CityReads│My All-Time Favorite Running Book

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My All-Time Favorite Running Book

The appeal of Once a Runner is, first and foremost, a running book. But it’s also for anyone whoever dedicated themselves to the single-minded pursuit of a goal.

John L. Parker Jr. ,2010.Once A Runner, Scribner,1 reprint edition.

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The first time I learned about Once a Runner was via Amazon’s recommendation “You might like…”. It claims that it is one of the favorite novels of Haruki Murakami, who also writes a popular book on running, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running. And it also says that it is one of the most stolen novels in the library. I was intrigued so I placed the order.

It turns out to be a really good read. It gets me in my heart about running, about training, about solitude, about life, about anything that you can think of, such as learning and writing.

The appeal of Once a Runner is, first and foremost, a running book. But it’s also a story about anyone whoever dedicated themselves to the single-minded pursuit of a goal.

Originally self-published in 1978, Once a Runner captures the essence of distance running and training. Unexpectedly it has become one of the most beloved sports novels ever published.

Thirty years later, John L. Parker, Jr published a sequel, Again to Carthage, in 2008. He then proceeded to publish a prequel, Racing to the rain, in 2015. 

I agree with one reader’s comment that he/she has read the book many times and will continue to do that. That is what I have done and what I am going to do.

The following are my favorite excerptions from the book. The name of the main character is Quenton Cassidy.

Why a runner runs?

A true runner ran even when he didn't feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back.He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed he thought.

The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he knew how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it; yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in the basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadulterated by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from the most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouting like mushrooms on a stump.

Running to him was real, the way he did the realest thing he knew. It was joy and woe, hard as a diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.

On training

He did not much like this morning business (running), but the idea of forgoing it, even for one morning, never crossed his mind.

Better to get it all over with and then be able to enjoy the day like any other citizen.

Though he hated running long in the morning more than anything he could think of, Cassidy was ecstatic to have his whole day’s training behind him.

On the altar of Consistency he offered up no less than two portions of his life per day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. His nearly filled calendar diary told no lies and the symbolism of the unmissed workout became ritualistic to him, taking on an important in his life he did not like to admit, even to himself.

There was no Secret! His days would have to be spent in exactly this manner, give or take a mile or two, for longer than he cared to think about, if he really wanted to see the olive wreath up close.

Warm-down time was slow luxury, an easy mile of deep, aching satisfaction.

An interval workout is the modern distance runner’s equivalent of the once popular Iron Maiden. Although overdistance laid the foundation, intervals made the runner racing mean. Cassidy liked them. Others preferred bamboo splinters under their nails.

While a ten-mile overdistance run might be generally thought of as a pleasant diversion, very few of Cassidy’s teammates thought of intervals as anything but a grueling ordeal, satisfying at best, horrifying at worst. It was precisely the kind of training that tempered the body for racing. Though the distance runner is constantly striving for aerobic efficiency, the race itself is primarily an anaerobic experience. Since interval training is usually sharp enough to bring the runner to grips with oxygen debt very quickly in the workout, he learns to deal with the debilitating fatigue from the first repetition on.

The first two or three always seemed somehow especially bad. Actually that was misleading. They seemed sluggish because the body was shocked by such a sudden demand for sustained speed. The heart rates shot up to the hummingbird levels it would have to maintain for some time. The legs became prematurely heavy, and the central nervous system sent up the message that such punishment could not be endured. But the central nervous system is overridden, of course, the runner knowing far better by now than his own synapses what his body can and cannot be expected to do. The runner deals nearly daily in such absolutes of physical limitations that the nonrunner confronts only in dire situations.

The key was not how fast he could run, but how fast he could run while tired.

Runners deal in discomfort. After you get past a certain point, that’s all there really is. There is no fineness here.

Let others flail; the runner runs truly to the end.

Cassidy awoke only once during the night, filled the toilet with bloody urine and went back to bed. He slept seventeen hours altogether and when he awoke at last, the runner, paragon of fitness and efficient mobility, this runner at least, had trouble getting around. He went back to bed.

The toll on the runner, however, was high if he chose not to slack off. Psychologically as well as physically, he paid the price. He became weak, depressed; he needed 12 to 14 hours of sleep a night. He was literally desperate for rest, spent his waking hours with his legs elevated, in a state of general irritability. He became asexual, rendered, in the words of the immortal limerick, really quite useless on dates. He was a thoroughly unpleasant person.

Denton called it "breaking down". Quite a bit more, really, than the simple exhaustion of a single difficult workout, breaking down was a cumulative physical morbidity that usually built up over several weeks and left runner struggling to recover from one session to the next.

The object, according to Denton, was to "run through" the thing, just he maintained one should attempt to "run through" most of those other little hubcaps life rolls into your lane; everything from death in the family to cancer of the colon.

Quenton Cassidy's method of dealing with fundamental doubts was simple. He didn't think about them at all. These questions had been considered a long time ago, decisions were made, answers recorded, and the book closed. If it had to be re-opened every time the going got rough, he would spend more time rationalizing than training; his log would start to disclose embarrassing information, perhaps blank squares.

Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed,strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.

He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs, He listened carefully to his body and heeded strange requests. 

Running as a way of living

Did you run today?

Can a fish tread water? Hell yes, I ran today.

The same schedule that didn’t allow much time for fretting about trivia likewise had no room for major catastrophes; Cassidy was content to follow the routine numbly.

The runner had always leavened the unavoidable solitude of their sport with the social atmosphere of the team, but now that Cassidy’s isolation was geographical as well as physical, he slipped toward goofiness. He read massively. When that didn’t do it and his natural gregariousness boiled over, he began to carry on conversations with inanimate objects.

He quickly settled into a mesmerizing pattern of hard training, reading, eating his simple fare, sleeping like a wintering bear, and talking to the pots and pans.

“I’m going nuts,” he informed himself happily in the mirror one morning.

The distance runners were serene messengers. Gliding along wooded trails and mountain paths, their spiritual ancestors kept their own solitary counsel for long hours while carrying some message the import of which was only one corner of their considerable speculation. They lived within themselves; long ago they did so, and they do today.

One that traveled at a steady though unspectacular pace, and that would take them, they felt, just about anywhere they wanted to go.

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