Edinburgh, after London: The marathon is now ‘everyman’s Everest’
The Edinburgh Marathon came roughly one month after London’s world famous exertion, in a sign of the boom in city running. Here’s some crucial context from the April24 edition of This Week, Those Books. Read here or sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.com/ and get the post the day it drops
The Big Story:
- Distance running is trending big time as a recreational activity.
- More than 800 marathons are organised every year and runners take to city streets across the globe from Iceland to India.
- According to David Monti, who runs a popular newsletter on distance running, the marathon has gone “from being something for fanatics to the everyman’s Everest”.
- Marathons have broken social barriers:
- This year, London set a global first for equality in sports by awarding wheelchair athletes and non-disabled runners the exact same prize money.
- In 1972, the Boston Marathon officially allowed women to run, ending years of conflict on the issue.
The Backstory:
- The marathon, as we know it today, is 26.2 miles (or 42.1 km).
- Its unusually specific distance — 26 miles and 385 yards — was set as the standard in 1921 by the International Association of Athletic Federations.
- There is some confusion about why the marathon has this “weirdly precise length”, but it has inspired some quirky retail products, not least a beer named the 26.2 Brew.
- The internationally agreed distance for a marathon is not that different from the original race for which it is named: the legendary 25-mile wartime run in 490 BC by a soldier from the Greek city of Marathon to Athens.
- In 1896, the first modern revival of the Olympic Games featured a marathon race set at 40 km or 24.8 miles.
- The Boston Marathon, which began in 1897, is the world’s oldest annual marathon.
This Week, Those Books:
- A cult classic novel about the pleasure and pain of running.
- A true story about how one woman conquers her fear of running.
Once a Runner
By: John L. Parker, Jr.
Publisher: Scribner re-issue 2009
Year: 1978 (published by Cedarwinds)
Some runners may recognise the name “Quenton Cassidy” but not because he’s a real champion of the track or even a real person. Cassidy, an undergraduate “miler” at Florida’s fictional Southeastern University, is the hero of John L. Parker Jr’s novel. He is inspirational in his complete and utter dedication to his dream: running a mile in less than four minutes. The plot revolves around this struggle — against bodily and temporal limits — and the turbulent backdrop is the Vietnam War protests that roiled American campuses.
Long considered a cult classic, this novel offers a rare inside look at the isolation and exhilaration of distance running. The author, himself a runner and former editorial director of the now-defunct Running Times magazine, acknowledges that “a great deal of the story came straight from my life”. Though some say you have to be a runner to properly understand it, I’d argue that anyone who reads this story will vicariously feel the thrill of a “waking world (in which) his whole being centered around covering ground quickly on foot”. Some 40 years after he self-published Once a Runner, Parker said he thought it the greatest accomplishment of his life that the novel survived “long enough to make it to a general readership”.
Parker’s subsequent novels stay with the subject of running and his hero. Again to Carthage has an older Cassidy returning to the spartan life of the distance runner, this time a marathon. Racing the Rain explores how Cassidy, the child, became fascinated with running as a way to feel part of the natural world.
Choice quote:
“In the world of the runner, as in the ocean, there is a hierarchy of ferocity…The runner…looks to those stronger with respect and fear, to those slower with sympathy or tolerance (they tread ground he has long since covered). The jettisoning of but a single second is announced like a birth in the family”.
Running Like a Girl
By: Alexandra Heminsley
Publisher: Windmill Books
Year: 2014
Before this book begins, it has the following words of praise from bestselling author Jojo Moyes: “The morning after I finished this book, I got my running shoes on”.
I know exactly what she means. Alexandra Heminsley’s account of going from petrified non-runner to confident finisher of marathons is heartwarming in its honesty, humour and practicality. Like a Tik Tok video in prose, Heminsley tells a gripping story: her disastrous first attempt at running; the very real bodily pain of not knowing how to run properly, and the joyous clarity that eventually comes with learning that running “isn’t about breaking boundaries you thought you could never smash (but) about discovering those boundaries were never there in the first place”.
Though the title may feel as if Heminsley is shutting out men, the book is a good primer for any rookie runner.
That said, Chapter 17 is aimed squarely at women, offering practical advice on the correct running gear as well as make-up considerations. Another chapter lists some of the (mainly US) female runners who forced rule changes half-a-century ago that allowed women to participate in city marathons and road races.
Originally published at This Week, Those Books. Click here for a podcast version of this post.
