“At paces that might stun and dismay the religious jogger, the runners easily kept up all manner of chatter and horseplay. When they occasionally blew by a huffing fatty or an aging road runner, they automatically toned down the banter to avoid overwhelming, to preclude the appearance of showboating. Not that they slowed in the slightest.” – Once a Runner
The plan was to revisit our old five-mile loop around Marlay Park this week and turn back the clock to when running was once a serious business. Something and everything about this time of year also brings that sense of starting over again, starving for the miles to run and the promises to keep.
The softening grass, the chill of the morning air, it felt like there were always fresh possibilities ready to shine, no limits to our hopes or imagination, and it was somewhere early in this exercise in nostalgia when Once a Runner came to mind.
Duly being reread this week, this is the book which, for reasons most people will never understand, was, and perhaps still is, a sort of bible for every college distance runner in America. Especially this time of year when cross-country running took hold in our favourite season, also known as the Fall.
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Because once upon a time we were those runners, building slowly and then suddenly up to 100 miles a week, all the while keeping up that same manner of chatter and horseplay. It never once dawned on us that maybe some day we would become the ageing road runner or religious jogger that we are now.
Once a Runner was self-published by John L. Parker Jr in 1978, after multiple rejections, when he founded his own company and printed off 5,000 copies, never once doubting his running content. For many years it remained out of print, before Scribner books, home to some of the legendary American authors, gave it the magnificent hardback edition it deserves.
My original tattered copy, held together by at least three strips of grey duct tape, was handed down to me in my freshman year, and it is a still scarcely believable premise that is part training manual, part religious tract, part love story, and all about running.
Parker introduces Quenton Cassidy, the hero of Once a Runner and a student at the fictional Southeastern University, somewhere around Gainesville, Florida, as “six foot two, his meagre 167 pounds stretched across his frame in the manner dictated by the searing daily necessities of his special task”.
It also contains a series of magnificent one-liners, such as when introducing the university doctor, Dr Stavius, “whose claim to fame was that he once punctured a blister on the foot of Roger Bannister”.
Parker also nailed some of the finest ever descriptions of distance running to print, especially when racing the mile and that “last 50 yards of straightaway, legs, arms, shoulders, jawbone, ears, chest, fingers all battling the strained numb pain of the lactic acid, all striving for that normality of motion that would preserve, should heaven and hell fall into each other in a cosmic whirl, the integrity of the stride”.
These were the sort of passages that stood out on my original reading, only now it’s more about how Parker further relates “the runners” to the “religious jogger”, perhaps sensing they might some day appreciate the reversals of fortune.
“They in fact respected these distant cousins of the spirit, who, among all people, had some modicum of insight into their own milieu. But the runners resembled them only in the sense that a puma resembles a pussycat. It is the difference between stretching lazily on the carpet and prowling the jungle for fresh red meat.”
Truth is, I had always read Once a Runner through the eyes and ears of the puma, not the sort of pussycat I have possibly become, no longer prowling the jungle for fresh red meat.
Even the title feels different now, not so much the once a runner as in always a runner, or for at least as long as we can, and more about being once a runner, and definitely not the runner we once were.
Rereading it this week has also left me more conscious and careful of the running etiquette when passing, or being passed, by another runner. Whatever about Parker’s understanding of the requirement to preclude the appearance of showboating, and tone down the banter, sometimes there is the need to slow things down even slightly.
Part of the problem these days is that most runners are hooked up to some sort of earpiece, denying them that natural sense of alertness and awareness, and freedom to boot. They may have something more serious on their minds, such as running the Dublin Marathon next month, but that’s no excuse to be that overwhelming runner that Parker also precludes.
Now that I’m more likely to be the runner being passed rather than the runner doing the passing, other things came to mind on that five-mile loop around Marlay Park this week. In the good old days, running with Dundrum South-Dublin Athletics Club, the pace and distance was everything, and there was no such thing as slowing down.
Inevitably this meant running up behind walkers and other (slower) runners, and we had a few tricks to let them know we were coming: one of us might cough gently or even feign a sneeze, or a simple call of “coming through”, best delivered in a gently reassuring voice of reason, was better than nothing.
In the end, rereading Once a Runner also brought a realisation that there’s not always an uncomfortable shift between “the runners” and “religious jogger”, such as that passage when Cassidy revisits the Southeastern University track some years after the peak of his running powers.
“In lane one he stood very still, looking down at his street shoes, joggers now going around him with curious glances, and tried to conjure up the feeling. After a moment a trace of it came to him and he knew that was all there would be. You can remember it, he told himself, but you cannot experience it again like this. You have to be satisfied with the shadows. Then he thought about how it was in the second and third laps and decided that the shadows were sometimes quite enough.”
