Where is the Literature of Running?

Transcript of piece read on Radio Four for Open Book
Hear it HERE about 20 minutes in.

Where is the literature of Running?
When I tell people what I’ve been working on, they usually follow up with a question in a politely confused tone. “Where is the literature of running?” they want to know. Is there a hoard or some secret stash of running novels tucked away somewhere that they don’t know about (The Woman in White trainers, or Anna Karunina)? The answer is that their hunch is correct: there isn’t really a literature of running. Could Darcy have fallen for Lizzie if she had arrived at Netherfield a sweaty and puffing wreck because she had intervalled her entire way from Longbourn?         Two hundred and fifty years ago, the same questions might have been asked of someone working on a book about walking.Walking and versifying have been linked since the very earliest of world literatures. In those arduous journeys from the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, or The Aeneid, walking was incidental rather than crucial to the narrative. Much later, stories were also told to pass the time to counter the boredom of a long journey (like in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where the pilgrims take turns in entertaining and distracting the group from their activity. As late as 1818, Jeanie Deans, from Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian walks the million or so steps from Edinburgh all the way to London to plead clemency for her sister, and even here, the drama is a stationary affair, something that happens in between the walks. Almost nothing is said about the experience of walking hundreds of miles barefoot on eighteenth-century rural roads.         It’s not until the arrival of figures like Wordsworth, Coleridge and John Clare that walking finds its way between the lines of our verses and stories and into our hearts. Their walks became the mainstay of their poetry.  Without Wordsworth’s walks, for example, there would be no ‘Tintern Abbey’, no Prelude, and we would never have what must be the most famous line of all English poetry ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. Later, Charles Dickens explored the drama of long walks in novels like Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. Thomas Hardy used our heroine’s epic walks in Tess of the D’Urbevilles to make sense of her (and our) insignificance in the landscape. And through figures like Virginia Woolf and Edward Thomas, right up to Rachel Joyce’s recent bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the literature of walking is now firmly established.         So where are the runners? Despite there being millions of us, and despite there being numerous novelists and writers that are committed runners (like Don DeLillo, Lionel Shriver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Scarlett Thomas), where are all the stories? Where is the literature of running?         A good story unfolds at walking pace, to the rhythm of our footsteps - indeed, we are so unchallenged by the motion that, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, we can even tell the stories as we walk. But the intensity of running prohibits this. And it is what makes these two forms of movement so very different. Running might have a beginning, middle and an end, but it is not a story, it is too intensely embodied. The sensory overload of how the grass feels against the soles of your feet, of the air hitting your skin and pumping in and out of your lungs, of your eyes scanning the horizon, all as you stroke the pinion of the tall grass, these reflections are more at home in poetry, the essay, or in nature writing, than they are in the novel.
         Just as there was a renaissance for writing about walking around two centuries ago, I think we are just now working out how to write about running with authors like Richard Askwith’s Running Free, Mark Rowlands’ Running with the Pack, Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and in the essays of people like Hayden Lorimer. Each of these writers is able to focus on the intensity, ephemerality, and the sensual immediacy of running without feeling the need to mangle their reflections into a literary form like the novel. These are the books that are laying the ground for a new kind of writing about the body, the landscape, and the ways that we cut through it when we run.