The Brutal Wonders of a Late-Summer Run
The athletes and writers who made running into an American trend in the 1970s were hip to the way a good August or September run can “summon up the presence of death itself.”
I LOVE TO RUN IN THE HEAT. Long, slow distances are good for the cold months, but come July and August, I want to sprint. I head to a local park. It’s the off-season, so the baseball and soccer fields are empty. I run a slow mile down a wooded trail to warm up and then stop at the treeline, which puts me at the bottom of a long, steep grassy hill. I can’t see anything past that hill, other than the sky and the sun. It feels enormous. Impossible.
If you run the same hill regularly enough, you get a sense of how to pace yourself, how to read the incline, how to pump your knees and arms and to save some breath for the end. But the exhaustion always comes. When I reach the top of the hill, it sometimes feels like I’m about to collapse. My mind entertains impossibilities: Maybe my flesh will fall from my bones. Perhaps I’ll spontaneously combust. I could vanish.
I feel absolutely alive in those moments of exhaustion. They bring me back twenty years.
My college dorm room wall was covered with photos, Italian-American miscellany, a crucifix, neon beer signs, a 1980 University of Kentucky football recruiting poster with coach Fran Curci, and a short essay titled “Did I Win?” by George Sheehan. One of my coaches or older brothers must have clipped it for me from the December 1995 issue of Runner’s World.
I ran the 800 meters in college: the half-mile of hell. Sheehan was my oracle. Born in Brooklyn in 1918, he ran for Manhattan College, winning the Junior National AAU indoor mile in 1940 at 4:19. (The first sub-four-minute indoor mile was run by Jim Beatty in 1962.) Later that year, Sheehan stopped running and started medical school. He served in the Navy before practicing as a cardiologist. He cofounded Christian Brothers Academy, a Catholic prep school for boys, in 1959.
In 1963, Sheehan, then 45, started to run again. He measured a course in his yard that enabled him to run ten laps to the mile, and he got to work. Five years later, he was running a 4:47 mile. He became the medical editor for Runner’s World and started writing a column for them that the magazine continued to publish posthumously for two years after his passing, using material variously sourced from his many writings. The last installment they ran is what I put up on my wall. It was based on a speech that Sheehan gave in April 1993, the year he died.
Sheehan was in a Unitarian church in San Diego taking questions from the podium after giving a talk on running. Someone in the audience asked about his biggest concern in life. Sheehan thought for a moment, “turned my face heavenward, lifted my palms in front of me and said, ‘Did I win? Is this enough?’” He intended his heavy question earnestly, writing: “I feel as if I’ve spent my life playing a game in which I am not sure of the rules or the goal.”
Sheehan cites lines from Robert Frost that have been difficult to verify; they appear adapted from some material in the poet’s letters. “I am no longer concerned with good and evil. What concerns me is whether my offering will be acceptable,” is Frost’s provocation, as Sheehan puts it. He agrees with the sentiment. “Even with clear evidence of weakness or wrongdoing, of a guilty conscience or none at all,” Sheehan writes, “we may be looking at someone who passed the test. Someone who knew and did what is necessary for the winning life.”
Sheehan was a runner, talking to runners. “It’s hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners,” he wrote. The competition is ultimately against your very self, its discouraging inner voice, the longing to quit.
He ends the essay by noting that his son Andrew gave him a copy of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (the book had just won a few national awards). Sheehan quotes the inner reflections of the father of protagonist John Grady Cole as he rides behind his 17-year-old son: “He rides that horse as if he was born on it. If he had been born in a country where there were no horses, he would have traveled until he found them, and he would have known that’s where he was supposed to be.” Sheehan thinks of his own twelve children; he sees each of them riding out in front of him in life in a way that resonates with the way McCarthy’s fictional father regards his son. He counsels parents to raise their children with this destination in mind, to help them above all “to come into that country where they were born to be.” It is only in arriving there, Sheehan concludes, that anyone can “get beyond good and evil” and reach the place where “your offering is acceptable.”
As a 19-year-old trying to pace myself on a track in central Pennsylvania while my coach screamed “Lengthen your stride!” I found Sheehan’s essay to be a little pep talk. Although I’d run well enough in high school to merit a middle-distance spot on the college team, my real sport was basketball. But during my freshman season in college, I’d dislocated my shoulder for what seemed like the tenth time, which prompted our small local hospital to request a specialist from Penn State to make the trek out to treat me. He wrapped a bedsheet around my arm and pulled my shoulder back into place. Although my body was restored to rough alignment, the recurring injury had stretched the ligaments thin. A surgical procedure soon after marked the end of basketball for me.
Track became my obsession. Upper-body weight training came slowly, but my legs had an almost frenetic desire to move. I ran long, slow distances on roads that yarned among farms. I ran in the morning, and then I ran along the Susquehanna River at midnight. I also read all the Sheehan I could find. “Running made me free,” he wrote. “It rid me of concern for the opinion of others. Dispensed me from rules and regulations imposed from outside.” Alone and sometimes miles from home, I found a stride that suited me, and felt a bit of that freedom.
TIM MCLOONE, A LONGTIME CROSS-COUNTRY and track coach and friend of the Sheehan family, called Sheehan the “literate part” of the running boom of the 1970s. Technically, things got going in the mid-1960s with Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, whose pamphlet, The Joggers Manual, and book, Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for All Ages, got bodies moving. In 1976, former Syracuse University standout Mike Spino published Beyond Jogging: The Innerspaces of Running, which was intended to help joggers move beyond rote exercise and embrace technique and training. He found jogging to be a “plodding” activity, one that might create “physically fit” but “stodgy” people.
Spino wanted people instead to run. He advocated for interval work: not constant jogging, but a mixture of endurance running, speed (sprint) work, resistance training (like running on sand), and the “fartlek” approach. (Swedish for “speed play,” fartlek denotes coach Gösta Holmér’s method of shifting between sprints and endurance during a continuous run.) Spino believed these bodily shifts produced spiritual results. He considered running to be “a form of meditation”; he reported weeping during runs—not because of pain, which would be easy enough to understand, but because of transcendence. He advocated for “rituals before athletic activities”: lighthearted but earnest attempts to channel bodily energy, even telepathically. (For example: “Have two partners run toward an object, like a tree, and have one person send a telepathic message of what side of the tree to run on. If the energy is ‘tight’ between the partners, the message will be received.” What, haven’t you communicated on the astral plane with your gym buddy lately?)
Clearly, Spino’s book was a product of his time. Sports were getting spiritual then. The August 1974 issue of Golf Digest included an article titled “The Jock-Mystic Approach to Better Golf,” an account of trendy workshops that prioritized things like “visualization and the Energy Body” over actual practice on the links. In his 1975 book The Ultimate Athlete, George Leonard struck a similarly cosmic note. “We forget: all running is falling,” he writes. “To run, we commit ourselves to spring from the earth and fall back down again and again, neither fearing nor opposing gravity but giving ourselves over to its care.” Leonard calls running “the ultimate sport” in part for how the activity connects us with eternity. “What we run for we shall never reach,” he writes with biblical piquancy, “and that is the heart and the glory of it. In the end, running is its own reward. It can never be justified. We run for the sake of running, nothing more.” Running in Leonard’s account is virtually indistinguishable from life itself; it is similarly self-grounding.
Leonard’s reflections are not to every taste, which is useful for understanding the next step in the advance of running as an American cultural practice. That happened in 1977, the year that saw the arrival of James Fixx’s classic, The Complete Book of Running. Its influence helped running emerge from its slightly esoteric niche to become a popular practice.
A New York City magazine editor who would “entertain authors at lunches and dinners” and enjoy “too many martinis and too little exercise,” Fixx pulled a calf muscle during a tennis match. Angry and embarrassed, he started a running regimen—with resignation. “The only running I had ever done had been in Army basic training, and I had hated it,” he wrote. He kept running, slowly increasing his length and rate. After moving to Connecticut, he signed up for a five-mile race. He was 35, the age his own father had been when he had a heart attack; he finished in last place. He then began to train smarter and better, and within two years, he finished first in his age category in a 10,000-meter race with competitors from across the state.
As is the case for many runners, Fixx was inclined toward obsession. His first book, Games for the Super-Intelligent, collected Mensa-inspired logic and word problems. “For as long as I can remember,” he wrote, “I have taken a special—some might say an almost irrational—delight in puzzles, games, and problems of all sorts.” By the time he published it in 1972, Fixx was already running, and his prose seems often to illuminate both his athletic and intellectual preoccupations simultaneously: “Puzzles are something the aficionado does in odd, wonderful moments, mostly alone.”
He started to write about running—first for the Oberlin College Alumni Magazine in 1972: “I like the liberated, animal-like feeling I got when I was running along a beach or on a Connecticut horse trail (no phones, no kids) and I was lighter than I’d been in years.” In 1977, when his classic book on running arrived, it carried an epigraph—“It’s a treat, being a long-distance runner”—from Alan Stilltoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” In Stilltoe’s story, this phrase is the start of a poetic rumination from the narrator, who loves to be
out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do or that there’s a shop to break and enter a bit back from the next street. Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive.
Although Fixx’s running book includes plenty of practical advice, it has its own spiritual dimension. “You feel wonderful [after a good run],” an urban runner tells him. “[It] makes you feel sort of holy.” Fixx makes his goals clear in the foreword: They are “first, to introduce you to the extraordinary world of running, and second, to change your life.” This change, he concludes, is an elemental one, a reaching “back along the endless chain of history,” a restoration of our primordial kinship with other created beings. Perhaps runners are drawn to such big pictures because they are always propelling themselves toward the horizon.
Fixx died in 1984 during a late afternoon run along Route 15 in Hardwick, Vermont. He was 52. Years of smoking and poor eating had blocked his heart. His death threatened to stall the running movement, but for years—going back to earlier luminaries like Bowerman and Sheehan—running’s adherents had offered a cautionary refrain: The benefits are often intangible. The body is a mysterious machine.
RUNNERS OFTEN THINK ABOUT DEATH. George Leonard thought that pushing ourselves toward exhaustion is “to summon up the presence of death itself,” an encounter he considered necessary as a matter of routine; without it, his day felt incomplete. He spent an afternoon with a French professor at Stanford who ran the 100-meter in 10.5 seconds when he was 51. The professor told him, “Sometimes I think of my stride as pushing the ground back rather than propelling me forward. In sprinting, there’s some sort of switch-around between time and space. You become aware of the space-time continuum. You find yourself converting space to time, time to space.” Reversals of figure and ground, gestalt shifts: These are things we might associate with outlier experiences—but whether those of a damaged mind or one achieving a kind of transcendence, it can be hard to say.
And while this all might sound a bit loopy or off-putting, it could behoove us to suspend our disbelief to think more carefully about what is actually objectionable in it. Consider that it is socially acceptable, even expected, to be a devoted fan of professional sports. We are bidden to watch, to scream, to wail; and we offer these responses to a game in which we are not ourselves directly involved. Why not such devotion toward our own athletic participation, an undertaking in which more is at stake for us than in the distant game on TV? Running makes a claim on our entire bodies, and because of the sorts of spiritually restless creatures we are, that claim is most keenly felt in our souls.
At 42 years old, I appreciate Sheehan’s essay in a different way. I linger on those apocryphal words he cites from Robert Frost, the concern over “whether my offering will be acceptable.” When Sheehan gave the speech that became the essay I put on my wall, he had lived with prostate cancer for seven years. He would die months after he gave the talk that would later become his valedictory column.
After my dad finished his college athletic career as a fullback (and during the spring season, a sprinter) for the College of the Holy Cross, he kept running. He ran six miles each morning through the early darkness. Now, in his mid-eighties, he tells me how much he misses those runs. He would love to do that again.
For cradle Catholics like me, death is forever a part of how you see the world: how you pray, how you celebrate, how you tell stories and create art. But that doesn’t make your awareness of your inevitable death any easier. The thought of not being with my wife and my daughters, of never seeing my family again—these thoughts overtake me with an ambiguous frisson, something like the rush of ecstatic exhaustion I feel somewhere near the top of the hill.
I won’t run forever. But running feels like a practice inherited from some ancient tradition, something primal and odd. I run in the heat to run into the summer, to keep the heat going as the evening light begins to dim.
Years ago, when I raced those two laps around the track for the 800, I’d run my first lap a bit slow and make up ground on the back 400. My coaches tried to speed me up at the start, but I held back. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough left for the end. Running in the late summer, before the cold comes, reminds me that I am still unsure. No matter how far or fast I go, the horizon always recedes.