January 2024

FUN, FUN, FUN!

A Review of Taro Gomi’s Run, Run, Run!

by Scott F. Parker

Taro Gomi was already a household favorite in my family, thanks to his classic Everyone Poops, which we have long quoted and laughed at and learned from. The art in Gomi’s latest book to be translated into English from the original Japanese, Run, Run, Run!, a board book, is reminiscent of his best-known work. Plain-colored backgrounds, in this case white, featuring simple figures in action, in this case mostly running, don’t just illustrate the story but play a crucial role in its telling.

The narrative announces itself from the start: “It’s time to race!” Five children approach the start line and await the starter’s signal. From the moment the gun fires, it’s only a page until the first child crosses the finish line, where she receives a flag numbered 1. But wait, the text tells us, “Running is fun!” Are we really at the finish line already? The book just started. As the second, third, and fourth runners accept their numbered flags, the last runner continues past the finish line. The next several pages see this runner take to city streets, neighborhoods, fields, and forests. If running is fun, Run, Run, Run! asks, why would anyone stop?

Eventually, though, if you run far enough you come back to where you began, as the child in the book does, approaching the finish line a second time. This time, however, a dog that has been following the child since the farm surges into the lead and claims fifth place in the race, bumping our hero back to sixth. This is how far behind our hero has fallen: finishing sixth in a five-kid race.

Meaningless childish silliness? I don’t think so. Or, rather, not just. Gomi’s runner is not merely eccentric. The child understands what the race is and what it’s for but chooses, despite this, to break out of the race’s constraints entirely. The reader’s expectations about the narrative are revealed as this child asserts the right to make new rules. Why can’t a race be run without racing? Why can’t a book start one story only to tell another? Run, Run, Run! is as liberatory to the adult reader as it is perfectly sensible to the child reader.

What could be more sensible, more logical, than to explore the world by foot, to proceed according to what’s fun, to run your own kind of race, to be your own kind of self? Does it sound childish. Great wisdom usually does.

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 Personal is Political as Memoir

A Review of Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself

by Scott F. Parker

In another world, Caster Semenya’s memoir might have told the archetypal story of an athlete working hard with her considerable natural talent to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Needless to say, Semenya did just that in the course of setting numerous records and winning three world championships and two Olympic gold medals at 800 meters.

But in this world, Semenya’s memoir, like her career, gets totally subsumed by gender controversy. For all her accomplishments on the track, Semenya is far better known for her disputed status as a woman. “To put it simply” Semenya writes, “on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.” This fact was revealed by a gender test given in response to suspicions about Semenya’s race results. “I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspaper reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher-than-normal levels of testosterone.” The official diagnosis was a variant of DSD (difference in sex development) condition known as 46XY, which is to say Semenya has male chromosomes.

Despite this seemingly undeniable fact, Semenya devotes much of The Race to Be Myself to asserting her status as a woman. Take two typical passages: “I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man.” and “I want everyone to understand that despite my condition, even though I am built differently than other women, I am a woman.” The claim lands squarely on Semenya’s sense of identity. She was raised as a girl, accepted as a girl, and understood herself as a girl and then as a woman, and therefore takes herself to be a woman, regardless of what anyone else says: “To be honest, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are.”

Even the most sympathetic readers will notice that this emphasis on identification, no matter how understandable, avoids the central question, which is not how we define woman as such but how we define woman in track and field. The definition itself is relevant because women are protected from having to compete against men due to their relative physical disadvantages. A better analogy than to say LeBron James’s genes give him an unfair advantage over his competitors but we don’t ban him from the NBA would be to say that we have weight divisions in boxing to give more people a chance to compete. Following this analogy, Semenya simply has the misfortune of belonging to a class too small to field its own division within the sport. If this is unfair to Semenya — and it is — wouldn’t it be similarly unfair to the other athletes to let her race against women?

If you’d rather gain access to Semenya’s experiences of the extraordinary events of her life than engage such arguments, The Race to Be Myself feels mostly like a missed opportunity. As she writes, “it is hard to think of another athlete at the elite level who has endured as much scrutiny and psychological abuse from sports’ governing bodies, other competitors, and the media as I have.” Yet the book largely neglects the emotional toll that this experience placed on her in favor of defensive posturing. The greatest exception to this tendency comes in the book’s strongest chapter, “Nothing,” which depicts the low period in Semenya’s life after her private medical records were made public. “How do you explain what it feels like to have been recategorized as a human being? That one day you were a normal person living your life, and the next day you were seen as abnormal?” Yes, how do you explain that? I would love to find out.

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 Being and the Doing

A Review of Brendan Leonard’s I H♡TE RUNNING and You Can Too

by Scott F. Parker

Maybe I should consider it a sign. I was walking by a table of books at a church fundraiser when the word running caught my eye. Stopping, I read the full title, I H♡TE RUNNING and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion. It looked, from premise to design, a little cute for my tastes. But one term in the subtitle intrigued me: irrational passion. It is one of the motivating concerns of this column to make sense of precisely that. Plus, the book was $1, and it would go to the church.

It didn’t take me long to realize that, assumptions be damned, Brendan Leonard is my kind of running writer: “This is not a how-to book or a memoir of a very fast person who has stood on podiums at the finish lines of races. It will not tell you how to train for a race, how to eat during, before, or after running and/or racing, or what kind of shoes to buy or clothes to wear, or what kind of stretches to do before or after running.” Pausing briefly to remember that some fast people write great memoirs, what I really want to say here is Amen. When it comes to reading about running, give me the intangibles every time.

But Leonard is being slightly ironic in his disclaimer. I H♡TE RUNNING most definitely is a how-to book; it’s just not about how to run a certain way or toward a certain outcome. It’s more elemental than that — it’s actually about how to be a runner. To wit:

Isn’t it more complicated than that? Not really. As Leonard explains, “At some point, every person was running zero miles per week.” Like Lao Tzu before him, Leonard recognizes wisdom disguised as the perfectly obvious: the way to get from zero to more than zero is to start. It’s impossible to argue against such clear insights. But the point isn’t to nod your head, it’s to take to heart.

Leonard challenges our conceptions of what it means to run so that we will be liberated to run. Here he is quoting Bart Yasso, the former chief running officer of Runner’s World: “I often hear someone say, ‘I’m not a real runner.’ We are all runners; some just run faster than others. I have never met a fake runner.” If you’re inclined toward ordinary language philosophy, you’ll see right away what Yasso and Leonard are up to. So many of us are insecure about our status as runners. Are we real runners? But we don’t stop think to about the implied contrast of real in that question. Do we mean that we are slow runners? That we are occasional runners? That we haven’t ever run marathon? Maybe we are slow, maybe we don’t run every day, maybe we max out at three miles. But these are just three ways of modifying what we are: runners.

This might start out as semantic, but one of Leonard’s key psychological insights is that it quickly becomes ontological. Noticing what words mean and using them precisely can produce a change in our self-conception. And that change in self-conception can propagate quickly in behavior. If I am a runner… I run. Or here is one of Leonard’s helpful charts:

The question then becomes, Why be a runner? Why run?

To this, Leonard offers several answers. There is the undeniable: “Either you think doing hard things is worth it to some extent, or you don’t.” The inspirational, by way of Alex Lowe: “‘The best climber in the world is the one who’s having the most fun.’ I think that ethos can apply to anything we do, including running.” The realistic: “Yes, I hate it most of the time, but maybe once during every run, I have a few seconds, or a minute or two, where I find myself thinking, ‘You know, this isn’t so bad.’” Different runners will lean into different reasons. And perhaps reasons is the wrong concept to apply here. We run because running is in our nature. We can but don’t need to tell a story about how it got in our nature. It’s enough just to notice that it’s there. If you do, the rest follows:

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 Balance

A Review of Mylo Choy’s Middle Distance

by Scott F. Parker

At the same time, during high school, that Mylo Choy learned about running the most efficient line when cutting in from an outside lane during an 800m race, they “became interested in expressing more with less” in their drawings. This minimalist aesthetic maintains in Choy’s graphic memoir, Middle Distance, which is as sparse in its narrative as it is in its illustrations.

The book, then, is not unlike its subject — running. In the same way that the simplicity of running is the source of its depth, Middle Distance’s simple style creates the space for the rich experience of reading it. There is a whole felt world beneath the surface of this one runner’s outline of a story.

This is not to suggest that Choy’s work is vague or impersonal. To the contrary, the particular details of the style and story are crucial to its success. Choy chooses not to linger on their Buddhist upbringing or their nonbinary identity, but these aspects of the author’s life uniquely contextualize the role running plays in it and support Carl Rogers’s claim that “What is most personal is most general.”

Choy started running in sixth grade when their gym teacher sent the class out for a state-mandated timed mile. Choy’s response was immediate: “I felt free. A new way to be in my own world.” From this day on, running would be a source of meaning and stability in their life. “When I ran,” they write, “I could process my feelings without words, and without anyone else. It gave me the feeling of power in my own life.”

Of course, running doesn’t go only well for Choy. Training for the New York City Marathon, they get injured and are forced to give up running for what turns out to be years before working their way through a long, slow rehab that eventually culminates in their completing the NYC Marathon.

But this is not a story of mind over matter, or the conquering will of the heroic athlete. This is a subtler book than that. It’s about listening to what is and learning how to trust the world and expressing oneself through authentic acts. This period of struggle when they are not running is profound for Choy. They, like many runners, are not the same person when they are not running. And their return to running doesn’t return them to the person they used to be. Running the NYC Marathon leads Choy, instead, to a mature perspective and a mature sense of self that recalls the Buddhism of their childhood. “I never lost my love for running. That love taught me to look for a middle way.”

Choy’s running, finally, is quiet, balanced, receptive, and wise. As is their book.

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.

Pair of Poet Laureates to Judge Our 2024 Contest

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash.

Indeed it has been 50 years since the mid-1970s. In a decade sometimes shaded by the turbulent 1960s, history was nevertheless made. If it predates you, Google it. On the sports and leisurely front, maybe you kicked off the decade “Truckin” somewhere “to hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.” The Miami Dolphins brought joy to their fans with a perfect 1973 season. ABC trumpeted thrills and agonies into our living rooms through the Wide World of Sports. And Title IX opened doors for female athletes.

We want to hear your stories from the 1970s. Or read your well-researched literary essay or narrative poetry. We’re not checking IDs on submissions. Sport Literate will be awarding two $500 prizes — for the top selected poem and best essay — within the broad yesteryear theme. We won’t be prescriptive beyond that, except to say that poets and writers should, of course, be looking at the bell bottoms’ decade through some sort of sporting lens.

Our guest judges, Jack Bedell and Sydney Lea, are both SL veterans and contest winners themselves. They also happen to be former state Poet Laureates. We’re thrilled to have their keen eyes for both poetry and prose on board as they pick winners from our short list of finalists. SL editors will read through submissions and send a handful of anonymous finalists to them for the final call.

Jack Bedell, our essay judge, served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. A professor of English, Jack coordinates the Creative Writing program at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His published work, in numerous journals, has been included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks.

Sydney Lea, our poetry judge, served as Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. The author of 23 books, Syd was the 2021 recipient of his home state’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, he is the founding editor of New England Review.

Contest guidelines:

• We think the $30 reading fee is a reasonable pot builder.
• All entrants receive a two-issue subscription (a $20 value), beginning with the issue you’re submitting for. Plus, two back issues. Current subscribers can extend subscriptions or gift one to someone else.
• All submissions should come through Submittable (on our website).
• Poets can send up to three poems per entry. Please place all in one Word document.
• Writers can send one essay per entry. Enter as many times as you like. A million times if you like.
• We’ll consider a chapter of a book, though your essay should read as a standalone piece.
• All entries will be considered for standard publication.
• Previously published work is acceptable. Just let us know where it first appeared.
• Submission deadline: midnight, June 30, 2024. We may extend this one time to July’s end.
• In addition to your subscription, you get two back issues — an oldie (of our choosing) and something more recent. If you have a preference, let us know. Otherwise, you get what you get.
• Note: We can mail issues only to U.S. domestic addresses. So if you live abroad, maybe you’ve got a cousin in the States. You can, however, still enter the contest.
• Another note: If we do not receive enough quality submissions, we reserve the right to cancel the contest and return all entry fees. In that case, you would still get the two-issue subscription and the back issues.