once a runner: a very negative review

by janedotx7

I started running regularly after finally giving up on riding my bike around Boston recreationally. The roads are narrow and I was spoiled by living only a 20 minute bike ride away from the chaparral and redwoods back when I still lived in Palo Alto. You can keep going for hours in the Boston area and still keep running into tons of houses and more traffic than feels comfortable on those narrow roads. Anyway, now that I’ve defected to the running tribe, I’ve been reading a lot of running forums, and I came across this little snippet from the novel Once a Runner:

‘What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared, to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heartrending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials. How could they be expected to understand that?’

That looked good. It looked really good. I bought the book on Kindle and set to work. I read about it online first, of course. The author, John L. Parker, tried to get it published but couldn’t because publishers thought it was too niche, too targeted at elite runners. His Wikipedia page has this quote:

‘I got the rejections, and I kind of went, “What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they understand that this is like sending a writer to the moon and having him come back and describe it?” Parker said. “There aren’t many writers who get close to a 4-minute mile, or who got to be roommates with an Olympian, and who can tell other people what that’s like.”‘

At the time I read this, I felt deeply sympathetic. Quite a lot of first-class fiction is just thinly-veiled autobiography. James Joyce is the worst and most famous offender I can think of, and it would be easy for me to rattle off five or ten more. Maybe the literati were all couch potatoes who couldn’t relate to running hard. Parker was wronged! But I, with my credit card and $12.99, would help right this wrong!

Then I read this book, this godawful book, and I thought no, no, this book’s rejection actually restores my faith in publishers as gatekeepers. The problem is that Parker is the kind of guy who can go to the moon and back and can’t tell you what it’s like! He can’t come back with anything to say but duuuuuuuude, that was SICK man. (Except he seems like the kind of bookworm who doesn’t know any slang.)

In some ways, this book is sort of the inverse of David Foster Wallace’s delightful essay on elite tennis, “The String Theory.” “The String Theory” is about an untalented athlete, Wallace, looking in on the world of a talented athlete, Michael Joyce, while Once a Runner is about a talented athlete trying to describe his inner world for all us schmucks who’ll be lucky to get an eight minute mile, let alone run a sub-four minute mile.

The problem with very elite athletes, as Wallace points out, is that the timeconsuming demands of their training don’t leave much space for a personality or thought in general. You can see Wallace struggling to keep his personal snobbery in check, but he fails horribly: “Close-up, he looks his age, which to me is basically that of a fetus. Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial-paperback sort that one reads on airplanes.” He goes on to call Joyce a “grotesque” and possible virgin. It makes you want to rescue all promising young tennis players from ever trying to go pro, lest they turn into a grotesque like Michael Joyce.

Once a Runner is essentially what you’d get if Michael Joyce had a good prose style and was an elite runner instead of an elite tennis player.

It’s possible to delve so deeply into a niche subject that you come out the other side with something that touches on a universally relatable aspect of the human condition, but that requires a sensitivity to life that is totally lacking in this book. Aside from some very fine passages that capture the experience of masochistically running mile after mile after mile, day after day after day, which is only enough material for an essay in _Runner’s World_,there’s no plot worth speaking of, no memorable characters, and the book could have been set anywhere in America with enough racist white men. Parker is not an observant author. He was clearly too busy running.