By Washed Up Former Officer, Colin SyBing

Six and a half years ago I made the varsity cross country team at Wootton High School. As a scrawny sophomore, I still wore white knee-length compression shorts under my uniform split shorts because the sight of my own thighs crippled me with anxiety. Even as an insecure 15-year-old, nothing instilled confidence in myself more than my running. The sweet spot of my career, that first year when you start taking your training seriously and it pays off, had begun. I PR’ed in almost every race I entered as a sophomore and looked towards my first state championship unfazed by the challenge.

As such, when my two coaches huddled my team in a science classroom after practice a few days before the state meet to give us a pep talk, I almost fell asleep. I didn’t need any extra motivation. Why would I? Running was simple; you show up, you do your best, and your best comes out. The ignorance borne of youth and absence of adversity made me invincible. Why were we taking an extra twenty minutes to “inspire” ourselves after practice when I could be studying for pre-calc or playing Fire Emblem: Awakening? (My time was precious, you see).

When my coach began reading us an excerpt from some popular running book, I rolled my eyes and checked out. How could anyone possibly write an entire book about something so mundane, so easy, and so mind-numbingly singular? Three days later, further supporting my theory that I knew everything and had figured out the secrets of life at 15 years old, I ran a PR at the state championship and earned a top 25 medal. Running’s easy, keep your books to yourself!

Six years, four major injuries, and countless heartbreaking workouts and disappointing races later, I saw myself preparing for my last collegiate track season a tad fed up with running poorly. A novel idea arose; maybe my incredibly experienced coach knew what she was talking about. Whilst shopping for Christmas presents, I figured I’d splurge on a little something for myself: a copy of John Parker Jr.’s Once a Runner, the very story I discounted six years prior. Many runners hail Parker’s novel as “the best book ever written about running” (it says that on the cover though, so the critical thinker in me took that with a fist-sized grain of salt). Maybe I had been missing some secret this whole time, and somewhere in 250 pages lay some sentiment that would electrify the end of my collegiate running career.

In a week, this book melted my skepticism. I was in love. The way Parker created a fictional world of a collegiate distance runner that felt realer than anything was like nothing I had ever read before. This book understood me. Everything from the pre-race jitters to the unspoken politics of track teams, from the annoyance of being constantly confused with “health-nuts” to the subtle unease of skipping a training day, and most importantly, the constant drive to improve and the mysterious, unnameable source of that drive, was there and expressed succinctly, almost poetically. It was as if some distant, unknown cousin came for a surprise visit and started showing me grainy photographs of long-lost family members resembling me. Parker’s book was new to me and from a completely different time, but at the same time the little touches that adorned every aspect of his world felt eerily familiar, like I had seen them a thousand times over without ever bothering to put a name to them.

As a quick account of the book hopefully low on spoilers, Parker, a former mile champion himself, pens a fictional tale of an avatar of himself: Quenton Cassidy, a talented, self-deprecating yet delightfully cocky miler entering his senior year in Florida’s fictional Southeastern University in the early 70’s. The book takes a simultaneously irreverent and deadly serious look inside Cassidy’s mind as he prepares for his final year of track. Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll not disclose here, Cassidy, in the shape of his life, gets banned from competition in the spring. In the midst of a challenge completely unrelated to running, Cassidy faces a choice: change his lifestyle completely in order to continue his pursuit of running perfection, or accept the hand dealt to him and walk away quietly to a life without competitive running. If you could guess, he chooses the former, isolates himself in a desolate cabin in the woods, and triples his efforts in pursuit of becoming the perfect miler.

This book lit my soul on fire in January, and that flame warded me against laziness and the winter’s cold. The simplicity and ferocity with which I trained returned to 15-year-old me levels. Running was still the inherently simple, and sometimes painfully mundane task it was six years ago, but I could love it all the same because this book reawakened my passion for that simplicity. This was my last track season, and thanks to Parker and Cassidy, it would be explosive.

That is, it would have been had the world not ceased its rotation before spring break. Alas, like many seniors around the country, the track season I thought to be my magnum opus no longer existed. While this is not meant to be some self-obsessed account of why this pandemic specifically harms me, an upper-middle class college student with no health problems or compromised family members, hopefully you can understand and relate to my disappointment, if only a little bit. Running’s purist beauty, after two months, became poisoned with extraneous hardships and complexity.

Faced with the similar choice as Cassidy, I wasn’t ready to quit in the face of adversity. I was in great shape, the product of four months of excellently consistent training and four years of equally consistent suffering. Why stop now? My valiant quarantine training commenced! I scheduled a time trial with my roommates. I held the intensity of my training afloat as best I could with a growing tidal wave of apathy lurking in the background. This was simply another test, right? Just as Cassidy states during a particularly difficult bout of overtraining, “from the crucible of such inner turmoil comes the various metals, soft or brittle, flawed or pure, that determine the good runners, the great runners, and perhaps the former runners.”

Loosely translated; if you don’t keep training just because your precious little season got cancelled, you’re a fraud. Quarantine hadn’t changed running, just everything else around it. The bleachers had been stripped of your audience, your efforts lost the promise of medals and ribbons, and your training lost the levity brought by training partners. Running is still there though, and if you don’t love it at its worst, you don’t deserve it at its best *vomits*. Your training should have the same, nay, double the intensity it did before or else you weren’t a true believer, just some tourist experimenting with the life of a true runner for a couple years.

Curiously enough, I’m a fraud. Physically poised to run a 5k time-trial that I thought would be the first of a lengthy “Quarantine Racing Series,” I toed the line at the track one March afternoon feeling oddly tired, and just a bit bored. A tad over 2k in, that boredom evolved to intolerable discomfort and crushing disinterest, so I stepped of the track, sat in the sandpit, and untied my spikes. Four days later, I couldn’t imagine keeping up any form of training, and declared a hiatus.

Confused, frustrated, and just plain tired, I picked Once a Runner off my desk to try and rekindle the spark. This book is a cult classic beloved by millions. It couldn’t be meaningless, could it? There had to be something in this fiction that was real, irrefutable, and constant: some golden truth that I needed to reconsult to give my struggle meaning again. This time, I read closer, scrutinizing themes and ideas more deeply than the first time around. I even wrote down important quotes accompanied by page numbers (please clap). I left not disappointed, but with a wildly different impression. Without giving too much away for any of you who haven’t read it (a condition I still think you should fix), I left the second read with three key flaws in the book I previously thought perfect. After a brief online search, it seems that these criticisms aren’t anything new. So, to summarize those flaws:

• This book glorifies overtraining. When I brought up the superhuman volume of Cassidy’s training to my roommate, he countered with “It was the 70’s man, everybody trained like that.” Upon my first read, yes, Cassidy’s constant 140-mile weeks (in preparation to race a mile, mind you) stood out as ridiculous. However, upon a second read, the issue runs deeper than a miler doing double the necessary mileage. When Cassidy begins suffering physically from increasing his mileage (sleeping 14 hours a day, eating poorly, feeling depressed and irritable, ignoring his girlfriend, and skipping class) he throws out some macho 9^th grade one-liners about how overtraining is a necessary part of the process: Cassidy’s “Trial of Miles.” The book presents an uncompromising message towards training. The “secret” to success is running a lot, pretty fast (about 6 min/mile), twice every day, without any days off. If you can’t commit to that, you suck and you’re wasting your time. Cassidy’s idol and coach, Bruce Denton, runs twice a day through a sickness that leaves him bedridden and puking for the rest of the day. Cassidy trains similarly and never suffers an injury or underperforms in a race (his slowest mile race in the book is about 4:03). How convenient. Cassidy’s infamous interval workout (which lies in one of the best written chapters so I won’t spoil what it is), demands paces and volume that make a training montage from Dragon Ball Z look realistic. Cassidy, Denton, and their teammate Jerry Mizner, train like insufferable morons for the entire book. Don’t read this looking for training advice.
• This book’s main theme has sexist undertones. When I first read this book, I saw some of the sexism in it and wrote it off. It’s set in the Deep South in the 70’s, so I expected some of it. But I’m not talking about how the school football coach is a womanizer (his name is Dick Doobey, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t), nor am I talking about how the jocks single out “ugly girls” to cheat off of during exams, or about that bizarre, glancing sentence where Cassidy kisses a random nurse on the forehead before sprinting away and we’re supposed to think he’s some charming rogue for it. I don’t mind the first two because the football establishment and its members are villains and villains are prone to, well, villainy. The third is obnoxious, and there’s loads of minuscule, one-off sentences like it where a woman is reduced to “a sweet thing” or some other outdated one-liner that could have been omitted without any consequence to the story. The larger, possibly unforgivable offense lies in the writing of Cassidy’s girlfriend Andrea, the only female character given more than ten lines of dialogue. Andrea spends the book trying to understand Cassidy and his spiritual desire to test his limits, but she can’t. Why? Because Parker finds his only female character more useful as an obstacle than a support. Andrea exists solely to provide a running-free foil to Cassidy in his running-centric world. She symbolizes a distraction, not evil but frivolous, something that obstructs Cassidy’s pursuit of athletic prowess. It’s no coincidence Parker wrote Andrea with a limp. She’s written as an earthbound pedestrian trying desperately to understand space flight. She gets reduced to a trial that Cassidy must overcome, because how could the pursuit of greatness ever be understood by *gasps* a woman?
• This book’s specificity can be alienating. Just as Andrea, a non-runner, gets blown sideways in the wake of Cassidy’s fast-track to glory, so too does anyone running for any reason other than winning races. Parker periodically digs at hobby joggers, fitness junkies, “spiritual” or “zen” runners, and anyone else with less than pie-in-the-sky goals. Parker intended this book for competitive runners, and with that comes some elitism and exclusivity. Cassidy’s internal monologue mirrors Parker’s intent: if you’re not “all or nothing”, you’re nothing.

So “the greatest book ever” presents some issues. It’s uncompromising, exclusive, and, shockingly, fictional. What then, draws so many to the tale of Quenton Cassidy? He’s not exactly the most relatable protagonist. He begins the book with a blistering mile PR of 4 minutes. He’s respected, clever, funny, unyieldingly ambitious and, for the most part, invincible. He’s basically a running Superman, and Superman’s perfection makes him less popular than heroes with character flaws. Why do runners look at Cassidy like a kindred spirit, when a fraction of a fraction of them possess the talent and drive to exist in his upper echelon of “real runners?”

I think the answer is simple. I think that every competitive runner, fast, slow, young, old or injured has either possessed or dreamed of possessing Cassidy’s drive at some point. Heck, forget just runners. Anyone who dreams of being great at anything wishes they could be Cassidy, if only for a little while. He’s a man who gives up everything in pursuit of greatness, and that image is tantalizing. Everyone’s thought it. What if I dropped everything and wrote music all day? What if I quit school to start a business? What if I moved to a cabin in the woods and ran like a madman every day?

It’s a simple idea, removing distractions to maximize your potential, and in the world of fiction our heroes rarely deal with a scenario where it doesn’t pay off because that would spoil the romance. It’s also an idea toyed with by many runners entering this quarantine. With the world closed and commitments shut down, I’ve seen people all over Strava embrace the “all-in” mentality. But for every runner I see busting out ridiculous mileage borne out of boredom, I see another like myself: unmotivated, guilty, and nostalgic for the season that never happened.

In March, we were kicked into isolation that Cassidy chose voluntarily. Some of us adjusted famously. Some took a step back or even stopped training altogether. According to Cassidy, only the former type deserves respect. The rest should be ashamed, and from what I read on Strava while skipping Zoom lectures, many of us are just that: ashamed. When I dropped out of my own time trial four weeks ago I felt acute self-loathing that eventually smoothed out into remorseful frustration which then fizzled into a quiet dissatisfaction that still lingers.

I’d argue that the final of those three qualities is the most useful for fueling a real running journey, one with all the warts and blemishes absent from Cassidy’s pristine journey. I liken self-loathing to an intense dehydration, where you want something so dearly, so immediately, that you’ll do anything to drink some damn water, even if you hurt yourself (not just physically) in the process. On the other hand, quiet dissatisfaction is more like the hunger in the middle of a day when you’ve forgotten to pack a lunch. The slow, smoldering embers of the latter are far more likely to keep you warm and carry you further, while the blazing inferno of the former will burn and burn and burn until you’ve got nothing left but ashes and a hatred for your sport and yourself.

If you’ve held to a strict training regimen in the midst of all this chaos, bravo. If instead you wake up in the middle of a global health pandemic without the intense, roiling desire to train your guts out with no races on the near horizon and no teammates to pal around with, and worse, feel guilty about not having the drive anymore, that’s okay. Because, at the risk of Quenton Cassidy rising out of my book and smacking me across the face, it’s okay to not be “all-in” all the time. You can fulfill yourself without Cassidy’s furious obsession.

Deep down, everyone wants their running career to be Cassidy-esque even if they haven’t read the book. What you might forget when you’re caught up in either the book or your own head after a failed workout, is that more than just gumption separates you from Cassidy. Rather, you could train with the same ferocity and single-mindedness he does and still come up short. That’s a result of living in the real world, where injuries are real, overtraining is real, you are real, and where global health pandemics are real. In this real world, though you may be isolated like second-half Quenton Cassidy, there’s no need to adopt his “do-or”die” lifestyle as well, t’s okay to be first-half Quenton Cassidy, who pulls pranks, who leads an exciting love life, who gets his training in but is willing to adjust so he can enjoy the weekends with his friends (though I suppose you shouldn’t be doing that last one). Don’t obsess, just live your life the way you want and let the running come naturally.

Nevertheless, I can still love this book and forgive myself for taking a break from my training during quarantine, and that’s because the magic of Once a Runner lies not in its social commentary or utility as a training guide. If that were true, you’d see competitive runners spitting on joggers out on the sidewalk whilst training themselves to death, and almost all of them would still end up unsatisfied with their own lives because not all of them could be the best. Bleak, right?

Once a Runner’s timeless power, the power that draws emotion out of so many, is the vivid life it brings to the unspoken laws and details that litter the corners of our lives. Cassidy sleeps in his running clothes to save extra time in the morning and yet he still despises every second of waking up for a run. He and his teammates give their routes goofy names and talk ridiculous hypotheticals to pass the time while running. He’s got every pair of spikes he’s ever raced in saved in a box under his bed, each with their own stories. Knowing that millions of people understand what it’s like to spend your day doing something so simple without imagining doing it any differently, knowing that they understand that alongside every other minuscule habit that links us all together gives this tale the power to tell the reader “you’re not alone,” even when we’re all locked away in our own corners of the world.

Read the book if you’re interested. Forgive yourself if you’re not killing it on the trails now. Most importantly, though it might feel like it, don’t ever think you’re running alone.