From the None issue of Runner's World
On one of our LPs, Dylan Thomas had joked about reading "indiscriminately," then having blundered into taste. This door was closed to me. There were many great books I knew about. How could I wear out my eyes on books that were less than great? But now I was a runner. I was listening for pleasure.
This all took place in the early 1980s. I've run thousands of miles since then, listened to hundreds of books. Some of them splendid. Some of them not.
There are people out there who don't run. And runners who don't listen to books. Allan Steinfeld, for instance, vice chairman of the New York Road Runners, told me that he never wears earphones. He likes the sights of nature, the sounds of other people breathing.
I do that too, sometimes. Leave the machinery at home. Go for my own dismal thoughts: Remember to buy skim milk. Did I leave the kettle on?
Other times, I get the right book, and maybe it's a glorious day, or a treacherous one. If you're running and you're running hard and the book is captivating, then for a little while the person who is worried and insecure and slow-witted, slow footed, and disappointed, he drops away. What remains is pure spirit and intense joy. The thought evokes a poem I like to listen to while sprinting, Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":
"Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run."
Out for a walk on the trails behind my house, you might see a man fighting the hills, not very young anymore, or very fast either, a rag upon a stick. An orange Walkman clutched in one hand. You might chuckle quietly to yourself. You wouldn't see--you'd have no way of seeing--that this is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. That this is my finest hour.
