What are the best books on running? Lord knows I’ve read a few.
I’ll review some of my favourites and tell you if they helped my running, or not, and why.
Running books? Oh, I've read a few....
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First off - “The best novel written about running.”
So reads the quote from Runner’s World on the front cover of “Once a Runner.”
Because the book was written in 1978, I don’t know when the testimonial was coined or if it is still valid.
Originally self-published by John Parker, a college champion runner and later newspaper reporter and lawyer, the book was sold at races out of Parker’s car trunk and became, as the dust jacket tells it, like a sacred text passed around by high school and college athletes. The edition I read was a re-issue in 2009 after it became the most sought-after out-of-print book in 2007.
Available in the Victoria library
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The cover photograph of a silhouetted runner striding along the edge of the ocean is more evocative than the original drawing of a pensive runner in his dorm room but the story of a collegiate runner at a fictional southern US university who trains mercilessly to break a four-minute mile stands up over the years.
Parker knows how to get inside the life of a competitive runner and the isolation that results from the single-minded pursuit of a goal.
Frankly, there isn’t much comparison between me and the protagonist Quenton Cassidy whose physique is ‘sharply chiseled as if from sand-worn driftwood, fluted with oblique angles, and long tapering ridges” and “inverted teardrop thighs and high-bunched calves suggestion only motion: smooth effortless speed.’
I do resemble driftwood but definitely in a drifted, wooden way – like the misshapen logs that get dumped by the sea on a beach, as if the waves couldn’t be bothered to pull them out again to sea.
I’ve never considered myself anything remotely like a contender. I took up running late in life and am happy to walk past the elites toeing the race start line as I worm my way to a position, way, way in the back.
The elites relaxed and waiting at the start line
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But I can appreciate Parker’s smells-like-the-truth description of what it takes to be one of those physically blessed, disciplined and determined elite runners who endure brutal workouts and the rarified company of like-minded athletes.
Like this description of a painful interval workout in Cassidy’s 140-mile week aiming for a one-mile race where he will compete against the world’s best in a sub-four-minute contest.
Pushed to the limit, unable to even easily recall his own name, “he was incredibly thirsty; his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and he no longer had to spit out the white fluffs of congealed saliva; there was none. Parched, wobbly, near mad.”
Or this passage about strategy:
“A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at the precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.”
Once a Runner made an impact on me, not because it was particularly well written, but because its evocative tale of the grit, effort and sacrifice demanded of those striving for the peak of any sport. It makes my efforts seem like a whisper and a feather in the wind. Light and inconsequential. It will make even the toughest of my days, when the pain seems intolerable, just a skip and a hop in the bigger hopscotch of stacked squares that you need to progress through towards that final chalk mark, wherever you draw it on the sidewalk.
You don't need to be among the wiry and wired-for-success to learn a lesson or two from Parker and the runners who populate his novel.
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