March 2023

OF A MORAL LEGACY
A Review of Kara Goucher’s The Longest Race

by Scott F. Parker

By the time Kara Goucher’s memoir landed on my front porch, the big news had already broken. In The Longest Race, Goucher describes being sexually assaulted by her former coach Alberto Salazar and reveals that it was her accusations that eventually led to Salazar’s lifetime ban from professional coaching. (After his doping suspension is served, he will be eligible to coach high school and college athletes).

If you’ve been following this story for the past several years, this revelation does not come as a total surprise. Goucher and her husband, Adam, also a former member of Salazar’s Oregon Nike Project (NOP), worked with the FBI and the USATF for years at great personal cost to protect the integrity of track and field (such as it is) from Salazar’s amoral and possibly immoral approach to biological tinkering. Their success came when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency banned Salazar for four years (upheld on appeal) for possession of testosterone, tampering with the doping control process, and for complicity in the administration of a prohibited method. In the course of that investigation, Goucher mentioned two sexual assaults that Salazar committed against her. This accusation sparked an investigation from SafeSport, which eventually implemented Salazar’s lifetime ban (also upheld on appeal).

The Longest Race represents Goucher’s most comprehensive statement on the sagas that have ensnarled her life since she first became involved with Salazar and is a riveting read on those merits alone. But aside from the details of the two monumental scandals, The Longest Race’s success stems equally from its depiction of the human being at the center of them. The self-portrait of Goucher at NOP is of a woman beset by self-doubt and dependence in the face of the powerful, charismatic, and domineering Salazar. One lowpoint is illustrative. Goucher, who as a young child lost her father to a car accident involving a drunk driver, is being driven through Portland’s notoriously twisty West Hills by a drunk Salazar and is too cowered by him and his role in her life to object, despite the profound inner torment her silence causes her. It is such emotional transparency that provides the book with so much feeling. And when Goucher does summon the courage to start speaking out against Salazar’s repeated transgressions, we know what a triumph it is for her.

Goucher finding her voice, despite the pressure and incentives not to, is the real story here. The book’s refrain consists of variations of “I was also fearful of speaking up”; “I worried about saying anything at all”; “Why didn’t I say anything?”; “I felt choked, deafened by my own silence”—a refrain that is ultimately replaced by “I realized, my power wasn’t in my legs. It was in my voice.” One way to understand this transformation is that Goucher was accustomed to subordinating herself to Salazar and might have gone on doing so indefinitely if it were a matter only of her own suffering but that she understood herself to have responsibilities to her sport and her community that compelled her to disrupt the status quo. Which is to say, claiming her voice was a byproduct of Goucher’s pursuit of the Good. Understood this way, Goucher’s heroism is as moral as it is personal—but either way it is heroism.

None of which even touches on the standard tribulations of life as an athlete in the strange world of professional running, all of which are present in Goucher’s story, including the capriciousness of career-sustaining sponsors, the unhealthy incentive structures that promote injury, the role of luck in a career, the prevalence of eating disorders, the joy-sucking pressure to succeed, the industry-standard hardships faced by mothers, and the egregious conduct of Nike, which violated USATF rules to unfairly advantage its athletes and then used its influence (it seems) to ensure that the cheating would not be penalized.

FIt’s a mess of a sport and one that not many elite athletes seem to get out of with their integrity intact. That Goucher has is testament to her judiciousness as well as her courage. She has been sober and circumspect, even kind, in her accusations when she might have been reckless and reactionary. Her example serves not only future runners but anyone who is reluctant to claim their own voice. Goucher may not have wanted to tell this story, but this is the story she has, this is the life she has lived. And it is this—Goucher’s complete self-acceptance, regrets and all—that most impresses me in The Longest Race. I come to this book a great admirer of Goucher and leave it the same. No one represents the sport better.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On the Run with Scott F. Parker

Running Book Reviews from an SL Veteran

Scott F. Parker has been a quadruple threat for our small press publication for several years now, contributing poetry, essays, literary journalism, even a video essay. Now, with running book reviews, he’s offering some critical insight into writings on a sport that is close to his own beating heart and blistering feet. Check out the following from “On the Run With Scott Parker.”

 

TENDA WEMA NENDO ZAKO^[1]

A review of Sarah Gearhart’s We Share the Sun

by Scott F. Parker

^[1] Do what is right and go your way.

As long as I’ve been writing about running, I have been extolling the virtues of running for the sake of running. If you’ve come across my writing before, you’ve likely seen me discouraging the focus on results, miles, training plans, and watches; you’ve maybe known me to encourage you to attend, instead, to the quality of your experience as you move your body through space and when you detect joy in the process allow yourself to freely move toward it.

Well, We Share the Sun: The Incredible Journey of Kenya’s Legendary Running Coach Patrick Sang and the Fastest Runners on Earth is not that. Sarah Gearhart introduces readers to runners who have dedicated their lives to succeeding at the far reaches of human possibility. Running in this world is very much about winning, with self-actualization falling much farther down the list of one’s priorities. Sang’s runners “‘come into the sport to make a living,’ he says. That is the driving force: to fight poverty.”

And yet Sang is hardly a typical winning-is-the-only-thing coach. Far from it, he comes across in Gearhart’s portrayal as a modern-day Stoic more concerned with character than success. His gnomic utterances could easily place him in the company of Marcus Aurelius. Consider that, for Sang, “character is everything,” where character means, in part, controlling what you can control. “What I’ve learned in life, and it started way back when I was young, is do your best. There’s nothing else.” If you do your best, after all, the results are just the results, nothing to feel overly good or overly bad about. And if you can’t something cannot be controlled, what sense is there in worrying about it? “If there’s no answer to anything that’s complicated, just leave it. Why should I struggle?”

As one of Sang’s athletes, Eliud Kipchoge, the consensus greatest runner of all time, said in explaining to a journalist how Sang gets the best out of his runners, “And above all, how to make that athlete a human being. In our camp, we want the best athletes. At the same time, we want to be human beings.”

So while economic realities might account for the plethora of eager Kenyan runners, by the time they find themselves in Sang’s company, something like self-actualization begins to come to the fore. This is demonstrated by the fact that, “For years, Sang has permitted locals in Kaptagat to attend his trainings.” Can you imagine, in this country, being welcome to join Des Linden’s workout (as she once joined Sang’s group)?

Running isn’t just about international results and prize money, for Sang. It’s about finding out who we are deep in ourselves. “‘Whenever I run, I always pray. I always confess. I correct myself. Whatever I’d done wrong. I get the right answers. I find myself apologizing,’ he says. Sang doesn’t let on any specifics, just that running affords a space for him to ‘get all sorts of solutions.’” There’s something ephemeral to Sang in We Share the Sun. Maybe it’s the language barrier, maybe it’s the limited access Gearhart had to him, or maybe it’s his propensity to ask questions rather than answer them: “‘Who are you?’ is the root question he wants each person he coaches to consider. ‘If you take athletics out of a human being, what is left?’ he says.” Whatever it is, the elusiveness makes for a compelling figure. I come away from Gearhart’s book curious to know more about Sang yet somehow also grateful not to know more but to be left with the curiosity itself.

Prior to coaching, Sang competed for Kenya in the steeplechase, winning silver at the Barcelona Olympics. For much of his professional career, he coached himself. “Self-coaching is just being aware of yourself. If you do too much, listen to your body. If you do less, listen to your body. Evaluate yourself after competition. You tend to sort of mold your way into the business of coaching.”

He comes by coaching naturally, then, and is seemingly an ideal fit for the job. The only hitch seems to be that Kenya has been hit with a spate of doping violations in recent years, including some for Sang’s athletes. Most disturbingly, one of Kipchoge’s training partners, Philemon Kacheran Lokedi, received a three-year ban for testing positive for exogenous testosterone. Gearhart’s book would have gone to press before the Lokedi suspension, but she might have dug into this difficult reality instead of simply celebrating Sang, easy as he is to celebrate. Even assuming Sang isn’t implicated in Lodeki’s case, it reveals the limits of his influence. Character, Sang would be the first to say, cannot be granted, it can only be earned.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

THE MYSTERY PERSISTS

A Review of Paul C. Clerici’s Oregon Running Legend Steve Prefontaine
& Steve Bence’s 1972: Pre, UO Track, and My Life with Them All

by Scott F. Parker

Two recent books have me thinking again about the legend and legacy of Steve Prefontaine. The first is Paul C. Clerici’s Oregon Running Legend Steve Prefontaine, a research-driven retrospective of Prefontaine’s career that offers as dense a packaging of Pre arcana as even a devoted fan is likely to need. I’d be surprised if there were a race result or an address change that Clerici fails tio note. It doesn’t make for the liveliest reading, but the coupling of information and archival photos will make this book a useful resource for track historians.

One of the sources Clerici quotes is the blog of Steve Bence, a former teammate of Pre’s, who is also the author of 1972: Pre, UO Track, and My Life with Them All (written with veteran journalist Bob Welch). The book is exactly what its subtitle suggests: a whimsical, good-natured, scrapbook of a read.

Bence’s humble narration feels authentic. And the awe-shucks style makes Bence something like a transparent lens through which to recall the storied events he witnessed: Bowerman’s tenure at the University of Oregon; Prefontaine’s transcendent life and tragic death; and the rise of Nike, where Bence made his career. The portrayals are warm and simple. But the innocuousness that Bence aspires to is threatened by his employer’s regular controversies, some of which he raises only to dismiss, others of which (Alberto Salazar, the Vaporfly 4% “super shoes”) he ignores entirely. Needless to say, Bence manages to find his way to Phil Knight’s side of every issue, even if the defenses wear thin.^[1]

But the reason to pick up 1972 isn’t to read about Bence or Nike but to read about Prefontaine. Pre is such an enthralling figure that having been in his proximity is enough to warrant a book. And Bence was right there time and again. Most memorably, when Pre pulled him away from studying for his final exams to play cards before what would be Pre’s last race. At that same fateful meet, Bence would race in the 800m with a broken jaw. A photo taken before the race shows Pre offering tender assurances to a nervous Bence. According to Bence, Pre told him “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing, so why not make it worthwhile?”

Anecdotes like this bring Pre into focus more effectively than Clerici’s accumulation of data. Still, neither of these books, nor any other, can sate our curiosity about him. In the same way that another Dylan biography only confirms the need for still more Dylan biographies, a book about Prefontaine scratches an itch only to make the itch more compelling. The intrigue of Prefontaine only deepens.

And at the heart of the intrigue is the mystery that lurks behind every consideration of Pre: What accounts for genius? And what but genius can we call his example? Genius for Emerson is self-reliance, the courage to “believe your own thought,” which Pre embodied as well as anyone. And so, like Emerson, he calls upon us to become better versions of ourselves. I dare the most sober and rational thinker to read one of the books or watch one of the movies about Prefontaine and not feel greatness inside themself.

And yet, the mystery persists: what accounts? We might name here Pre’s charisma or his success or his confidence or his look or his personality or his Munich result or the timing and circumstances of his death and say that each is necessary but that even all of these together are not sufficient. I think of what Greil Marcus said about Dylan: that if effects like these had causes, there’d be genius on every corner.

The mystery persists. And we are left in wonder. Wonder that there ever was a person such as Pre. Wonder that wholes sometimes are not reducible to their parts. Wonder that the depths of us are never reached. Wonder that one runner could teach us so much about ourselves. Wonder that no matter how many times we hear the story it never gets old but that, as Molly Huddle (quoted in Clerici) describes running at the old Hayward Field, it’s “like an old memory is happening now.”

^[1] And please don’t get me started on Nike’s attitude toward Hood to Coast, which Bence relates in a remarkably self-unaware chapter. What can you do with someone who comes away from that race saying “No more of this ‘winning-isn’t-everything’ stuff” but pity them and maybe keep your distance?

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

THE MIND INSIDE THE MYTH

A Review of Emily Pifer’s The Running Body

by Scott F. Parker

There is no mistaking the fact that Emily Pifer’s memoir, The Running Body, is a distinctly literary effort. Only secondarily—almost incidentally—is it also a book about running. Like any good memoir, it is less concerned with what happened than with the sense the author can make of what happened.

From a distance, what happened to Pifer is what happens to runners all the time. She was fast. She restricted her eating. She got faster. Then came the injuries. She never ran as fast again. Under a lesser pen, the arc of that story takes care of itself. Just tack on a reminder for younger runners to learn from the example and there’s your book.

But in refusing to keep the reader at a comfortable distance from which to feel sympathy for her younger self, Pifer brings the reader all the way in to that younger self’s experiences, revealing her inner world in all its torment. This approach is well suited to the material. As anyone who has become obsessed with her or his body and diet knows, the objective world can easily be blocked out by the bright-shining needs of the self. Taking us so deep into her subjective experience, Pifer sacrifices the familiar support of chronological narration. It’s a sacrifice that’s central to her project. She correctly anticipates the response she will get: “What happened? You are asking. Be more clear, you are saying.” And she knows how to respond: “But I have been wanting to show you what looking at this wound looks like to me.”

What do we see through Pifer’s self-conscious gaze? Here she is in her first paragraph introducing her idée fixe: “Flesh wrapped tight around muscle around bone. Every rib self-evident. Tendons so exposed. There were all these parts of me I had never seen. I called the sum of these parts the running body.”

It sounds so inspiring. So powerful. So healthy. In her own eyes, Pifer is like those runners she has observed: Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher and dozens of others. “I thought it was so beautiful how you could tell just by looking at their bodies that they were made to do the very thing they were doing.”  Yes! Watching such runners run, like watching Michael Jordan play basketball, can feel like glimpsing the essence of human prowess. But we know all too well that essentializing the human body as one that runs turns pathological in a moment. The temptation to want to look like what a runner looks like quickly becomes an obsession with the body’s appearance that eventually supplants even the running.

In addition to the professionals, Pifer compares her body to the collegiate women she races against for Ohio University. More punishing still, she compares herself to the male runners in her life. About her boyfriend Aaron, she writes, “every time we ran together, jealousy and resentment threatened to masticate away at all the good feelings. His body was harder and smoother than mine.”

At times it’s hard to witness the suffering Pifer undergoes. Seeing life as someone with an eating disorder does is to understand viscerally that solipsism itself is a form of pain. The self unfettered is a malignancy on the psyche. One wants to reach into the book, grab Pifer by the shoulders, and command her to eat. But a healthy diet—one sufficient to sustain a runner through weeks of long miles—would treat only a symptom of what ails Pifer. Beneath her disordered eating lies an unhelpful metaphysic that pits mind against body. Fundamentally, The Running Body is about the limits of will and the impossibility of control, no matter how desperate one is to achieve it.

Even when things are going well for Pifer, running-wise, the problem stalks. The true appeal of running for her is that it can liberate her from the controlling self. “Empty your body of what weighs it down. Empty of what you can’t use for distance and speed. Run your self out of your body, then you can be free.” Freedom, as in freedom from an oppressor, is the only concept that could apply here: “The way I ran for miles without having a single thought—like my mind wasn’t there at all.”

At moments like these, we could almost be talking about the selflessness of mysticism, but this is not the mystical insight of no-self. This is Pifer seizing a momentary victory on the way toward ultimate defeat, as the terms of this liberation are entirely the products of the mind, specifically a mind that defines itself in contrast to the body. The contradiction of the self trying to extinguish itself serves only to further entrench the self. Ruling over a shrinking kingdom, Pifer wants a control she can never have. In the end, she has only two options: either she must cede her power or pursue it to oblivion.

Fortunately—and I use that term only relatively—she goes the former way. “I lost control—could not stop eating. . . . I would be jamming handfuls into my mouth. My hands would always try to do as much damage as they could before my mind intervened.” (45)

What are the people in Pifer’s life saying to her as her health spirals? The most striking response is not from those who gently probe her eating habits or from the teammates who are suffering similarly themselves but from Pifer’s coach, who practices self-interested neglect in choosing not to notice the danger Pifer is in as long as her results keep improving. In this, it becomes hard to tell much difference between collegiate distance running and other domains over which our extraction economy has spread. Like overlogging or overfishing, the cost lags the returns. You can encourage a runner to overwork and underfeed herself for a while, until you can’t. “And although I had been dangerously underfed, it seemed as if the running body that resulted in my undereating and overtraining had been encouraged, expected, and celebrated by nearly everyone surrounding me, especially our coaches.” (62)

Later, after her injuries, Pifer emails her coach, Rick, about possibly rejoining the team. “Rick never responded to that email though, and I haven’t communicated with him since.” (91) She was easily expendable when she could no longer produce the returns he needed. He walks away from her as if abandoning a depleted mine.

Right here, narratively, is where Pifer the author could have succumbed to memoir’s temptation toward straightforward redemption, but she approaches it only to blow right past it to a deeper, more careful reading of the self:

The correct response is to find meaning in the injury. To tell the story this way: I overcame. To say I hurt my body, but because it is a body, it healed. And because my body healed, I too have healed. And when I look back, I see a broken body but one that has taught me all the things that breaking is supposed to teach you. And look how I’ve let go, moved on, gotten over it. Look how I’ve told myself the story of a body redeemed. Look how I’ve organized my life around this new body, this new me. Look how much stronger and smarter and better I am. Look how I leave out the details that trouble me: all that I have not been able to pull myself out from, the phantom fractures and the way they haunt me, the dream that even on my least delusional days still pulses in my blood to the rhythm of maybe maybe maybe.

Narrative closure is the last thing Pifer will settle for. She’s too sensitive, too honest a writer for such fantasies. Consider this crucial admission: “I wish I could say with certainty that if I had understood the costs, I would have done things differently. But I can’t say that, or much of anything about that time, with certainty. I think I was just sick, is what I mean.” A life is what a life is, and the self looking back can’t imagine undoing the past without simultaneously undoing itself. And how scary it is to let go the past: “Healing is supposed to be a beautiful thing, but healing requires you to shift your relationship with the past. It requires you to rewrite the story, or at least, the ending. To heal properly you must forget, maybe not the whole thing but parts, certainly. The whole must become hole-y. In this way, healing is its own kind of loss.” Who is Pifer if not her miles, her injuries, her disorder?

A story of the self in crisis is not one that can be easily resolved. But in this it is only a stark example of what is always the case: that the self can never be entirely beyond itself. It is always a pile of sand. The ground is always giving way. There is always another reflection in the reflection. Narrative closure can only be imposed from the outside, from someone else’s point of view. But a memoir is bound by the life it depicts, one that hopefully fumbles toward consciousness, knowing all the while that it will never arrive.

Pifer is dead center in The Running Body as she enacts the various riddles of consciousness and butts up against the limits of their representation: “Now I know I must either find an alternative way out of this story, or stay in here forever, spinning. I don’t know if it’s wrong or right to presume I have the ability (the power? the agency?) to make the choice. Of course the choice is yours to make, part of me says. If the choice were mine to make, why have I not made it? Another or perhaps the same part, answers.” (95)

Writing a life is like running on moving ground, but that doesn’t mean you stop running. The job of meaning making goes on.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On Being a Human Being

A Review of Des Linden’s Choosing to Run

by Scott F. Parker

If you know just one thing about Des Linden, it’s that she won the Boston Marathon. If you don’t already know about her victory in Boston, it’s right there on the cover of her memoir. Either way, there will be little suspense as Linden and her co-author Bonnie D. Ford recount the 2018 race over the course of the book in chapters alternating between that race and Linden’s life and career before and after her greatest career achievement. And yet, to pluck just one more word from the book’s cover (this one from Angela Duckworth’s blurb), the retelling is utterly gripping.

Even if, like me, you watched it live and cheered for Linden as you had for years; even if you can recall the horrific weather conditions on that day, with some runners dropping out, some developing hypothermia, and some doing both; even if you scratched your head when you saw one runner (Linden) waiting outside a toilet (mid-race!) for another runner (Shalane Flannagan) to rejoin her; seeing the race again from Linden’s perspective is revelatory. No matter how well you know her race, only she ran it. And that point of view is everything.

Linden’s ability and willingness to see clearly and say plainly is part of what has endeared her to running fans since her career began. Her charm, which comes through in the book as it does through the screen, is that of someone who knows herself and is herself and doesn’t apologize for herself. Lauren Fleshman got right to the point during her recent appearance on Nobody Asked Us, the podcast Linden hosts with Kara Goucher, when she said: “One thing I’ve learned from following your career, Des, is you’ve done a much better job for a much longer period of your life of not giving a fuck about other people’s opinions.”

But alongside the fucks Linden doesn’t give are those she does. She cares deeply about her success on the road. Running, though, is only part of who Linden is. One of the recurring refrains in Choosing to Run is the breadth of Linden’s self. Her interests outside running — including coffee, bourbon, and literature — are well known in the running world, but still how unusual, how refreshing, it is to hear an elite athlete say, time and again, things like “running was what I did, not what I was” and “I left my running gear at home, ditched the one-dimensional self I had to be in training, and steeped myself in trying to learn something new.”

There would be a way of reading this to suggest that Linden is hedging against her future disappointment. If there’s more to life than running, she has a ready-made excuse for failures (relatively speaking). Except that Linden’s disappointments are deeply felt and lead her to periodically consider retiring from the sport, thinking she’ll never improve on her second place at Boston in 2011 (by two seconds). Time and again, though, she returns from these losses. Her resilience isn’t that of someone who is monomaniacal in her drive but that of someone who can find rewards in the work itself independent of outcomes. As she quotes from the Bhagavad Gita,

“You’re entitled to your labor. You’re not entitled to the fruit of your labor.” Linden doesn’t always exhibit this kind of attitude; more impressively, when she’s feeling dejected she is able to work her way back to it.

The most striking example of Linden’s resilience follows 2017, the low point of her career. Coming in in great shape and with years of experience, that was the year she “was going to win in Boston.” But even hitting her goals for the race she came in fourth, more than two minutes behind the third-place finisher, Jordan Hasay. Having watched the leaders run away from her in supershoes that were not yet available to Linden or most other runners, she was dejected. “Overall, my sport seemed to be descending into disorienting chaos. It seemed easier to let go of ambition and stop caring.”

The year got worse from there, with Linden suffering a major health problem that limited the quality and quantity of her training. When she showed up at Boston the next year it was without her “usual competitive mindset.” Instead of expecting to win, she doubted she’d finish. The cold rainy weather that day was its own variable, but it’s hard not to think that Linden’s victory wasn’t also affected by the freedom with which she seems to have run. It is as if, without the pressure to perform, she felt free to open herself to the moment and respond to it as it unfolded. After expecting to drop out early in the race, she decided to stay in the race to support Shalane Flanagan, even waiting for Flanagan when she stopped to use the bathroom. This generosity was its own reward for Linden. “Working in Shalane’s service puts me in a more productive headspace.”

If you’ve ever had an athletic moment in which you feel like you’re simultaneously making no effort yet performing better than ever, Linden’s finish to Boston reads like that—a creative as much as an athletic act. About taking the lead, she writes, “I abandon any idea of a plan and start improvising.” This is Linden with the courage to run straight into the unknown, curious and without expectations about what she’ll find there. And what does she find? Before you accuse me of reading psychology into mere sport when I propose that she finds the self she has been creating most of her life, consider that choosing to run “was the first real decision I ever made.” And if you’ll give me that, I hope you’ll give me this, too: discovering what it’s like for someone else to self-realize in this way is the next best thing to doing it yourself.

There are a lot of books by runners. Many of them are good. Few of them are as human as Choosing to Run. Because Linden knows herself as a human in essence and only contingently as a runner, she writes not for other runners only but for any reader who suspects they might be human, too. It is examples like these that make us so.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.