December 2025

Running and Writing the Self:

A Review of Nicholas Thompson’s Running Ground

It hardly matters whether you approach running competitively, recreationally, or as a responsible form of aerobic exercise, eventually you will confront the kind of metaphysical conundrum with which the sport abounds. Who am I? What kind of thing? In what relation to the world? Capable of what?

In his memoir, Running Ground, Nicholas Thompson describes one possible route to such philosophical territory. A competitive runner, Thompson is ever on the lookout for opportunities to shave time from his results, one of these being to learn how to ignore the desire to slow by overruling what are in effect the brain’s warnings to preserve energy, something Tim Noakes calls “the Central Governor Model.” As Thompson explains, “The Central Governor Model suggests a mind-body dilemma. We all can go faster. We just need to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brains is our brains. Training becomes a game of hide-and-seek with oneself.”

Right, but bootstrapping problems aside, what is the self? For Thompson it’s a multitude. “I realize now,” he reflects from the vantage of middle-age, “that I’ve sought distinct and different compound goals from the sport as I’ve gone through life: self-confidence, self-awareness, and self-transcendence.”

The mature runner, if anything like Thompson, balances these three goals, identifying now as unlimited will, now as a bounded and contingent being, and now as being itself (perhaps). But the memoirist pursues a singular goal, one that relies on a narrower sense of self: how, he asks, can I understand the past that has made me into the person now looking back at that past? In Thompson’s case, the story he’s after is the one that explains how he became a world-class masters runner after years of good but not great racing. If that scans as standard inspirational stuff, be advised that The Running Ground is an outlier among running books. In addition to being an elite runner, Thompson is an enormously gifted writer, capable of being competitive in major marathons and then reflecting on them with the sensitivity and precision of someone who has dedicated himself to a life of letters. (In his day job, he is a prominent journalist.)

The story of Thompson’s running begins with his father, a competitive runner himself, who introduced Nicholas to the sport. After finding success in high school, Thompson is good enough to run for Stanford but not good enough to stand out there. He leaves the team and takes a break from running before taking up marathoning a few years later and going on to earn the nickname “Mister 243” for his uncanny ability to run this time and only this time (plus or minus). It is only after surviving thyroid cancer at 30 that Thompson is able to break through and improve significantly on his two hours and 43 minutes. Looking back on this period of his life, Thompson writes, “Multiple studies have shown that survivors of cancer often experience what is known as post-traumatic growth. Standing on the edge of mortality gives them clarity about what matters.” It’s another one of those oddities of the human psyche. We all know that we will die, indeed are all the time approaching death. Yet this insight alone isn’t enough to propel us toward the growth that we know is available. And pretty soon those possible selves become unavailable to us.

Even after running his personal marathon best of 2:29 at age 44, Thompson must confront the reality of his unrealized potential: “I wondered then, as I wonder now, what other versions of me exist that there may no longer be time to find.”

There would be worse ways to read The Running Ground than as a reckoning with aging. As Thompson finds new ways to excel past his running prime, his father’s life undergoes a fairly spectacular decline that serves as a cautionary example, among other cautionary examples, that “people stop running because they get old; they also get old because they stop running.” Thompson’s response to his father’s eventual death is to push himself to run faster, a way of processing his loss by means of accepting his father’s “gift of running” and refusing to squander it.

But just as there is something noble about doing one’s best, no level of success forestalls death or decline. And while the rewards of running certainly include accomplishment, they are not equivalent to it. For all the ways Thompson sacrifices at the altar of speed, he understands that speed and the pursuit of speed is itself but a means toward the end of experience.

The telos of running, if it can be put so seriously, is a way of being in the world that, for the runner, is indistinguishable from play. Even the hard work of training and vigorous effort are but forms through which play expresses itself. Thompson quotes Charlie Parker to this effect: “Learn all the theory you can, but forget it when you play.” When you’re running, just run. Just trust yourself to play.

Of course it’s a gift to run, and it’s one the runner wants to pass along to his children when the time comes: “I hope, though, that one day in the future, in whatever cities they live, they stand on the sidelines of a major race, watching the runners flow by, remembering cold November mornings from a generation ago when their father, then strong and quick, ran by on Atlantic Avenue.”

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 Sustaining Power of Myth

A Review of Matt Love’s Never Stop Pre

by Scott F. Parker

For the past quarter century, Matt Love has been one of the more prominent, and perhaps the most prolific, members of the Oregon literary community. Through his Nestucca Spit Press, he’s published more than two dozen books exploring the history, geography, and culture of his home state. It’s only fitting that on the 50th anniversary of Steve Prefontaine’s death Love has turned his attention to Oregon’s foremost athletic icon with his new book Never Stop Pre: The Enduring Inspiration of America’s Greatest Sports Legend.

As Love rightly assumes, there is no need to establish Prefontaine’s bona fides either as a runner or as a legend of the sport. The legacy speaks for itself to anyone with even the least interest in track. And yet for those versed in the mythology of Prefontaine there is deep pleasure to be taken in celebrating his feats in the company of other fans or — let me call them what they are, let me call us what we are — disciples. Through half a century of communal worship we have established not just the legend of Prefontaine but also its power. And the more we go on honoring him, the more deserving of honor he becomes. The man becomes a symbol.

At its core, Never Stop Pre is a compendium of 28 scenes attesting to Prefontaine’s lasting impact, a book-length collage of poems, song lyrics, newspaper articles, official testimonies, oral histories, folk tales, and the inspired efforts of everyday runners. Love has dug deep into the archives and emerged with gems, like Senator Mark Hatfield referring to Pre as “an Oregon tiger” in the Senate Congressional Record and Governor Tom McCall writing in a letter to Prefontaine’s parents that “Oregon has never been struck such a tragic blow.”

Alongside these historical artifacts, Love relates his own personal relationship to Pre’s influence, the power of which he attests to early in the book, writing, “Indeed, his legend had a significant influence in staying my hand against suicide.”

Several years ago, after pleading guilty to luring a minor for sex, Love was sentenced to 30 days in jail, two years of probation, and forced to pay restitution and register as a sex offender, making him persona non grata in the community he had been so instrumental in creating. Writing in the third person, he describes the saga this way in the book, “He had made a mistake in two sentences of written social media communication (no images at all) with a 17-year-old female he was mentoring (not his student) and lost everything. The State annihilated his past and present; he had no future. The mob had stoned him to death on social media and newspaper comment boards. He had considered suicide by jumping into Hart’s Cove on Cascade Head; he was encouraged to commit suicide by total strangers. His closest friend vanished without a word.”

Fortuitously, at this time, he pulled his truck off Highway 101 to wait out a storm in Coos Bay. There, he walked into the Coos Art Museum and “took the stairs to the Prefontaine Memorial Gallery. No one was there. He examined the memorabilia and then sat down and started reading the register.” An hour later, after soaking up the appreciation others have expressed for Pre, Love persuaded himself that he must run “like Pre raced, although there was no known finish line. It was the only way he would ever survive.”

Love’s psychodrama can be read as indulgent, a distraction from the tribute he otherwise pays his hero. But it’s easy to judge, and Love’s story can just as well be read as a testament to the power and utility of Prefontaine lore. The beauty of the myth of Prefontaine is its vast applicability. Pre “knew he had to keep running to see who had the most guts.” The metaphor is there for the taking: it’s possible for anyone to live with the kind of guts Pre ran with — possible at least to aspire to. Whatever anyone thinks of Love’s crime, it took guts for him to draw from Pre’s example the courage he needed to go on, it took guts to write this book as he wrote it.

Never Stop Pre is a book a certain kind of Oregonian and a certain kind of runner will have been waiting for. It’s a book that asks us to take Prefontaine seriously. Even more, it asks us — whether we make a pilgrimage to his holy sites (Hayward Field, Pre’s Rock, his gravesite in Coos Bay, etc.) or just read about them — to study Pre’s example and from it learn how to take ourselves seriously as well.

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.