My golden Kodi and I went on a 10-mile run yesterday. We took off out my back door here in Dedham, traversed a technical trail in Wilson Mountain Reservation, across Whitcomb Woods, through Charles River Reservation and the St. Sebastian High School, and finally along the boardwalk of Cutler Park. That all this natural beauty straddles Route 128, the demarcation of Greater Boston, always shocks me.
On that boardwalk, with high marsh grasses dried brown, and the golds and reds of the trees in the distance, I felt the glory of running in November in Massachusetts, moving my body in the magical way I have for a half a century now. As I ran, I listened to Nicholas Thompson read his new book, The Running Ground, which at its heart is about Thompson’s relationship with his brilliant but alcoholic father, for whom he runs.
It transfixed me the whole way.
I grew up in Western Massachusetts, the son of an English professor and a family therapist in the 1970s. My parents were true hippies in ways that could make a school-aged boy’s skin crawl. So, I ran and ran and ran, on the trails that surround Amherst. It was my solace and my joy. I studied running not so much as a sport but as a philosophy of life.
My running resumé is: running the Boston Marathon three times at sixteen years old (2:48), thirty-three (3:33), and at fifty-eight (4:29). In the last couple of years, I have embraced the moveable feast of trail ultra, finishing the Leadville marathon, the Vermont 36 miler twice, and the Black Canyon 100k. I recently completed a 50k here in Massachusetts.
Like Thompson, racing isn’t really the sole reason I run. Out on that 10-miler with Kodi yesterday, listening to Thompson, I thought about all the other running books I have read—the ones that have influenced my training, sure, but also how I move through life, how I view it, and myself.
These books might change your life, too.
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My love affair with running books began with George Sheehan’s “Running and Being.” Sheehan was a Navy doctor during World War 2 and a cardiologist afterward. Running helped him become a sort of Buddhist monk even as he continued to treat his patients and ultimately write about it. Running and Being is a way to simplify your life on your daily run. It showed me the impact running had on my brain, and the possibility of euphoria and self-discovery. It made it okay for me to be a loner who spent all his time running twenty miles a day as a teenager, dreaming about everything and nothing at all. If I could run, I could be. Nothing else mattered.
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In the running climax of The Running Ground Thompson is about to take over as CEO of The Atlantic. It’s COVID, all the races have been cancelled, and Thompson is connected with Olympian Des Linden who, in her boredom, has decided to try to break the women’s world record at 50k (31 miles). Linden recruits Thompson to pace her until she decides upon a goal time too fast for Thompson (under 3 hours). Thompson decides to race anyway to try to break the men’s masters’ world record at the same distance. Cheering each other on a looped course, Des and Thompson both break their respective records and drink champagne out of their shoes afterwards.
Des Linden is a badass. When she won the Boston Marathon in 1985, no American woman had won the race in thirty-three years. Choosing to Run: A Memoir is the story of her historic day, when Des stopped to help teammate Shalane Flanagan when she went to the bathroom before leading her back to the pack. And then went on to glory on an ugly day of rain and wind.
Des had finished second at Boston several years prior. She was known for her toughness, yet on the day of her win, she repeatedly thought about dropping out. She only kept going because getting to her husband at the finish line by public transportation would have been way more complicated than just continuing to run. In the end, the harsh elements made it her kind of race —a slugfest not so much about time as about heart. And all of a sudden, she was alone, running with effortless effort into history. I remember watching it live as she screamed a four-letter swear at the top of her lungs as she hit the tape, with tears in my eyes for her heroism.
***
Katie Arnold’s “Brief Flashes in the Phenomenal World” is about her attempt to win the Leadville 100-mile trail race but it’s also about Zen, a river, a terrible accident, and how in life the worst things are often the best, and how there is actually nothing to figure out. I enjoyed the book so much that last September, I joined a retreat which Katie led at a cabin with no running water, electricity, or cell service.
“Zen teaches that you already have everything you need,” she said. “We are perfect, we just get better at the creative expression of that perfection. Running and writing are examples of creative expression.”
I pondered this as I panted heavily up a 12K-foot pitch in the San Juan mountains, Katie next to me and other people from the retreat. I tried to catch my breath as I asked Katie questions about her experience of being in flow state for 20 hours during the Leadville and the experience of facing an injury halfway through Run Rabbit, which meant she had to walk the second 50 miles to finish a half hour under the cutoff. “The feeling after both races was exactly the same,” she told me. “The outcome absolutely didn’t matter.” To her, the flow state can happen both at the front and back of the pack.
We talked about her book and how its structure is that of a river. How it could have been called “How to Save a Marriage.” And the fact that her husband never read the book until her first public speaking event, at which she could see him welling up with tears.
And with that, she was off again, and I followed, and in some sense, I still am today, as a writer and runner, chasing one of the masters of both things and trying to remember there is no destination, there is only this step, this breath, that mountain over there. On any run, if I try, I feel my connection to all of it in my beating heart.
From Katie, you’ll learn that the point of all of this is to become yourself. This is not an achievement. It means meeting each moment, each breath, with beginner’s mind. “This moment contains all moments,” Katie said during the retreat, by which she meant that time is not linear. It bends back on itself, and if we run long enough, we will see the connectivity of all things, not only now but forever back in the past and forever into the future.
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As profound as Katie’s book is, and as much as Thompson’s carries elements of that same profundity, the book that The Running Ground reminded me of most is “What I Talk About When I Talk about Running” by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a peculiar Eastern Japanese author with a casual, almost conversational style that makes you almost miss how profound his prose is. He is an accidental writer, who came to the craft while he managed a jazz club and went to a baseball game in Japan one night and at the crack of the bat decided to write a novel. He submitted the resulting manuscript, with no backup copy, to a famous contest. He won. For him, running, like for Thompson and Arnold, is the source of his creativity.
Murakami does not much like people and spends most of his time alone, running and writing. He tries hard to cultivate the void of not thinking when he runs. There is very little “point” to his running. And he is very clear that in running and his art there is not a competitive bone in his body. He does it for the thing itself.
“It doesn’t matter what field you’re talking about—beating somebody else just doesn’t do it for me. I’m much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself.”
He goes on later, “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself?”
***
Thompson, Arnold, and Murakami make the solitude of running a central aspect of their lives and creative work. Their work brought me back to my recent study of the Desert Fathers. These were the original Christian monks of the 3rd century who got fed up with what they perceived as Roman Catholic corruption and literally ran and walked out into the desert to be alone in silence and find God. In my running and thinking about its impact, I found the famed Theologian Henry Nouwen’s book The Way of the Heart about the Desert Fathers.
He writes about how the secular or false self is the self which is fabricated by social compulsions. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated, or despised…how I am perceived by the world…The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same—more work, more money, more friends.
Thompson, Sheehan, Arnold, Murakami—even Des Linden in her own way—talk about this. The enemies of spiritual life and of the running life are anger and greed.
The desert fathers believed that solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude, we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusion of the false self.
All great running books speak most deeply about this furnace of transformation through deep solitude, which ultimately does not isolate but, through which effortless effort, the experience itself—the flow state—greed and anger are replaced by compassion and connection
“In order to be of service to others we have to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others,” Nouwen writes. “To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to be free to be compassionate.”
It is this solitude, in this running me, “that we become compassionate people, deeply aware of our solidarity in brokenness with all of humanity and ready to reach out to anyone in need.”
***
At the start of my 10-mile run—even while Thompson whispers in my ears about the memories of his dad in all their complexities, the demons which got in the way of building his career, how Thompson strove to run free and fast while being a good dad and husband—I have all kinds of great thoughts about my life, the world, my work, my family and friends, none of which are great thoughts at all, I realize, just dopamine induced mirages. My brain tries desperately to solve problems that have been stored up since the last run and which all involve my attempts to control the uncontrollable. This madness always continues for a while, sometimes hours, until the loops get exhausted with themselves and give in to silence.
It is the silence I love. And into that silence I find one section of near-perfect trail: wide and straight and tunnel-like with mature coniferous trees on either side. There are no rocks or roots, just soft pine needles.
When I hit this section on the way home, I enter a living dream. I have no idea how far I have run or how far I have yet to go. I have no concept of speed or even the fact that I am running. I am so far into the act of the thing it has swallowed me whole. Time no longer has any meaning, as if the past and future have collapsed into this perfect moment right now.
At the same time, there is a great expansion of my vision without my actually looking at anything. I am overwhelmed with the beauty of the snarled ridges of dark bark on the tree in front of me, and the gentle breeze that touches my face.
As my body continues to move without my knowing it, and the pine needles crunch below my feet, I see a white swan on the pond in the distance, and a tear rolls down my cheek at the sheer beauty of the thing, so unlikely in its presence, so perfect. And the grace that put me on this stretch of trail to witness it.
Like Nicholas Thompson, I am free to become the best version of myself through running.
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Originally published on Tom’s LinkedIn page. Follow him there!
Photo by author.
