On Going With
A review of Lindsey A. Freeman’s Running
by Scott F. Parker
Reading Lindsey A. Freeman’s Running is like running a 5K. You know it’s going to be a short race, and once you start you don’t want to let up until you finish, no matter how much you’re hurting. In other words, I couldn’t put it down, even if a few times I wanted to throw it out the window.
Then again, it’s harder to write a book than to read one. Maybe Running is a marathon, and it takes the runner/author a few miles/chapters to get the nerves out and find a good pace. It does get off to a slow start. Freeman, a sociologist at Simon Fraser University, has an academic’s habit of throat clearing and qualifying her prose beyond common decency. There’s even something of a lit review by which Freeman seems to want to establish her right to write the book. And too often her own thoughts are followed by the assurance that Foucult or Barthes once thought something similar. Meanwhile, we’re a few chapters in before Freeman really begins what is a vivid, insightful, and above all knowing reflection on running, her love for which is manifest and contagious.
It is love that propels Freeman. Running belongs categorically to Duke University Press’s Practices series, books that “are by and about amateurs in the original sense — those who engage in pursuits out of sheer love and fascination.” Freeman was a successful collegiate runner, but it is not her past accomplishments (briefly discussed) that impress as much as her devotion and appreciation. Freeman’s expertise, as one hopes from a work of literature, stems from the quality of her attention to experience.
Running is a lovely assortment of occasional pieces about the wide-ranging experience of being a runner. Runners will recognize their own practices in Freeman’s stories and reflections. And non-runners, I suspect, will come to appreciate what it is that draws us runners so steadily to this activity. How could they not when they encounter passages like “With my senses heightened the world itself seems supercharged: in spring, the grass greens even brighter; in summer, limbs unfettered by jackets and tights relish the heat; in autumn, the fallen leaves crunch with a pleasure that travels from my feet up my spine; and in winter, the freshness and freedom of being warm outside when moving wins over the chilly start to the run.” Any runner knows these moments as some of the rich pleasures of running. And we all point, as Freeman points, to such intangibles when we try to sincerely explain why we run.
This question — what it is about running that inspires such love and fascination — is the mystery Freeman’s ode plums so well. Despite rejecting essentialist arguments,[1] time and again Freeman limns aspects of running that resound across the usual identity categories.
Take just one example: “In most areas of life, you can’t show how much you want or love things, but in running, and especially in racing, there is the opportunity for this kind of near-naked display.” Exactly right and profound enough. But the passage continues, with Freeman ever attentive to the dynamic between the metaphorical and the literal: “This showcase of desire, effort, and personality is made all the more vulnerable for the fact that, in racing, you are often not wearing much clothing.” Aha! That feeling and that insight are undeniable yet, as far as I know, previously unarticulated. Maybe not every runner has that experience in common, but just about any runner could.
Superficially, Freeman and I have little in common, and yet I cannot read her book without recognizing her running and my running to be one running. We can, as she writes, “touch and be touched by others who love” what we love.
I am very happy to have taken up Freeman’s invitation to “go with me,” in no small part because she and I do not always see things the same way. Who wants a book that wins them over too easily or that they dumbly agree with? If I want to think my own thoughts only, I can always run alone.
[1] Freeman is so dismissive of Christopher McDougall’s argument that humans are “born to run” that she refuses to even mention him or his bestselling book by name.
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.