The gulf between the runner and the jogger hangs over the literature. On one smaller shelf are running novels and short stories marked by an unflattering athletic elitism. They cater to me, the reader who would devote a Sunday morning to watching Kiptum and Hassan chase records through the Chicago streets. I don't jog; I run. On another larger shelf are jogging novels and stories that assume that running is boring and that it must be analogized. Running, in them, signifies flight from grief; leaving home; coming home; moving forward; enduring the obstacles of youth, of middle age, of getting older; the “treadmill” of wage labor; the “marathon” of life. The one thing that running doesn't mean is running. Novels on the latter shelf tend to be coming-of-age and/or trauma stories and often share generic characteristics with young-adult fiction. The running novel is an anti-jogging novel. The jogging novel is not a running novel at all.In 1975, Steve Prefontaine, months before his death, also in a car accident, told a psychologist conducting research on elite athletes that he considered a race “a work of art that people can look at and be affected by in as many ways as they are capable of understanding.”8 Prefontaine, the bold, arrogant icon of ’70s distance running, often said things like this. He was cocky, a little full of himself. It seemed like the usual Pre bluster. But perhaps he thought it fell to him to make art out of running because no one else was.In 2007, I discovered that I owned a book for which strangers on the internet would pay $300. The book, which I sold in a heartbeat—I was a broke college student—was John L. Parker Jr.’s self-published 1978 novel Once a Runner. The search engine BookFinder.com would later announce that more people in the United States had searched for it that year than any other out-of-print novel.9 I don't remember how I came to own Once a Runner, but I had read it at least four times since high school, and I'm not a re-reader. My college teammates had all read it—well, at least the men; the novel comes nowhere close to passing the Bechdel test—and they would recite lines from it on runs: “it's the lean wolf that leads the pack,” “if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn,” “the Trial of Miles, Miles of Trials.”10The novel, which tells the story of a college middle-distance runner named Quenton Cassidy who leaves school to train in isolation and reemerges as a world-beater, has received praise from runners for “getting it,” for capturing the maniacal dedication of the Olympic aspirant. “All of us who were competitive runners in the ’70s read John Parker's Once a Runner,” Bill Rodgers, the four-time Boston Marathon champion, told Runner's World. “John captured the essence of running at its most elemental level, with a special emphasis on the ultimate struggle within runners to excel.”11Distance running in the 1970s was a small world. Parker was “John” to Rodgers because they had raced one another in college. At the University of Florida, Parker had won back-to-back Southeastern Conference titles in the mile. He dedicated Once a Runner to two of his training partners: Jack Bacheler, a two-time Olympian, and Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon champion. Parker was a publishing outsider but a running insider, and he flaunted his track credentials to sell his self-published debut to the hardcore runner. The back cover of the first edition features a photo of Parker in full stride wearing a Florida Track Club singlet and an author bio that leads with his running résumé: “John L. Parker Jr. graduated from the University of Florida in 1970 with eight school distance running records. He has run the mile in 4:05.2 (indoors), the two-mile in 8:51.0, the three-mile in 13:47, the 3,000-meter steeplechase in 8:51.4, and the marathon in 2:33.” Parker later acknowledged that this was a bit much: “Man, talk about hubris.”12Parker wanted runners to know that this book was for them. But he also wanted joggers to know that this wasn't Runner's World or Jim Fixx's The Complete Book of Running (1977). There would be no discussion of the runner's high. The novel begins with a frame narrative in which an older Quenton, now retired from the sport, returns to his college track at night. He watches from outside the fence as joggers move in slow circles. Quenton can't make out more than their silhouettes in the dim light, but he can imagine who they'd be. “There would be, he knew, plump, determined-looking women slogging along while fleshy knees quivered,” dreaming of bikinis and tango dancing, and “men too of various ages and levels of dilapidation, perhaps also grinding out secret fantasies.”13 In the frame narrative, Quenton is still a young man, perhaps in his mid- or late twenties, but, as the title announces, he is done with running because he is done with racing. He would never, like the night joggers, run to burn calories or to calm his mind. He and his college teammates, we later learn, “respected these distant cousins of the spirit, who, among all people had some modicum of insight into their own milieu. But the runners resembled them only in the sense that a puma resembles a pussycat. It is the difference between stretching lazily on the carpet and prowling the jungle for fresh red meat.”14 This, the first pages announce, is a runner's novel, and a runner's novel is an anti-jogger novel. Some of the people on the track that night would have considered themselves runners—there is, after all, no Jogger's World magazine—but Quenton and Parker felt a need to set them straight. You don't run; you jog.Parker's attitude toward the jogger is, as the young Obama's coworkers assumed of his, anti-bourgeois. The novel celebrates running hard for the sake of running hard and dismisses the middle-class jogger who runs for fitness and wellbeing. “His daily toil,” Parker writes of Quenton, “was arduous; satisfying on the whole, but not the bounding, joyous nature romp described in the magazines. Other runners, real runners, understood it quite well.” The magazine readers, whom Parker refers to as “the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners,” chased some elusive runner's high, and they were nowhere to be found, he observes, “on dark, rainy mornings.”15 In high school, when I first read Once a Runner, I identified as one of Parker's real runners. I ran to race, and I knew that the best route to getting faster was to run more. I was after nothing greater, but in my own little universe, knocking a few seconds off your 3,200-meter PR meant something, and it meant something concrete. The novel gets this, and it is why I once admired it. But Parker takes a shortcut to communicating the faith-like devotion of the endurance athlete. Quenton exists not on his own terms but as the inverse of a caricature, the jogger. He is a runner because you are a jogger. He is a prick, and, perhaps, so was I.Once a Runner is a flawed running novel. But it is, at least, about running. Most works of fiction that would seem to belong to the genre take almost no interest in the sport itself. Running is not the subject but a mere allegory for the subject. Take what some would consider the modern urtext of the genre: Alan Sillitoe's 1959 short story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” The governor of a borstal (a British youth detention center) discovers that one of his charges, Smith, is a talented distance runner. He tells Smith that if he is a “good lad” and wins the all-England borstal cross country race, he will award him with a lighter workload and assist him in pursuing the sport after his release. Smith knows he can win, but determines, mid-race, that doing as the governor wishes would mean “running right into [the authorities'] white-gloved wall-barred hands and grinning mugs and staying there for the rest of my natural long life of stone-breaking anyway.”16 Leading into the homestretch, Smith slows to a walk, letting another boy by. Running is an allegory for conformity. Smith would rather break stones on his own terms than win one for the governor.Sillitoe's story has endured because it reverses the usual lesson of the running allegory. Smith has read “one or two books” he tells us, at the end of the story, but found them useless because “they ended on a winning post and didn't teach me a thing.”17 He won't give the governor or the reader the satisfaction.Some big-name American authors have written stories about running—or at least stories with running in the title. In Joyce Carol Oates's 1992 story “Running,” a woman in her late twenties runs down a wooded trail in the northeastern Adirondacks. She has left her boyfriend, a slower runner, behind her, and, feeling strong and free, she entertains the thought that she could live without him, without any man. But ahead she sees a group of young male campers with the trail and, before her comes into that the strangers may She that, in this as a her is In story “The Runner,” an in with three young he can't his daily miles on the high school He of his a and moving his back to He knows he He is not the runner of the title. 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