In Nicholas Thompson’s book, “The Running Ground,” which came out this week, he writes that “Over the years, the sport has shifted my imagination and my sense of self.” For Thompson—a former New Yorker editor who is now the C.E.O. of The Atlantic—running has been not just a tool for building discipline but also a way to relate to his father, to pare away the demands of everyday life, and to achieve calm and clarity. Not long ago, he joined us to recommend a few books about devotion to demanding physical pursuits. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
Endure
by Alex Hutchinson
“Endure” is a book about endurance sports, but it was really helpful for me in understanding how pain works. A lot of my book is about distinguishing the different kinds of pain that you feel when you’re running—when is it actually debilitating and when is it just part of a psychological process?
One of the things that I believe about running is that most of the pain is not physiological—it’s your brain worrying that you’re putting in too much effort and won’t be able to maintain homeostasis. At that point, your nervous system starts to send pain signals throughout your body that aren’t really necessitated by muscle fatigue or lactic-acid buildup—the kinds of problems that we think about. As I write in the book, in order to overcome this pain, you have to do something that’s a bit like playing hide-and-seek with your own mind.
“The Running Ground” is an investigation into how I was able to run very fast in my forties—so much faster than I had run in my twenties and thirties, when I was sort of at a physical prime in my life. I trained very hard and in very focussed ways in my thirties, so why was I not able to run faster? One of the important realizations I had is that I just did not conceive that I could go faster. Speed, pain, and effort are—as Hutchinson illustrates—psychological.
The Examined Run
by Sabrina B. Little
Little is a trail and ultramarathon runner and a philosopher. In this book, she goes deep into Aristotle and Plato, examining their ideas about how to live an ethical life and the ways in which running can teach you about ethics. She talks about how if you go for a run every day it builds a habit. It’s like a tiny act of courage. It teaches you a little bit about perseverance. And you learn patience, because if you don’t have control of your emotions, and if you don’t think about patience while you run you run badly.
What I loved about “The Examined Run” is that it looks at running in this deeper way. Most running books are, like, “I went for a run and it was awesome, and then I got mad at the world, and so I trained super hard and broke the record.” Reading this book, you understand how crazy and obsessive people in the sport are, and the ways in which that can be positive—or problematic. Running is a means of developing all these good virtues and habits. But it can also make you selfish, self-centered, and avoid other things that are more important.
Barbarian Days
by William Finnegan
Bill’s book is, in some ways, the closest model for what I was trying to do in “The Running Ground.” My goal is to take people really deep into the mind of a runner, and explain how my life has been shaped by it. Of course, my book is different—it’s structured differently, and it is also much more about my father and my relationship with him. But I am trying to explain my life, and the way that I see the world, through running, like Bill did with surfing.
I think “Barbarian Days” might have been the only book that I read twice in the process of writing my own. Of course, it’s scary—Bill is such a phenomenal writer that every time I would be reading it I’d think, God, that’s so good. I can’t match that. I put it to the side because it was kind of intimidating. But the thing is, when you read Bill’s book, you want to go surfing. You’re happy to understand the intricacies, like the difference between longboards and shortboards, but at the same time, you get to see him becoming an adult.
Once a Runner
by John L. Parker, Jr.
“Once a Runner” is probably a book that the average New Yorker reader is less likely to have read. It’s a little cliché, it’s a little over the top. But it’s also an amazing novel depicting what it’s like to be a young person completely obsessed with this sport, the way I was at seventeen.
