I don’t wear earphones when I run. I hate having music blaring in my ears, cutting me off from the rest of the world. A song might enter my head accompanying the rhythm of my movement. No song in particular; just some familiar pop song dredged up out of the recesses of my mind and resonating through the echo chamber that is my skull. Instead, I strive to be like N. Scott Momaday’s runner:
I, however, certainly do not sing when I run. Wheeze, maybe. But sing? Definitely not. I stride across the South Downs, a ridge of chalk hills in the South of England. The windswept, steeply sloping grassy fields practically disappear beneath my feet as my awareness of my feet contacting the ground slips away with every meter I cross. I have no idea how far I have gone or how long I have been gone. I simply am. I am running and thus I am a runner and as such, I am thoroughly ensconced as part of the world. I am not separate from it; my awareness takes in the rhythmic shush of waves caressing the shingle far below, the cry of terns coming off their cliffside nests or larks suddenly erupting out of cover and hovering above me as I approach and then pass. The rustling of something unseen in the gorse, the play of the clouds and sunlight mirror the dance of the long grass and my own legs, and the wind’s soft caress across my skin softly echoes the passage of birds overhead and my footfalls on the exposed chalky soil. I am aware of all these things as much as I am aware of my body—there is no distinction between it and the birds, the wind, and the sea. To become fully human is to become an integrated aspect of the world much as Momaday describes.He was alone and running on. All of his being was concentrated in the sheer motion of running on, and he was past caring about the pain. Pure exhaustion laid hold of his mind, and he could see at last without having to think. He could see the rain and the rivers and the fields beyond. He could see the dark hills at dawn. He was running, and under his breath he began to sing.1
This manifestation of being alive, of being a runner, is one that is difficult to articulate yet is a relatively common feeling amongst runners as well as other practitioners of various physical activities. It is through physical exertion, and the sensory experiences of those exertions, that one becomes more attuned to, more aware of, being; not just being in isolation as a solitary individual entity but as being part of the world. This expansive sense of existence, the making of the runner, is achieved through various sensory experiences. That sense of being, however, does not even begin to be captured in the popular and academic articulations about running. Something vital is being missed: the ways of being that Momaday captures and it is what Momaday extracts that is the focus of this book.
This book is about running, but it is not about how running is most commonly thought of. Running is not what we think it is. It is more. “Running” commonly means a particular form of running that is both culturally and historically specific. Running has been incorporated into what we commonly recognize as sport, and therefore there are certain evaluative assumptions made about becoming a runner and the act of running itself. Those values are embedded so deeply into the current secular, consumer capitalist, globalized worldview that the idea that running might actually be something much less and much more than this eludes most runners. They glimpse it, sense it just beyond their ken, but cannot seem to come to grips with that elusive will-o’-the-wisp at the cusp of their awareness precisely because of the underpinning values that hold them to their particular ways of moving.
Runners are ubiquitous presences in most leading socioeconomic capitalist societies in the world. In their brightly colored clothing, these runners are class-specific, oriented toward capital as evidenced in their motivations for personal betterment, to both feel better about themselves and also exhibit the dominant tropes of good health embodied by the middle classes of Europe and America—most especially, but certainly not exclusively, the white middle classes. The self-help books, the “runner’s guides,” the stores selling advice and technologies, all reflect the predominant message that anyone can run.2 Popular first-person accounts of the “average” person regaling their “adventures” and how running makes them feel reinforce the notion that anyone can run.3 Of course, anyone can run, but what those stories really mean is that most anyone can become a “runner.” But one can only be a runner if one follows certain symbolic precepts, one of which is to consume the latest technologies that show anyone passing that you are a runner. There is an entire “running” industry with its own ideological construction of “the runner” tied into technology, specific values, and techniques of the body4 that reflect twenty-first-century capitalist values.
One is that hard work will inevitably lead to success. This belief, a central and core dictum of the runner’s way of life, persists despite the simple truth that there is no reliable connection between the quantity of effort and the realization of one’s dreams. Another core value held to be self-evidently true is that the virtue of hard work is somehow ennobling. The very act of striving to improve, to dedicate one’s self to a task, makes you a better person. A related value is that through running you can become the person you always wanted to be and that if you manage to transform your being through running that will naturally lead to a complete transformation of yourself and the rest of your life as well. This too is part of the running dogma. All of these are patently false as universal laws. They might apply to any given individual. Such personal change can happen. But none of those values are inherent to the actual act of running and none are guaranteed to prove true for you.
While those values persist, another value has become crucial to the making of the runner, that of endurance. Endurance, like all social values, is culturally specific and the embodied endurance found in the act of running is also culturally specific. For example, various indigenous American groups ran and run long distances and value endurance.5 Endurance, however, takes on very different meanings in the post-industrial capitalist world. While endurance is valorized within capitalism, to endure a condition does nothing in terms of challenging or changing those conditions of existence. In effect, to endure is to accept one’s circumstances but not do anything to change those circumstances. Thus, endurance is valued because it keeps us “working hard” and striving to meet personal goals. The emergence of long-distance running as a popular self-affirming social practice is a product of our cultural times. The ability to endure as a social value has increased in value with the proliferation of ultramarathons (race distances at least more than double a marathon), extreme marathons (races in challenging climates such as the Sahara desert or Antarctica) or obstacle courses that test the ability of an individual to endure adverse conditions via “tough mudder” races. The test may be to determine what the limits of human performance may be in terms of distance and speed.6 Running is promoted as a “transformative” ritualized practice that leads to a sense of accomplishment that fulfills what is otherwise missing from many people’s lives.7 Nevertheless, however the agonies endured while running are suffered, such acts do not challenge the actual structures of capitalist society. Rather, running simply reinforces the status quo through an embodied act. All of these events valorize, more than anything else, a person’s ability to endure bodily discomfort and pain while putting forth tremendous physical effort in an effort to be appreciated.
Thus, the implicitly understood idea of “running” is not actually running but is a form of “disciplined leisure”8—an intermediary practice located between work and home—that gives rise to a specific form of being: the “runner.” “Running” is an obvious activity in which one moves as swiftly as one physically can across a set distance in as little time as possible. Or one attempts to cover as much distance as possible in a set of amount of time. Or to make it even simpler, a number of us all line up and move as fast as we can to a set point in the distance along an agreed upon route. These are not examples of running. Running is not a sport. These are forms of racing and racing is a physical act imbued with specific, shared, embodied meanings.9 In other words, racing is a sport but it is also a particular and peculiar form of cultural activity that reinforces specific values. As a particular form of running, racing has values specific to a particular understanding of the world that denies the saliency of the inherent celebratory nature of running as an individualistic act of becoming. The vast majority of the contemporary popular writings about “running” are actually about racing rather than about running. Racing is much more than the event itself. There are the preparations required for the event, what is more commonly recognized as “training.” Training is an aspect of racing in which it purposes to prepare oneself for the seminal event: “The race.”
This assertion is found in “the race” in which a few dozen to several thousand gather to all propel themselves along the same route to share in the experience of this event. The most prolific and obvious of these is the urban marathon. To run a marathon is to not merely cover its distance but to take part in the civic event that is also a personal milestone. To run a marathon is supposed to transform, if not affirm, one’s view of oneself. When asked how one did, the socially expected answer should comment on meeting goals, such as completing the route within a certain amount of time, or exceeding perceived physical limits, that is, breaking through “the wall and going faster than ever before.” The marathon then, like all races, is an event.
An event, at its most elementary, is not something that merely happens. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that an event is a happening that changes the very frame through which we perceive and engage the world.10 Events are profound happenings but they need not be large-scale occurrences. Events can involve thousands, if not millions, of people, such as the attacks on the US in September 2001 or the holding of major sporting events like the 2014 FIFA World Cup held in Brazil. An event can also be personal: a marriage, a birth, a death are all life events. An event designates a new disclosure of being, a whole new you and through that emergent new being, a whole new world correspondingly erupts.
Completing a marathon is supposed to be a transformative event. But the race need not be a marathon. Whether the race is 26.2 miles, 100 meters or something in between, such as the 5k and 10k races, or an ultramarathon, each race is more than “merely” running. “The race” is also something larger than the mere distance itself, even if, or perhaps especially if, what is transformed is the person completing the race in the first place. Some are now events specifically designed to effect change. The pervasive use of the race to raise funds for charitable causes is now a common value for just such an event. In effect, “the race” is meant to change the very parameters by which we measure our realities. To run “the race” is an attempt to enact a whole new way of being.
This is evident in the entire “running” industry—how to run better, to feel better about yourself by running faster, getting more fit, losing weight, being more efficient in your running. All of these aspirational values are based on the notion that the runner is an individual who lacks worth, is not a valuable runner or a “good” runner unless one pursues these predetermined, particular goals: to be quicker, to be more “efficient,” healthier, or slimmer, thereby attempting to appreciate one’s own self-worth by engaging in self-appreciation. As if appreciating one’s life, one’s personhood can only be judged by these dominant, insidious, silently assumed to be held values—values that identify and teach individuals to judge themselves in a specific manner—to not only ascertain one’s own value but the means by which to evaluate and assess someone else’s value as well. All of this is held with the expectation that you will be found wanting, or that other person will be found wanting, and one of you will never be good enough; that is, to have sufficient value. These presumptuous beliefs about the value of a person pervade all of twenty-first-century capitalist society. It is found in any and all activities that a person might wish to engage. Running is but one of them. While the discourses about running are ostensibly about “feeling better about yourself,” the sense of being remains one in which the runner passes through the world. The runner is cut off from the world. The world is reduced to quantifiable measures: one’s heart rate, distance covered, calories burned, and time spent. Even more telling are those who run on treadmills, an industrialized mechanism wholly designed to separate us from the rest of the world. Any pain that is felt is an effort to reach a tangible, measurable goal. If one could suffer through sufficient pain, then one could become anything one aspires to become. Pain is instrumental, a means to an end. It is an investment in one’s self that makes “running” an activity that validates and ascribes value to one’s own self. Pain, then, is not a means of becoming but an end itself, a part of sensate being that feels its own presence as part of the world. Pain is one of the many sensations that lead to the expansiveness of the runner, as Momaday identifies. Pain, as will be seen in the essay, “A Runner’s Body,” is not an investment that one makes toward becoming something else but is an integral aspect of simply being alive.
These values and understandings of running outlined above are not what this book is about. Rather, this book is concerned with the simple act of running as a form of enskilled movement and how that movement is central to becoming a mindful, fully engaged human being. Running is a basic form of human movement. It is something that we learn to do. Yet in our learning to move, we are not only learning the means of locomotion. The ways we move shape our very senses and the kind of being we become. Just as the dancing makes the dancer, the act of running makes a runner. Moving and our ability to sense the ways in which we move in our surroundings directly shape our very minds.
The act of running is in and of itself an inherent part of being alive and transcends any sport-related activity. Running is a form of movement inherent to life itself because movement is inherent to life. To be alive is to move. Everything from single-cell bacterium to the most complex forms of life all move. It does not mean that movement must be quick. Even when at rest, all lifeforms still move. That movement might be nearly imperceptible to another but movement still occurs. Movement is life, and since running is a basic, inherent form of movement of land-based lifeforms, running is a way of being al...