On Being a Human Being
A Review of Des Linden’s Choosing to Run
by Scott F. Parker
If you know just one thing about Des Linden, it’s that she won the Boston Marathon. If you don’t already know about her victory in Boston, it’s right there on the cover of her memoir. Either way, there will be little suspense as Linden and her co-author Bonnie D. Ford recount the 2018 race over the course of the book in chapters alternating between that race and Linden’s life and career before and after her greatest career achievement. And yet, to pluck just one more word from the book’s cover (this one from Angela Duckworth’s blurb), the retelling is utterly gripping.
Even if, like me, you watched it live and cheered for Linden as you had for years; even if you can recall the horrific weather conditions on that day, with some runners dropping out, some developing hypothermia, and some doing both; even if you scratched your head when you saw one runner (Linden) waiting outside a toilet (mid-race!) for another runner (Shalane Flannagan) to rejoin her; seeing the race again from Linden’s perspective is revelatory. No matter how well you know her race, only she ran it. And that point of view is everything.
Linden’s ability and willingness to see clearly and say plainly is part of what has endeared her to running fans since her career began. Her charm, which comes through in the book as it does through the screen, is that of someone who knows herself and is herself and doesn’t apologize for herself. Lauren Fleshman got right to the point during her recent appearance on Nobody Asked Us, the podcast Linden hosts with Kara Goucher, when she said: “One thing I’ve learned from following your career, Des, is you’ve done a much better job for a much longer period of your life of not giving a fuck about other people’s opinions.”
But alongside the fucks Linden doesn’t give are those she does. She cares deeply about her success on the road. Running, though, is only part of who Linden is. One of the recurring refrains in Choosing to Run is the breadth of Linden’s self. Her interests outside running — including coffee, bourbon, and literature — are well known in the running world, but still how unusual, how refreshing, it is to hear an elite athlete say, time and again, things like “running was what I did, not what I was” and “I left my running gear at home, ditched the one-dimensional self I had to be in training, and steeped myself in trying to learn something new.”
There would be a way of reading this to suggest that Linden is hedging against her future disappointment. If there’s more to life than running, she has a ready-made excuse for failures (relatively speaking). Except that Linden’s disappointments are deeply felt and lead her to periodically consider retiring from the sport, thinking she’ll never improve on her second place at Boston in 2011 (by two seconds). Time and again, though, she returns from these losses. Her resilience isn’t that of someone who is monomaniacal in her drive but that of someone who can find rewards in the work itself independent of outcomes. As she quotes from the Bhagavad Gita,
“You’re entitled to your labor. You’re not entitled to the fruit of your labor.” Linden doesn’t always exhibit this kind of attitude; more impressively, when she’s feeling dejected she is able to work her way back to it.
The most striking example of Linden’s resilience follows 2017, the low point of her career. Coming in in great shape and with years of experience, that was the year she “was going to win in Boston.” But even hitting her goals for the race she came in fourth, more than two minutes behind the third-place finisher, Jordan Hasay. Having watched the leaders run away from her in supershoes that were not yet available to Linden or most other runners, she was dejected. “Overall, my sport seemed to be descending into disorienting chaos. It seemed easier to let go of ambition and stop caring.”
The year got worse from there, with Linden suffering a major health problem that limited the quality and quantity of her training. When she showed up at Boston the next year it was without her “usual competitive mindset.” Instead of expecting to win, she doubted she’d finish. The cold rainy weather that day was its own variable, but it’s hard not to think that Linden’s victory wasn’t also affected by the freedom with which she seems to have run. It is as if, without the pressure to perform, she felt free to open herself to the moment and respond to it as it unfolded. After expecting to drop out early in the race, she decided to stay in the race to support Shalane Flanagan, even waiting for Flanagan when she stopped to use the bathroom. This generosity was its own reward for Linden. “Working in Shalane’s service puts me in a more productive headspace.”
If you’ve ever had an athletic moment in which you feel like you’re simultaneously making no effort yet performing better than ever, Linden’s finish to Boston reads like that—a creative as much as an athletic act. About taking the lead, she writes, “I abandon any idea of a plan and start improvising.” This is Linden with the courage to run straight into the unknown, curious and without expectations about what she’ll find there. And what does she find? Before you accuse me of reading psychology into mere sport when I propose that she finds the self she has been creating most of her life, consider that choosing to run “was the first real decision I ever made.” And if you’ll give me that, I hope you’ll give me this, too: discovering what it’s like for someone else to self-realize in this way is the next best thing to doing it yourself.
There are a lot of books by runners. Many of them are good. Few of them are as human as Choosing to Run. Because Linden knows herself as a human in essence and only contingently as a runner, she writes not for other runners only but for any reader who suspects they might be human, too. It is examples like these that make us so.
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.