March 2025

Just Running

A Review of Katie Arnold’s Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World

by Scott F. Parker

In Jon J. Muth’s picture book Zen Shorts, a panda named Stillwater tells traditional Zen stories to a set of three siblings. Among these is the story of the Chinese farmer, whose luck seems to fluctuate wildly over the course of a series of related events. First, he loses a horse. Then, the horse returns, trailed by wild horses that become his. Next, the farmer’s son breaks his leg riding one of the wild horses. Finally, the army comes through and conscripts every able-bodied young male, a category to which the farmer’s son no longer belongs. With the equanimity of a sage, and to the befuddlement of his community, the farmer keeps an even keel through these (seeming) ups and downs. Whether a given event is an instance of good or bad luck is never known. “We’ll see,” he says about each. As the youngest sibling in Muth’s book helpfully interprets for the reader: “Good and bad are all mixed up.”

Katie Arnold read Zen Shorts to her two daughters when they were young, a fact she recalls after her own leg is broken in a terrifying rafting accident. But Arnold is more skeptical than the farmer. It’s one thing to take a moral lesson from a parable. It’s another thing entirely to have the grace and practical wisdom to live by that moral. Admitting her skepticism, Arnold writes, “I had trouble getting on board with this idea at first. It seemed bogus, frankly. Of course there is good and bad in the world; terrible things happen to people, catastrophic things, atrocities, and there isn’t always a silver lining.”

How un-Zen of Arnold. But with the help of her friend Natalie Goldberg she’s coming around. She thinks of Muth’s book after Goldberg reminds her of the central Zen tennent that there is “No good, no bad—just this.” This wisdom, that it is not the world itself that is the source of our suffering but our judgments about the world, is one that Arnold has approached previously through running. The challenge for her is to carry that wisdom from running to her life broadly, a life that suddenly now does not include running. “I see that I don’t have to banish thoughts or make them cheerful. I just have to acknowledge them, note the fuss inside my head the same way I met the mountain when I ran up it, some days with a thrilling effortlessness, other days with unwanted difficulty. Running has taught me how to accept both. I used to run up a mountain; now I can sit like one.”

Accessing the spirit of the mountain, Arnold sees that the parable doesn’t have to be read skeptically but can be inhabited. “That my broken leg might be a form of liberation seems wildly paradoxical, in its own way mind-twistingly awesome. I want it to be true, but it is still too soon to tell.”

Everything I’ve quoted so far comes from one page midway through Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free, Arnold’s second book. Her first was the much-praised memoir Running Home, a meditation on grief and mortality, following her father’s death. Running Home factors crucially in Arnold’s new book. She is writing the first book as she rests and rehabs her leg in the narrative the second. One of the unforeseen consequences of her leg injury is the time and stillness it affords her to write. But Arnold’s takeaway isn’t a simple acceptance that there is a silver-lining to her injurty after all. She is a much subtler observer of her own experience than that.

Arnold’s injury thrusts her into uncertainty not just about her fortunes but about her self. Running for her had not been a hobby, but not just because she was good at it (elite-ultra-runner good). Running was Arnold’s way of being in the world. After her accident, there is a real chance she might not run again and therefore a real sense in which she might not be herself anymore. Naturally, this situation propels her self-reflection. Who is she if she isn’t running? Who is she if she isn’t a runner? Her response to such questions has the power to annihilate: “At its best, running is a true expression of the deepest part of me, but at its worst, it’s a crutch that feeds my ego; how attached I’ve grown to the word runner.”

And so, what has been Arnold’s practice becomes the object of her new (Zen) practice. The Venn diagram of runners and Zen practitioners isn’t a circle, but the overlap between the two groups is substantial. The kind of person who finds meaning in one is uncommonly likely to find it in the other. Reading Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind during her rehab, Arnold makes the natural comparison: “I realized that if I replaced ‘sitting’ with running, he and I were speaking the same language. After all, the main principles of Zen—form, repetition, stamina, impermanence, suffering, awakening—aren’t so different from those of long-distance running, or anything you do with great purpose.”

Sitting instead of running gives Arnold the chance to be what Suzuki would hope for her: “my broken leg had broken the cycle. Like it or not, I was a beginner again.” And learn to like it she does, demonstrating that the only path for us is the one we’re on. The awakening Arnold relates in Brief Flashings is honest; and the authenticity with which she relates it, affecting. This isn’t a treatise or a commentary but a sincere expression of what it’s like to be human in a changing world. Arnold is an adept memoirist, drawing meaning and wisdom from experience without a trace of self-indulgence.

At the end of the book, her rehab complete, Arnold returns to competitive ultrarunning. As impressive as that feat is (not to mention that she wins the sport’s most iconic race), what is truly inspiring about Arnold’s writing is how she is able to find what she is looking for in running and then find it again in not running. If she can do that, I want to say, anything is possible. This is a profound work of embodied spirituality.

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.

Everybody Does Something, Usually, Anyway

A Review of Brendan Leonard’s Ultra-Something

by Scott F. Parker

Reader, a confession: I have run farther than a marathon only once and never in an official ultra race. So when I say I know what Brendan Leonard means when he describes the suffering of the last 20 of a 100-mile race, understand that I know by analogy.

All distance runners have had the experience of going far, running out of steam, and suffering to the finish. Narratively, then, an ultra is no different from a marathon or—I don’t know—maybe a 5K for some. At their most tedious, running essays take this same form: it was really hard, but I made it. Leonard has written this kind of essay before.^[1] (And, I must admit, so has your humble reviewer.^[2]) But Leonard’s challenge as an autobiographer of running is not just formal; he has also written his backstory a time or two before.

If you’ve read Leonard, you probably know the broad strokes of what you’ll read in his memoir. He was a smoker, then he ran a marathon to help quit smoking, then he pushed pause on running for nine years before finally taking up ultra-running in earnest. Luckily, Leonard recognizes that the facts of his past are of much less importance than what he does with them on the page and doesn’t burden the reader with an overflowing self-regard.

What he does instead is something fresh and playful and true. Ultra-Something refracts its narrative against Leonard’s meditations on books, movies, and scientific studies in a collage-like fashion that emphasizes not things or stories or ideas but the relations among these. The book covers ground the way a runner would like to: swiftly and easily. And Leonard being Leonard, he doesn’t limit himself to text. Ultra-Something is replete with the evocative and often funny hand drawings that have become Leonard’s trademark. Take for example the image that follows a short reflection on meaning: “Maybe it’s simply that things have meaning because we decide they have meaning. We stick with something because we believe it will be meaningful, and sometimes it becomes meaningful for no other reason than the fact that we stuck with it.”

This passage demonstrates not only Leonard’s humor but one of his primary achievements in Ultra-Something. Leonard is alert to the (seeming) absurdity of recreationally running unreasonable distances and is able to articulate the appeal of doing so to those who haven’t yet and those who won’t ever. What accounts for this strange human practice, he hears you asking. Answer: the strangeness of humans themselves. We are a creature capable of extreme effort to avoid the tedium and attendant meaningless of life, and we do it all through the stories we tell ourselves about what really matters. Had Camus been writing about an ultra-runner struggling mightily with thirty miles of rocky uphill to go rather than Sisyphus, his instruction would have remained the same: to picture the person happy. Such happiness—or, better, such meaningfulness—is a choice that is available to all of us, all the time. Runners, Leonard proves, have found one reliable way of choosing yes. It helps, too, if, like Leonard, we are self-aware enough to laugh at the absurd lengths we go to even as by going to those lengths we transcend them.

^[1] For examples, see his book Have Fun Out There or Not, which might be the best title for a running book there is. The subtitle isn’t bad either: The Semi-Rad Running Essays and Race Reports, and Some Funny Lists, and Some Drawings. While too much of this book takes the it-was-hard-but-I-made-it tack, there are some big winners mixed in. Don’t miss “26 Useful Facts about Running,” “Solitaire,” or “How to Go for a Run in 22 Simple Steps.” Humor tends to bring out the best in Leonard’s prose.

^[2] About the time I ran 30 miles. If you’re wondering: it was really hard, but I made it.

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, theBeliever, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

“Give Us this Day Our Daily Shred”: The Gospel according to Kevin

A Review of Kevin Carollo’s SHRED! Running and Being

by Scott F. Parker

Some of the first book reviews I ever wrote were for Rain Taxi Review of Books, where I later joined the staff in an editorial role. Kevin Carollo was, and to this day remains, a friend of and regular contributor to the magazine. I came in contact with a lot of poets and literary types in those days, some of whom shared my interest in sports (basketball, more often than not), but not many I might bump into at my next road race. Kevin became the exception, when, after an almost three-decade hiatus from racing, he decided to return to running in his forties. I was incredulous when he told me that he’d made his marathon debut at age twelve. More impressive still, he’d broken 3:30 in that race, a more than respectable time for an adult weekend warrior. What would happen in his return to the sport? Pretty quickly he’d push his PR down well below three hours: a 2:43 at the 2013 Twin Cities Marathon, which also happened to be the occasion of my PR (a more pedestrian 3:15). Which is to say that, whether also a child, a poet, a scholar, or a literary critic, Kevin Carollo is a runner.

It’s also to say that I know Kevin, and I like Kevin, and I come to his book SHRED! Running and Being uncommonly confident that it is a book for me. Please keep this in mind when I go on to tell you that it is indeed a book for me and that if you’re a certain kind of reader it might be a book for you, too. Whether you are the right reader for this book depends less on your interest in running than on your interest in literary nonfiction as an elastic form of writing that can accommodate the twists of a unique and playful mind loosed upon the page.

In other words, a warning: If you want a straightforward training guide or a straightforward narrative or a straightforward whatever, you are hereby directed toward less interesting writers. As Carollo’s running biography suggests, very little about him is straightforward. He proceeds in his writing as in his running according to his own distinct intuitions and improvisations. What begins as a report on a day’s run might quickly turn to a digression on music or politics or the environment. Except, is it fair to call a digression what is really the very method of Carollo’s practice? His method is his medium, and his medium is language: “The moment you start playing with words, you start playing with the stock-and-trade idiomatic ideas that serve as the very foundation of human cognition. In wordplay, like a speedplay or fartlek run, comes insight, surface-level meanings giving way to something more dynamic and resonant . . . Intense tensionality. As verbs tense their muscles, we flex our able, tensing a different kind of kindness in kind.”

Let me be more concrete. Heeding James Fixx’s encouragement to “go out for a run, and then write about it,” SHRED! takes its form as a running log interspersed with poetry. But Carollo devotes his real energy to espousing his running ethos: the eponymous shred, the idea of which “runs toward Singularity, Harmony, Revelation, Ecstasy, and Dynamism.”

That this log spans five months of running during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic makes for a somewhat claustrophobic read in 2024. But recalling the isolation and masks and Zooming of 2020 is an apt context from which to experience running as a relief. It affords a chance to be in the world, to breathe deeply and freely, to be a body and not merely a consciousness plugged into the internet. Even reading about it carries some of running’s benefits. I feel my spirit stirring when I am reminded that “Running is elemental movement, a transformative force for good, a singularly meaningful practice—and survival mechanism—that compels us to move beyond the psychic barriers that define contemporary existence.”

Strange, then, how much of SHRED! is devoted not to running but to not running. We spend many pages at Carollo’s Fargo home with him as he watches soccer, makes pizza, drinks beer, listens to music, considers the weather, thinks about running, writes about running, debates going running, and only sometimes does run. Or maybe strange isn’t the word; maybe honest is. “With everything to gain simply by getting out in the elements for a while, you’d think I’d do this running thing more often.”

Anyone who regularly avoids doing what is manifestly good for them (getting more sleep, spending less time online, etc.) knows how easy it is to fail to be the versions of ourselves we’d like to be. More generously, not running might be one of the most important parts of running. The pleasure runners take in the sport is inseparable from our reflection about it. Even in our most absorbed moments, part of us is hanging onto the absorption for future memory or online posting or, in a writer’s case, essaying.

But Carollo’s love for running is pure. (It doesn’t hurt (a slower runner imagines) that he’s very good at it. Carollo will casually mention winning races or stringing together miles at paces most runners can’t hit once.) He’s a student of the sport, including its cultures and technologies as well as its practices and histories. His passion is manifest (although one is left wondering about his extended hiatus), even as his intellect runs from the front. As the subtitle suggests, SHRED! stakes Carollo’s claim to inherit from George Sheehan the mantle of running’s philosopher. But there’s a reason Sheehan wrote for Runner’s World and Carollo is publishing with a university press. As running books go, this is perhaps the headiest, even as Carollo is deliberate in his effort to regularly touch grass.

But heady it must be. Carallo isn’t writing running (primarily) or himself (primarily). He’s evangelical for shredding as a way of being. “Today, I invite you to become part of a movement of movement in which we move toward each other as if our lives depend on it. I have come to believe that they do—and that our time is running out.” And while there are other means of shredding, running is perhaps the most elemental and, therefore, perhaps the best. Running is running, but never just. “This is a non-denominational book I’m writing, but I don’t bristle at the idea of running as a form of prayer and exercise of faith, part of an essential belief system and survival mechanism in a desecrated and devastated world.”

Of course it’s ambitious. And may the running gods bless him for it. Running gives no quarter to the cynic. To run as to shred is to love the world.