This is by far the most engaging
book about running I’ve come across: it is both weird and wonderful, and I
encourage you to read it. To get a sense of its intellectual ambition, we need
wait no longer than the epigraph, a quotation from Apsley Cherry-Garrard (a
survivor of Captain Scott’s antarctic mission) which takes us away from the
brainless positivity that usually surrounds running: ‘If you are a brave man
you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards
have the need to prove their bravery’.
The book recounts the author’s monomaniacal
relationship with running, which began after a hazy all-night party with him
seeing the London marathon on TV, and vowing that next year he would be on the
starting line. He eventually becomes dissatisfied with what a devalued currency
the marathon has become, and turns to ultra-marathons, ultimately taking on the
Spartathlon, a 152km race from Athens to Sparta.
But Harvie’s kaleidoscopic vision
takes in much, much more – from discovery of his family roots to death and
illness of those close to him, and beyond. Most of the major figures in the
history of running are discussed, from Zatopek to Bannister (‘his legs moved as
easily as milk pouring from a jug’) and from the Greek Olympic games to Bill
Bowerman’s founding of Nike in the 1960s. A lot, perhaps too much, therefore goes
on in this busy book. But this does mean that each reader is treated to tidbits
of information she didn’t previously know. Some of mine were that the Greek ‘gymenazesthai’
(whence gymnasium) means to exercise naked, that running was the only sport in
the first 13 Olympic games, and that a monastery of Japanese monks dedicate
their existence to enlightenment through running.
The author openly states that he
is not built like a runner, and one of the strongest aspects of the book is the
glee with which metaphor is mixed with gruesome description in describing what
happens to the body during and after running: ‘My feet wept for days. Blisters,
forming and popping under the nails, turned the skin a mottled black as the
damage done to the tissues slowly revealed itself like some peculiar deep-sea
creature’.
This description is of Harvie’s
feet following the Spartathlon – for the benefit of non runners, the experience
is not normal –, and reveals one of the unresolved debates going on beneath the
book’s surface, which can be put as follows. Is this a book about training for
and running a single, monstrous event (as its narrative and structure suggest)?
Or is it about running in general (suggested by its title, Why We Run), about the way the impulse to run comes back again and
again, no matter whether we are training for a race or not, thus creating
patterns in our lives full of sound of fury but signifying nothing?
This question receives an
ambiguous answer with the crossed-out title of the final chapter on whether he
will re-run the Spartathlon: ‘Never Again’. And although I’ll leave you to discover how
the race pans out for the author, I can give a sense of the conflicted state in
which it leaves him. On the one hand, he comes close to describing running as a
parasite inhabting him: ‘There was a better person, an idealised version of the
man I wanted to be, who had never returned’. The language here is that of a
Vietnam veteran. On the other hand, when describing a sensation of cosmic
harmony, he gives it both barrels: ‘my will had been exposed to a divine
knowledge’.
The book that ends by being
pulled in these two directions is both interesting and ferociously honest; one
of those I’m looking forward – without ambiguity or crossing out – to reading
again.
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