“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.
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.