What are they thinking? Whatever your opinions about running, that is a reasonable question to ask, not just rhetorically but also literally, about the more than fifty thousand people who ran the New York City Marathon on Sunday. Like most major races these days, the marathon has become a serious spectator sport, with more than two million onlookers crowding the city’s sidewalks, and millions more watching on TV. Yet the essence of the experience remains invisible. Runners may smile or cry or limp or double over or raise their fists like Rocky, but these are crude proxies for what is going on in their minds during those 26.2 miles between the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the finish line, in Central Park.
Two hours if you’re Meb Keflezighi, six if you’re Joe Schmo: with the exception of bike racing, no other sport involves as much time to think as long-distance running. Golf rounds are slow and baseball games borderline endless, but the actual moments of play are comparatively brief and highly focussed; like faster, reflex-reliant sports—basketball, soccer, ice hockey—they do not conduce to abstract thinking. In endurance running, by contrast, one thinks at great length while doing the activity. To run five or ten or twenty-six miles is, as much as anything else, to engage in a sustained way with the deep strangeness that is the human mind.
Not least because of that deep strangeness (though also thanks to various technical limitations), the mind has thus far proved only moderately amenable to scientific study. Nonetheless, researchers have lately turned to science to try to figure out what runners think about while they run. In a study published earlier this year in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, the sports psychologist Ashley Samson and three colleagues clipped microphones onto ten distance runners and asked them to narrate their thought process during a run. Afterward, the researchers transcribed those monologues, identified the thoughts they contained, and divvied them up into three categories: Pace and Distance, Pain and Discomfort, and Environment.
The results make for entertaining, if not exactly convincing, reading. The (notably tiny) group of runners spent most of their time thinking about pace and distance—translated cynically, about how hard it was to move at their desired speed (“Come on, keep the stride going, bro”) and about how soon they could stop (“Come on, you have enough energy for a mile and a half”). But, after that, the runners mostly thought about how miserable it was to run. “While all the participants had periods during their run where they appeared to be comfortable and thinking about other things,” the researchers wrote, “pain and discomfort were never far from their thoughts.” Feet went numb, stomachs ached, lungs heaved, exhaustion loomed, hills hurt, heat sapped, vomit threatened; all told, fully a third of runners’ thoughts concerned the downsides of running. The remaining thoughts pertained to the runners’ immediate environment, which the researchers further subdivided: runners had mostly pleasant thoughts about terrain and wildlife, and mostly unpleasant thoughts about weather, traffic, and the other people around them.
Like a fair number of psychological studies, this one confirmed the obvious while simultaneously missing it. Of course runners think about their route, their pace, their pain, and their environment. But what of everything else that routinely surfaces in the mind during a run? The new girlfriend, the professional dilemma, the batteries you need to remember to buy for the smoke detector, what to get your mom for her birthday, the brilliance with which Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson (if you are listening to the soundtrack to “Hamilton”), the music, the moment (if you are listening to Eminem), the Walter Mitty meanderings into alternate lives: all of this is strangely missing from Samson’s study. The British author Alan Sillitoe got it right in his 1958 short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”: “They can spy on us all day to see if we’re … doing our ‘athletics,’ but they can't make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves.”
But where the scientists fails, the writer may succeed. “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” may be the most famous story ever written about running, and it does an exceptional job of capturing how the mind of a runner wanders and swerves and expands as the miles unfurl. Its protagonist, a seventeen-year-old known only as Smith, spends his daily morning runs thinking—occasionally about pace and pain and his surroundings, but chiefly about money, moral codes, friendship, his father’s death, the crime that landed him in a juvenile detention center, and how to assert himself over the authorities who are simultaneously keeping him locked up and championing his running career. Smith is a fictional character, of course, so his thought process as he runs is both an invention and, in a sense, a formal convention—a way for Sillitoe to structure his narrative. Yet his story might get closer than Samson’s study to answering the question of what runners think about while running.
The same could be said of stories in general—so far, fiction does a better job of capturing consciousness than any other method ever tried—but, unfortunately, running stories are, at best, uneven. For every Alan Sillitoe there is a Paul Christman, whose 1983 novel, “The Purple Runner,” begins with a blonde in nylon running shorts slowing to a stop. “Arms akimbo, she cocked her hips to rest upon one of her two statuesque legs, breathing deeply to settle the anaerobic debt acquired from her climb.”
Nonfiction about running is arguably better, and indisputably more abundant. Yet despite the explosion in memoirs and training guides (including some that focus on how runners think: “Brain Training for Runners,” “Elite Minds,” “Running with the Mind of Meditation”), very few such books address the mind of the runner in descriptive rather than inspirational or aspirational terms. The most prominent exception is the novelist Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” which manages to be neither inspirational nor aspirational nor descriptive. “What exactly do I think about when I’m running?” Murakami asks. “I don’t have a clue.” He is not describing the slipperiness of conscious thought in the runner’s mind; that is all he has to say. “On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is,” he writes. “And about the heat on hot days.”
That kind of banality is vintage Murakami, but it does very poor justice to what other people think about while running, and to the inherently profound nature of the enterprise, which mingles body and mind, pleasure and suffering, self and world. Books that do better justice are rare, but last year a small Southern press published, with near-zero fanfare, an understated little volume that does more than both the current science and the current literature to illuminate the mind mid-run.
Poverty Creek is a meandering stream, edged by wetlands and shaded by Appalachian hardwood, that flows southwest from the continental divide just outside of Blacksburg, Virginia. For nearly ten years, the trail system that surrounds it and shares its name has served as the running route of Thomas Gardner, a professor of literature at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech. Last year, Gardner published “Poverty Creek Journal” (Tupelo Press), one of the better books about running I’ve read, and the only one to uncover the literary possibilities inside the terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative genre of the running log.
“Poverty Creek Journal” consists of fifty-one entries, beginning on January 6, 2012, and ending on December 30th of that same year. Almost all take the day’s run as their point of departure, and none exceeds a paragraph. Through these constraints, running is simultaneously put in its place—the forty or sixty or ninety minutes Gardner spends each day on his morning runs mirrored in tightly limited lines—and, like a sonnet, permitted to contain everything. Indeed, of the many forms that the book glancingly resembles, one is the sonnet sequence.
Runners who track their workouts generally jot down their distance, time, route, and the prevailing conditions, both outside and in. Gardner includes and elevates all of this; his book would be less good if it engaged less—or less well—with the normally dull conventions of the running log. We learn that he typically covers seven miles a day in a little over an hour, but that he hopes to run eight-minute miles in an upcoming half-marathon. We learn that he prefers to run at Poverty Creek but occasionally does a workout in town or on the college track—which he accidentally shares, one day, with a hundred and fifty Army cadets, who converge and part around him like a flock of birds circling above a rooftop in Brooklyn. And, as in a normal running log, we see the seasons pass together with the miles. Gardner runs in heat and humidity, “feeling doped and unresponsive”; he runs on the first day of Hurricane Sandy, the wind out on the outer band of the storm reminding him of stories his wife once told him about childhood games of crack-the-whip. He runs in winter, when “the dust of snow against the blank ground makes the raised surfaces stand out,” and in autumn, when the trail, covered in leaf litter, turns golden and hazardous.
From the very beginning, though, Gardner’s journal makes clear how far it will diverge from a conventional runner’s log. “My right calf is still a little stiff from where I strained it last week doing mile repeats in the cold. Just enough to not let me out of my body,” he writes in the first entry. And then: “When Emily Dickinson writes about Jacob, she never mentions his limp.” That startling reference would have come naturally to Gardner, whose previous books include “A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson” (Oxford, 2006). His new work is closer in spirit to prose poetry than to an academic study, but it is still unmistakably scholarly. He is in conversation here not with athletes but with writers, whose voices mingle with his own on almost every page: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Howe, Seamus Heaney, Simone Weil, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Melville, Whitman.
So much erudition could easily come off as pretentious in a book about running, but it doesn’t. For one thing, the literary references in “Poverty Creek Journal” do not seem directed to the external world so much as integral to the inner one—pages in a private anthology that leaf open as Gardner’s mind and body loosen. For another, any hint of affectation is neutralized by the fact that, throughout, Gardner remains grounded, literally: sliding on ice in the winter, sinking into muck in the spring.
Gardner was fifty-eight during the year he chronicles in “Poverty Creek Journal,” and for him, as for the participants in Samson’s study, discomfort and pain are a consistent presence. “A dull ache, about half a mile into the run,” he writes one day, and, later, “I’ve had a bad cold the last two days, like running with a lantern in my throat.” But the suffering with which he is most concerned is not physical. Very early on in the book, in the entry for February 29th, we learn, without preparation or preamble, that Gardner’s younger brother died of a heart attack the day before. As both writer and runner, the author retains his form: “Cold rain this morning, 45 degrees, crying hard by the time I hit the pond.” For the rest of the book, grief will trail him just off one shoulder, the way his brother used to do until, always the faster runner, he pulled ahead at the end.
Other kinds of grief pace this book as well. We learn, fifteen entries in, that Gardner was in Boston running the marathon on April 16, 2007, the day a Virginia Tech undergraduate shot and killed thirty-two students and faculty and wounded seventeen others. In Boston, the weather had been so bad—rain, sleet, icy roads, gusting winds—that race organizers came closer to cancelling the marathon than at any time in its then hundred-and-eleven-year history. Gardner’s wife waited until he had crossed the finish line and stopped shivering to break the news to him. Back in Virginia, student after student showed up at his office to talk about what had happened on campus. What happened to Gardner himself—the disorientation of being so far away, experiencing something so different from his community—he summarizes with spare precision: “When I got up from my chair, the shock of my body still battered by the marathon surprised me. I’d forgotten Boston entirely.”
Elsewhere, the book is dogged by more routine loss. You cannot run for very long without thinking about the passage of time, and if you run the same routes often enough, sooner or later, you are lapped by your own ghost. At the start line of a small-town Independence Day 5K that he’s run for twenty-five years, Gardner is jostled by the memory of his past self, who could finish in eighteen minutes. Elsewhere in the book, new young runners pick up the baton. In one of my favorite passages (and one of the very few that strays from the creek), Gardner recalls a family vacation to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where he and a friend took his daughter, then a teen-ager, and two of her peers for a run on the beach. Toward the end, having pulled ahead, Gardner and his friend pick up the pace, only to have the girls sweep past them, fleet as “two young horses.” The two old horses stare. “Maybe we laughed,” Gardner writes. “There was no way we could catch them.”
Much the same could be said about the thoughts experienced by runners. When they are working at maximum intensity—racing up a hill, sprinting toward a finish line—runners cannot think at all; the brain is only the desperate charioteer of ten billion mutinous cells, famished for oxygen. Conversely, when everything is working to maximum perfection, runners can’t really be said to think, either, so blissfully loosed from conscious control are their thoughts. (“I run in a void,” Murakami writes, in the single passage in his memoir that I admired. “Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”)
Most runners run to achieve either or both of these conditions as often as possible—to provoke a kind of Cartesian collapse, mind and body suddenly in anguished or glorious collusion. And, most of the time, we fail. The body twinges and hitches and aches; the mind fusses and fidgets. What is it all for? What was it all about? Gardner compares his thoughts while running to the blue herons he sometimes sees on his route; they “rise and rattle, spread their wings, legs trailing them over the pond.” Summoning them back after the fact is difficult. They are as elusive as the ideas in a dream, “a kind of un-retraceable wandering.”
The achievement of “Poverty Creek Journal” is precisely that it does retrace that kind of wandering—and, in so doing, makes something lovely and meaningful of a difficult year. Gardner does not go in for pat analogies; he does not claim, as Camus once did about soccer, that running taught him everything about death. Nor does he go in for pat consolation. His journal does not so much end as stop, as if he has simply not yet risen for the next morning’s run.
But perhaps that is a solace. Confronted with difficulty of any kind—a throbbing ankle, a stitch in the side, cold, hunger, headwinds, loneliness, despair, boredom, grief—runners will inevitably talk about “running through it.” In its more modest connotation, the phrase simply means to keep going. But the grander meaning is that “through it” means “past it.” That is the runner’s great article of faith: that a better mood will supplant a worse one, pain will ease up, joy will kick in. “That sucked,” one of the participants in Samson’s study declared into his microphone, “but it’s going to be an awesome run on the way back.”
