The story of distance running is a story of love, dedication, and immense suffering. In his poem ‘A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting’, the ancient Greek poet Lucian extols the joy that the messenger Pheidippides feels on relaying the news of winning the war, and then promptly dies, after running back and forth for around 150 miles, roughly the distance of six full marathons.
Consider also the story of Atalanta, the great huntress, and a favourite of Artemis. Atalanta vowed to marry only the man who would beat her in a foot race. The only man to beat her, Hippomenes, only did so with the crafty help of Aphrodite. Atalanta remains a personal favourite among the heroes, perhaps the only female running athlete to be mentioned in the Greek myths.
Keeping at it
Although a great fan of Atalanta, I am a terrible runner. After almost five years of running in some form or another, I frequently breathe the wrong way, or wear the wrong gear, still don’t have the perfect playlist, or the perfect earphones. I sweat too much, I land too hard, I am constantly out of breath, constantly hungry.
That is not an average runner, that is a lousy runner; and like any defeated human, I turn for solace to literature.
My favourite story is from Murakami, in his book What I Talk about When I Talk about Running . Here he writes about one of his runs where he sees a bunch of Harvard girls kick back their legs and run like the wind. He remarks, “Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain.”
Perhaps that is what lousy runners have over the great ones. We know pain, we know losing, so no matter what the defeat, never having known success, we keep at it, and we never lose hope. In short, we are meant to go the distance. The story of distance running is the story of consistent failures.
Very often, you’ll find the soul of a writer synced in motion with that of an athlete. Zadie Smith once wrote a beautiful piece on dance lessons for writers —“lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style”. If you substituted dancing with running, the prose could remain unchanged.
Smith is also a runner. She used to get up at 6 a.m. before sitting down to write White Teeth . Dancing, running, writing are similar in that sense; they all rely on beats and breaths, an ability to think in motion, consistently, again and again.
Murakami says he became a runner at the same time he became a novelist. If he hadn’t been a long-distance runner, he says, he wouldn’t have been the same kind of novelist. He started running at the age of 33: “The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life.”
For Murakami, running and writing happen in one microcosm of being: “First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.”
In 1999, Joyce Carol Oates echoed something similar in her piece for New York Times , later a part of her book The Faith of a Writer. Like Murakami, she relates running to the essential idea of the “self”.
The small joys
I run for small, consistent reasons of happiness — the beauty of lonely mornings, the promise of an elaborate breakfast, the solace of running with absolute strangers. In the book Born to Run , Christopher McDougall describes this as the basis of the sport, “to be with others”. Marathons frequently come close to mimicking a fleeting moment of shared humanity, of bringing communities together. The Palestine Marathon, which started in 2013 in the midst of despair and occupation, fashioned into strange routes to avoid Israeli checkpoints, is a symbol of just that, a triumph of the collective human spirit.
For the love of it
That bible of barefoot ultra-running, Born to Run, goes so far as to say that running makes you a better human being, because it forces you to adapt to your surroundings, be more kind, patient and compassionate.
So this year, having faced multiple battles with injury, sickness and mental fatigue, I decided to run only for love. I signed up for a “100 days of running” challenge. I ran through deadlines and dust, stress and humidity, but I ran with the greatest self-belief on most days. I didn’t run every day, but I ended up doing way more than 200 days.
I could have been preparing for a race, except I wasn’t, and that made all the difference. As McDougall says, there “was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running . The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted, and appreciating what you’ve got.”
Usain Bolt talks of this love, and calls upon it to do extraordinary things. He calls it the “point of no return” in his book Faster Than Lightning ; the tipping point where you learn to beat the body’s fatigue. Bolt’s story is extraordinary, not only because of his relentless pursuit of speed, but also because of the realisation that supreme talent without perseverance, suffering and immense love, is worth very little.
Burundian long-distance runner and genocide survivor Gilbert Tuhabonye talks of infinite love and faithin his book This Voice in My Heart: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Escape, Faith, and Forgiveness . It’s a story of survival and of his journey towards forgiveness. He says, “I had to find running”, to forgive, to find joy, to find freedom.
The story of running is really the story of the human spirit. It is about running, sometimes walking, but mostly moving forward. It is an ode to fighters, to children who dreamt of being Atalanta, to people who live under occupation, and those who run through the early morning mist to find balance among the stones and love in the darkest of spaces. As McDougall says, “You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.”
The writer is Senior Resident Fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
