The Trial of Long-Distance Running

The Good and the Terrible

“Running to him was real; the way he did it was the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.” – John L. Parker, Once a Runner

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With all due respect to my friends who run a few miles once every couple of weeks, there are some things that can only be known by experience, and one of those is “the trial of the miles, miles of trials,” to quote Quenton Cassidy of Once a Runner. 

Many who haven’t experienced this would like to know what it is like. They wonder what it would be to be out there, moving through the world over hills and along paths. It seems terrible to many of them. They tell runners, “I hate running,” and the honest runners will have to reply that we don’t blame them. But there is something about the experience that, for all the toil and struggle, we wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. 

Running nearly every day, for many miles at a time, for years, acquaints one with the weather and the seasons in a way that is unfamiliar to most people who do not work outdoors. When you are out, you are in the world and you are a part of the world and you experience the world in a way which you cannot vicariously. When the world is hot, you are hot. When it is cold, you are cold. When the world is wet, you are wet. 

There are days when the weather is kind to you, and there are days when the weather is uncomfortable. There are days when it is painful to be outside. 

And there are days for which the only word is cruel. Barbaric cruelty. Some combination of circumstance and conditions and perhaps some mistake on your part combine to consign you to suffering that builds until it becomes torture. You learn on those days that it does not matter what you can or cannot take – you will not die and the suffering won’t cease, despite your wishes for both – you will take what you will take until it is over. Veteran runners know that there need not be any intentionality to the cruelty of the world. 

You learn, too, that if you aren’t bothered by mild discomfort, there is tremendous freedom for you. You will be wet and cold at times, but you will not be dangerously cold. You need not worry about the mild discomfort, for your skin is waterproof and you will be dry and clean again sometime in the near future. You will be weighed down by the oppressive heat at times, and it will build until you carry a great burden, but your body will grow used to processing such heat and you will eventually find that you can run on very hot days without great difficulty. 

But even as you build up tolerance to heat and cold, there is always a point beyond which you will encounter great, even unbearable, difficulty. Weather so hot it makes you sick and you feel hungover the next day, though not from alcohol. Cold so intense you never warm up. 

But you will come to know intimately those points, and you will know when it is just cold enough outside that your body will sweat after a few miles, and when it is so cold that you won’t. And you will know when it is so warm outside that you won’t process it effectively, but will instead begin to succumb the longer you endure it. 

You will come to know intimately the after-drop – the time, minutes after a run, when your body stops working and your temperature plummets. There is the initial warm-up, those seconds of serious heat and sweating, followed by the drop: the shivering and the inability to keep warm. This can persist for hours if you do nothing about it. Or it can go away quickly. 

But even when the weather is mild and pleasant, there is something deep and visceral about running that must be experienced to be understood. When are out in the world, stripped down to as few layers as you can wear, alone, listening to the sounds of the land around you, you experience life in an immediate and physical way. Traveling on foot, walking or running, especially in the woods or in the desert, will come to feel the most natural thing in the world, as though thousands of years of civilization and technology disappeared in the blink of an eye and your evolutionary programming took over. Your body evolved to travel this way, not in a car or a plane, and your brain will respond accordingly. This, it tells you, is right. 

And when you go to the track, or to the racecourse, or to some other site of great testing, some place where you hurl your body forward until it hurts enough to drive all thoughts from your mind, you will experience something else. Sebastian Junger explains that when soldiers come back from war, they often feel jarringly out of place. After the intensity and immediacy of combat, nothing in contemporary American life seems like it matters. Many soldiers are haunted not by their memories of combat, but by their desire to return to war, where decisions meant life and death. 

Running is not war. But there is something intense and immediate and all-consuming about running, and when you run hard enough, everything outside of that moment is stripped away. Some people try this once and vow never to do it again. Others find it intoxicating. 

There is a danger here for a certain type of runner, who will experience something a little like the soldier returning from battle. You come back from an ordeal and walk into a building and you are struck by thoughts of unreality and absurdity. You feel as though you do not belong. “What am I doing here?” you ask yourself. “Who are all these people?” You feel you have seen something of the wildness of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that sedate, climate-controlled surroundings will feel at first a little alien. 

The danger is that, like the soldier returning from war, you begin to feel as though none of this – this living indoors, working a job, going to school, meeting people, posting online, etc. – none of this matters. Everything other than running is anticlimactic. The danger is that you let your feelings guide you here, which if you do will lead you to the conclusion that you should stop taking “life” seriously, for life is lived out there and these things you do in between are merely the conventions you must observe to survive. One of the most striking features about Quenton Cassidy, the protagonist of Once a Runner is how little he really cares about anything other than running. 

With luck, you will strike a balance. You will run just enough to feel you have satisfied those primal urges which if they went unsatisfied might drive you mad, but you will not run so much that you stop caring about basic tasks like working and personal grooming. You will run just enough that you feel you are truly alive, but not so much you lose touch with those “in-between” bits of life (eating and sleeping and so forth). You will run just enough so that you sleep well each night, but not so much that you struggle to stay awake the rest of the day. 

Sometimes the miles fade into the background, merely a part of your life that you do not consider. After all, you would not say you are a sleeper, though you sleep every night, or an eater, though you eat every day. You can run every day without spending time thinking of yourself as a runner. The miles stay in the background until you remember, sometimes with a little horror, that other people don’t run. A certain type of runner must repress this knowledge, which can make you nervous if you let it, and which can even cause a stab of cold fear if you aren’t careful. 

At other times, the miles wear on you. And when you are indoors and your hollow eyes glance out the window, you shudder in fear. 

And still other times, you will glance out the window and you will long once again for the moment when your blood begins to flow, because then you really won’t care about anything else anymore. That moment when you hit the line on the track and spring forward and the world falls away until all that is left is the sun and the track and the cadence of your legs and the suffering that courses through your body. In that moment, as terrible as it is, the only things that matter are right there. And any baggage or façade or persona or trappings that you have accumulated will vanish, and what will be left is yourself.

Recently, a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche came to my attention (thanks to Joe) which captures this rather nicely. “You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.”

Many people in our postmodern age worry about finding themselves, discovering themselves, or defining themselves. At bedrock, they are worried about whether or not they exist, whether there is some “I” there underneath personality, appearance, clothing, and the roles we play in our lives with other people. But if you have run sufficiently hard enough for any great length of time, frequently enough, you won’t have this worry. Your body won’t just feel “I.” It will know “I.” 

When your knuckles ache from the stabbing cold, when the freezing rain lashing your skin goes on and on despite your fervent wish that it would stop, you may wish to be anywhere other than here, but you will know that you are alive. When you are in the final lap in the final interval of a crushing workout, your body and mind racked with exertion and suffering, you will know that you exist. When you stumble across the line and drop incoherent and exhausted, you won’t suffer from any existential doubts or worries. 

When you are running, you are doing something ancient, something that remains essentially unchanged from what it was in the lives of our most distant ancestors. Here is life in its raw and elemental form. Here life is stripped to the barest: cold and the desire to be warm, fatigue and the desire for respite, pain and the desire for relief, the sensation of movement and the feeling of one’s body as it travels. Human life has accumulated complicated trappings in the millennia of recorded history, but here there is none of that. Here you are faced with the realization that you are no different from a human being of ten thousand years ago. You, too, blister and chafe and sweat until the sweat runs into your eyes and blinds you. Your body has the same limits your forebears’ did – all the technological advancement of ten millennia can do nothing to make your legs move faster than they can move or your lungs breath harder than they can manage. 

The trial of the miles is the weight carried by veteran runners. It is the deep knowledge – of one’s body and of the world and of one’s body in the world – which can only be learned the hard way. It will reward one greatly – with satisfaction and confidence. But it will reward one terribly, too, by banishing one’s fears through exposure to harsh reality. 

One can learn to live with that harsh reality, and live quite well. If one is untroubled by it, if the toil of the miles is not shirked from but accepted and embraced, one can even thrive. The harshness of reality need not perturb us. It is what it is, never more nor less. The trial of distance running isn’t unkind. It is exacting, but it is rewarding, too.

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Ben Connelly a writer, runner, and personal trainer based in Virginia. Ben can be found on Twitter and on his Substack, Hardihood Books, where he publishes short fiction and essays.