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.