The elite competitive distance runner trains until his arms and legs feel leaden with exhaustion. The elite distance runner must have the mental capacity to push himself daily beyond his apparent physical capacities. The elite runner must learn to coexist with pain.
John L. Parker Jr., himself a former elite competitive runner, wrote a novel more than 30 years ago that has drawn praise in some corners as the best novel ever written about running. The story of the novel is as compelling as the novel itself, which is compelling enough to merit new commercial editions following Carter’s original self-publication in 1978. He roamed around at track meets and sold books out of the trunk of his car.
Now Once a Runner is available in a hardcover edition for the first time.
Once a Runner (Scribner, NY 2009, April 2009; ISBN 978-1-4165-9788-9) actually has just enough novelistic elements to tie together the many evocative and revelatory passages about the mind and body phenomena of running, drawn from Parker’s own experiences. He won the U.S. collegiate Southeastern Conference championship in the mile three times, as well as winning the national steeplechase championship of the U.S. Track and Field Federation.
Absorbing Physical Punishment
Through the eyes of collegiate runner Quenton Cassidy, Parker tells us:
Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.
A runner’s body (and mind) must withstand getting beaten up the way a boxer copes with getting beaten up:
In a hail of killing blows, the fighter’s quiet center of logic, schooled in brutality, will be calmly theorizing: We are hurt pretty badly. If we do not cover up and take up the slack, we will soon be unconscious.
Cassidy, a miler at fictional Southeastern University in Florida, gains a mentor in graduate student Bruce Denton, an Olympic gold medal winner in the 5,000 meters (about three miles).
Denton ascends to guru status when Cassidy is suspended from track team after taking part in protest by several athletes from different sports over trivial restrictive rules (code of dress, length of hair, length of sideburns – remember, the book was written in the protest-laden Viet Nam era of the 1970s).
Pursuing the Four-Minute Mile
Under Denton’s tutelage, Cassidy stops going to classes, moves into a cabin in the woods owned by Denton – which Denton financed by money paid to him for ostensibly “amateur” events. Cassidy runs 20 miles a day, 140 miles a week. He obsessively pursues his goal of breaking the four-minute barrier for the mile – still the gold standard for milers even after it was first broken in 1954 by England’s Roger Bannister.
In the only passage of the book that withers under the scrutiny of time, Denton exhorts Cassidy:
“That quarter-mile oval may be one of the few places in the world where the bastards can’t screw you over, Quenton. That’s because there’s no place to hide out there. No way to fake it or charm your way through.”
That statement seems naïve from the perspective of the steroid era throughout sports. An icon like the Olympian Marion Jones found herself serving six months in prison in 2008 for lying to an investigation about using performance-ehancing drugs (PEDs). She had to surrender several of her gold medals.
But Parker's unique insights into the mind and body of a distance runner far surpass any of the book’s shortcomings, culminating in Quenton’s ultimate challenge: a matchup against the greatest miler in the world. It’s a race you won’t want to miss.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
Join the Conversation