Rereading Once a Runner
After forty years, does Once a Runner remain the “classic running novel”?
I started reading Once a Runner in the back of a van, squeezed between two sweaty men.
I was in college and riding back to campus with my cross country team after a meet in Charleston. We’d raced an 8K earlier that day in a marshy park outside of town. It was a muggy, South Carolina Lowcountry morning, and the van stunk of body funk and swamp muck.
I borrowed a copy of the paperback from a teammate and dug in as the van pulled onto I-26. Amidst the post-race banter of young men, I utterly lost myself in the pages of the novel. I pilfered the copy, skipped a house party, and finished the book in the early hours of the next day. I closed the cover a different person.
There was something about the candid narration and cynical platitudes that resonated in my eighteen-year-old soul. “Yes, yes! This is the path,” I thought as I thumbed the pages, a landscape of self-reconstruction opening up before me. The novel tapped into the inner life of the sport—the thoughts, urges, and impulses that define the competitive runner.
Looking back, nearly twenty years later, I'm struck how deeply the book resonated with me. When John L. Parker Jr., who turns 75 this year, self-published Once a Runner in 1978, he arguably wrote the English language’s definitive story of competitive running. How, after forty years, does Once a Runner remains the “classic running novel”? And does it continue to speak to the runners of today?
The novel’s plot, like a running race, is simple.
The main character, Quentin Cassidy, is a talented middle-distance runner at a Florida university. He trains hard and aspires to make the Olympics. But <spoilers> he’s kicked off the track team for leading a student protest. This leads him to dump his girlfriend, drop out of school, and begin intense training in a remote cabin. The story culminates with a mile race against the world-record holder.
As literature, it’s not particularly inspired. Parker aims awkwardly toward profundity, but his prose often lands like a Gatorade ad. Non-runners will find little of interest. Indeed, it took the Internet's consolidation of the running niche to make Once a Runner marketable for mass publication in 2010. (Slate)
The book is less a novel than a form of fictionalized memoir, something closer to autofiction—a nostalgic ode to collegiate athleticism. We begin and end with Cassidy walking around a track, ruminating over his running memories, familiar to anyone who ran in college: the groggy camaraderie of the morning run, intense friendships formed through interval workouts, the beautiful exhaustion after a race. Even the college pranks and dining hall shenanigans feel on point. Once a Runner is an embellished memory, packaged around the tale of the mythic masculine athlete.
Like many young male runners, many of passages of the book are elitist, juvenile, and sexist. Cassidy is a preening prick when it comes to running ability:
When they occasionally blew by a huffing fatty or an aging road runner, they automatically toned down the banter to avoid overwhelming … They in fact respected these distant cousins of the spirit, who, among all people had some modicum of insight into their own days and ways. But the runners resembled them only in the sense that a puma resembles a pussy cat.
Such condescension oozes through the book in a masturbatory fetish for talented men. Parts of Once a Runner read like a sportsman’s Nietzsche for those with high-school reading abilities. This includes myself. In college, I loved Parker’s lines about work ethic and excellence because they reaffirmed my own sense of self-importance. Now I realize that the joggers Parker mocks as “plump, determined-looking women slogging along” might be working two jobs to make rent. I just can’t get behind the worst of Quentin Cassidy’s elitism anymore.
And yet, despite the smug arrogance and streaks of misogyny, Once a Runner remains a definitive statement of the sport’s idealized ethos.
Parker constructs running life as a singular existence, similar to a religious cult or sect.
Driven by internal “demons,” Cassidy refers to his training in abstract terms as “The Task,” an unending quest to become ever faster. Qualifying for the Olympics or winning isn't really the point. Rather, The Task is a form of self-overcoming in which hard training lets one momentarily reach the sublime. And the road to transcendence is not very fun.
Parker describes the dreariness of running high mileage after Cassidy, expelled from school, moves to the woods of the Florida Panhandle. There are, Parker notes repeatedly, no secrets to success, only the “trial of miles.” So Cassidy devotes himself to “removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough soles of his running shoes.” Living monk-like and alone, training becomes a crucible that burns off the unworthy from the worthy, the reprobate from the elect, the good runners from the great. He runs twice, thrice a day, including a track session that leaves him with organ damage.
To anyone outside the running community this is, to put it mildly, eccentric behavior. But Cassidy’s training has roots in Western religious traditions.
His disciplining of his body follows what historians of medieval asceticism call a “habitus,” or a regimen of behavior aimed at unlocking mystical or esoteric knowledge. Cassidy’s Task is similar in practice to the flagellants of the 14th and 15th centuries who mortified their bodies with whips and chains to spiritually commune with the divine. And Parker's language echoes that of mystics throughout the early modern period. When I was doing dissertation research for my doctorate, I encountered the writing of Roger Crab, an English mystic in the 1650s, who reminded me of Quentin Cassidy as he described starving his body to allow "a New Man to emerge.”
Moving into the modern era, religious forms of corporeal discipline were co-opted to address the cultural anxieties caused by industrialization. In the early 19th century, English social theorists thought that certain sports, including long distance walking and running, reaffirmed masculine vigor in the face of the effeminizing forces of urbanization and the luxuries of the free market—language that continues to permeate sporting culture into the twenty-first century.
All this is to say that Cassidy’s running is a secular, individualistic evolution of a deep history—one of disciplining the body toward idealized ends.
For Cassidy, the culmination of that discipline is a race.
Here Parker’s wisdom is timeless. He suggests that racing doesn’t reveal some sort of inner quality. Rather a footrace provides glimpses of the abyss. The pain of racing functions as an unveiling of the self, and what is revealed is nothingness:
Cassidy knew very well that he could take men, otherwise strong and brave men, to places they had never been before. Places where life and death overlapped in surreal valleys of muscle gloom and heart despair, where one begins to realize once more that nothing really matters at all and that stopping is all; where all men can finally get the slick skin of civilization off and see that soft pink glow inside that tells you – in both cunnilingus and bullet wounds – that there are no secrets.
Within the painful ecstasy of oxygen debt, the runner finds neither bravery nor insight. They discover only absence. Running, to quote Parker, is “a rite of death.” And to race is to probe the limits of life, mapping its edges. Quentin Cassidy continues to speak to us because he finds meaning within this peculiar form of self-induced suffering. He is not nihilistic, but he revels in the simplicity of reducing the self to nil.
And one can hardly blame him given the politics that bleed through the book.
Parker's disgust at the hypocrisy, racism, and administrative incompetence of America in the 1970s is obvious and explicit through the novel. In the aftermath of Watergate and the catastrophe of Vietnam, small wonder that a character like Cassidy would retreat from the world into the simplicity of a footrace.
Such language continues to resonate. Much like the early 1970s, our society is again defined by a dizzying sense of upheaval, shot through with pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, drug addiction, and tribal politics. Running is a way of evading this cultural vertigo to find meaning in a world that eludes easy reference to the transcendent.
Amid the noise, running provides a direction for growth and self-improvement. And it is here that Quentin Cassidy remains worthy of reverence. He is the mythical saint of all who pad the tracks, tarmac, and trails. His are the monologues that spin out from the running mind. He is the solitary hermit of the long run, spouting out wisdom from his cell of oxygen debt. But his words only make sense to those who tread a similar path.
Miles of trials, friends.
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The weekly run
Breakfast Club's weekly run meets every Thursday morning in the Oakland hills for an 8-mile run.
When and Where: Thursday, 6:30am at Lake Temescal
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace; routes include a few hundred feet of climbing. See route on Strava
Parking: lots are closed early in the morning, but street parking along Broadway is plentiful just beyond the park's northern entrance. Be careful with belongings as theft is common.
Meeting spot: north side of the lake at the toilets near the northern parking lot. The group runs a clockwise loop around the lake before heading out of the park. Vaccines are mandatory.
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