The Paradox of the Distance Runner

I still remember my first long run. I was 19, home from college, and it was one of those perfect summer days: bright and blue and not too humid. When I got to the end of the trail, my typical turnaround point, I decided, on a whim, to continue. I added one mile, then another, then another. By the time I returned to my parents’ house, I’d completed 10 miles. My whole system buzzed with adrenaline and endorphins. I felt like a god.

If this run lingers in my memory, it’s not only for the feeling of transcendence that accompanied it, but also for its innocence. I wasn’t straining to meet some mileage goal or pushing myself to run farther or faster than I wanted to. I was simply enjoying myself, seeing what my body could do. Purposeful runs came later. So did tempo runs and 20-milers, half marathons and marathons, tendinitis and amenorrhea, an unhealthy fixation on weekly mileage and an eating disorder just shy of clinical. But this first long run was pure pleasure, not least because I learned what it was like to locate a limit, then to push past it. It was intoxicating. I wanted to do it again.

Perhaps more than any other sport, distance running requires athletes to push their limits. Ever since Pheidippides, the first marathoner, ran from Marathon to Athens to declare victory over the Persians, we’ve understood distance running as the ultimate expression of human resilience. (We sometimes conveniently forget that Pheidippides dropped dead upon arrival.) In ancient Greece, running—and athletics more generally—were understood as a way to discipline and purify the body; in this sense, running was the perfect complement to philosophy and poetry, which disciplined and purified the soul. Traces of this attitude linger today: Distance runners are often praised for their discipline, their stoicism, their commitment to winning at all costs.

In running, unlike in team sports, there are no substitutes for exhausted players. Nor are there machines to assist an aching body, as there are in cycling, or pauses built into the game. A runner must stay in constant motion, pushing her body to run farther than the average person can fathom, farther than may be strictly healthy. For many, the marathon looms as the ultimate endurance test, but ultramarathoners regularly compete in 50-mile races, 100-mile races, and even longer races, some of which take place in the harshest climates on Earth. And if running hundreds of miles in the Arctic cold doesn’t sound challenging enough, then you could always spend 52 straight days running 3,100 miles around a single block in Jamaica, Queens, in a race called, appropriately enough, Self-Transcendence. Distance running requires you to dance right up to the edge of your physical limits, to endure extremes for hours on end.

Distance runners are particularly tantalizing cultural figures because they do something utterly natural—bipedal motion is a crucial component of human evolution—but they do it in a way that strikes us as superhuman. The successful distance runner is thus a paradox: a person blessed with godlike endurance and a baffling insensitivity to pain, who nonetheless, in a fundamental way, is just like us.

Two new books portray the difficulty of distance running while simultaneously challenging the idea that distance runners are superhuman. For journalist Maggie Mertens, distance running can be a form of political action, a way to overturn limits that have historically been imposed on women who run competitively. By her account, women have always been capable of running—some of them faster than many of their male counterparts—but they’ve often been prevented from doing so by men, who worried about the effects of the sport on the “so-called weaker sex.” To Mertens, sex identity is also a kind of limit, one that must be destroyed; throughout, she works to trouble the idea that a woman is any one thing or a woman’s body is any one way.

Sabrina B. Little, a moral philosopher and elite distance runner, emphasizes the physical limits common to all runners of all genders and suggests that we redefine what it means to run well and to live well. She makes an argument for running within our limits, which shift over our lifetimes, and for finding beauty and meaning in doing so. Read together, the books offer contrasting visions of athletic success: one achieved by pushing limits, the other by accepting them. The first may be more familiar to the sports fans among us, but the second might be more useful for our lives off the track.

There is a long-established tradition of male-centered running books, from Roger Bannister’s The Four Minute Mile (1955), his memoir of setting the world record, to Jean Echenoz’s bestselling Running: A Novel (2009), a portrait of the Czech runner Emil Zátopek. Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008) is one of the more memorable examples of the twenty-first century; in this meandering memoir, written in pared-down prose, he draws analogies between writing and running—he aims to finish a novel around the same time he seeks a personal best in the marathon—and reflects on aging. Surveying this literary tradition, with its paucity of women writer-runners through much of the twentieth century, one might assume that women are recent additions to the running world. Perhaps it’s only in the last 50 years that women have raced long distances and gone on to write about it.

Mertens’s debut work of nonfiction, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women, can be read as a riposte to exactly this kind of assumption. By documenting the long history of women’s running, Mertens sets out to combat pernicious “falsehoods,” some of which still endure today, about female athletes’ capacities. Among them: Women are too weak for strenuous physical exertion. Women should lift light weights, not heavy ones. Women shouldn’t run while pregnant. Women shouldn’t run while breastfeeding. Women shouldn’t run while on their period. Women shouldn’t run, period.

Combining historical research and on-the-ground reporting, Mertens dissects each of these claims, showing how they arose and how various women—runners, educators, and researchers—proved them wrong. She pays special attention to the work of reformers, such as Alice Milliat, a French woman who fell in love with rowing while working for a wealthy English family, founded an international sports society for women, and agitated successfully for the inclusion of women’s sports in the Olympic Games; Senda Berenson, an expert on women’s basketball, who revolutionized physical education at Smith College, Mertens’s alma mater; and Barbara Drinkwater, a physical education teacher and sports psychologist and physiologist, whose pathbreaking research on female marathoners led to the inclusion of the women’s race in the 1984 Olympics—nearly 100 years after male Olympians had first run the event.

But her most powerful argument against sexist assumptions and concern-trolling is simply the long history of successful women runners, from Florence MacDonald, an 18-year-old from Boston who competed in the first women’s 800-meter race at the 1928 Olympics—and who did not collapse from exhaustion at the end, as newspapers at the time falsely reported—to the British marathoner Paula Radcliffe, who won the 2007 New York City Marathon just nine months after giving birth. Throughout, she draws attention to underrecognized figures, such as Mickey Patterson, the first Black American woman to medal at the Olympics, and Diane Leather, a student in Birmingham, England, who ran a sub-five-minute mile—a first for women—right around the same time Roger Bannister ran his sub-four-minute mile.

Though Mertens forcefully defends female athletes and argues that they are capable of doing anything men can do, she is wary of presenting women as somehow innately superior—even when they beat men. Covering the 2019 Spine Race, a trail ultramarathon—or “fell race”—in the U.K., Mertens marvels at the performance of the winner, Jasmin Paris, who set a course record while stopping to pump breast milk for her infant daughter. Paris’s performance is impressive but not unusual: Women have been known to beat men at very long distances, prompting some to wonder if women are biologically better suited to ultras than men. Mertens is agnostic. She’s familiar with studies that suggest that, compared to men, women take longer to get fatigued and do better on little sleep, but she’s also aware of “plenty of physiological studies out there that show the exact opposite things.” Rather than trumpet female biology, she prefers to think of people as “complex,” and of any given race outcome as determined by many different factors, sex being only one. For Mertens, the whole point of feminism is to get away from thinking about your body as limited—or empowered—by its biology. “And it’s kind of freeing, isn’t it?” she asks. “We don’t have to be constrained by what we’ve always thought we knew about our body and its ability just because of our sex … we, too, can do the impossible.”

Like many contemporary feminist writers, she is attentive to the ways race and class affected female athletes. In a chapter on the 1936 women’s Olympic track and field team, she describes how future golf pro Babe Didrikson played vicious pranks on her Black teammates, and how these same teammates were denied spots on the 4x100-meter relay, despite their strong performances in trials. She also has a capacious definition of womanhood: In one of her strongest chapters, Mertens offers a nuanced perspective on the role hormones play in athletic performance and makes a solid case for including all woman-identified athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.

The story Mertens tells about women and running is mostly a triumphant one. “Women runners have proven that what is humanly possible is often beyond the scope of society’s limited imaginations,” she writes. But sometimes the history she relates is more complex. Take the case of “Little” Mary Decker, a precocious athlete who won her first marathon in 1971 at age 12, but who struggled with overuse injuries for much of her career. Decker became a media obsession and a tragic case: a gifted runner, often described as “frail” and “fragile,” who couldn’t stay healthy, most likely because she worked too hard.

Mertens portrays Decker and other women runners who overtrain as victims of overzealous coaches, weight-loss culture, and a scientific establishment that neglected to research women’s bodies—a failure that continues today. These factors surely shaped the training regimens of female athletes, although Decker, as Mertens characterizes her, also seems quite stubborn; perhaps she ran through pain for her own inscrutable reasons. What’s more puzzling is Mertens’s presentation of relative energy deficiency in sport, or RED-S, formerly called the “female athlete triad,” a term for the combination of overtraining and underfueling that can lead to reproductive dysfunction, osteoporosis, and eating disorders, among other problems. Mertens blames the male gaze for the proliferation of this disorder, absolving women entirely, and she strangely criticizes the media for promoting research into RED-S. “The stories seemed to say that, for girls, the act of running … is, in fact, a precursor to bodily harm,” she writes, with some sarcasm. “Sure, some exercise and sports were fine for girls, but parents should watch out that their daughters don’t do too much.” But weren’t researchers suggesting precisely this, that young runners shouldn’t “do too much”? Overtraining, we now know, can have severe and long-lasting consequences that adolescents, who sometimes have trouble taking the long view, might not always consider.

This tension—between limitless possibility and physical reality—runs through Mertens’s book. Mertens suggests, again and again, that there are no limits women can’t break, no challenges they can’t meet, even as she documents the consequences of training as if your body had endless capacities. Pregnancy and breastfeeding, in her account, are, if anything, advantages for female athletes: In her chapter on ultrarunning, she suggests Paris’s ability to run on little sleep owed something to her experience nursing an infant during the night. We don’t get a sense that the reality of women’s lives—the physical and psychological demands of reproduction, wage-earning, and caretaking—might restrain them in any way. Women can indeed do it all! To suggest otherwise, we infer, would be to collude with the men whose “limited imaginations” kept women runners away from the starting line.

There is something inspiring about this message, but also something troubling. If a woman admits to a limitation—if she scales back her training, or rearranges her priorities—is she failing the feminist project, or, perhaps worse, failing herself? It is of course true that women are strong and capable, and that they can juggle many different demands on their bodies and on their time. But it’s also true that women—like men—tire, age, and find their attention and energy pulled in other directions. At this point, a woman can rail against these new limits and try to push against them, often harming herself in the process, or she can accept them and adjust her expectations of what her body can do. Must such adjustment always be a kind of resignation? Or might there be something liberating about lowering your expectations?

“It often seems like we talk about surpassing human limits without really caring about what a human is, or about how to live a rich life and run beautiful races within the limitations we have,” writes the moral philosopher Sabrina B. Little. Her book, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners, is an unusual entry into the canon of running literature. Neither memoir nor narrative history, Little’s book is instead an effort to teach virtue ethics—a set of theories that investigate the development of virtues and good character—through running.

Little, an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University and a five-time member of the U.S. national team, believes that athletes have “an impoverished moral vocabulary”: They don’t have a way of discussing “the virtues relevant to sport.” Developing such a vocabulary is important, she argues, because of the relationship between physical activity and moral development. We are “embodied beings,” she writes, and how we move our bodies shapes who we are as people. In order to maximize moral development, Little suggests, we must not only challenge ourselves physically but also think carefully about our motives and our aims.

In The Examined Run, Little identifies “right motivation” for athletic endeavors as well as the “performance-enhancing virtues” that these motivations help develop. She focuses on distance running, both because it’s her area of expertise and because endurance sports, she argues, depend on “emotional control” more than other sports. The virtues that running develops include resilience, perseverance, joy, and humor; she contrasts these qualities to “performance-enhancing vices”—among them pride, intransigence, and envy—and argues that, in almost every case, there is a virtue that one could cultivate in place of the vice while still achieving excellent results. A foot injury, followed by “arduous” physical therapy, taught her about resilience; running a 50-mile race during a summer rainstorm reminded her of the value of humor. In one chapter, she lists her running role models, careful to note both their impressive achievements and their virtues, which include humility, generosity, and love.

Athletic success, in the common sense, is not Little’s focus. As a teacher, coach, and parent to two young children, she’s more concerned with how to develop good people than how to steer young runners to the top spot on the podium. “Young athletes especially struggle to know the difference between productive and unproductive forms of suffering,” she writes. As a coach, Little works to help her charges make these distinctions—not necessarily so they race faster, but so they become better people, happier and more at ease. But not infrequently, personal self-improvement also leads to better race times. Little describes one middle school runner who had trouble focusing; when she reminded him before a race to pay attention—a skill that would serve him in many areas of life—he ran a personal best in the mile by 60 seconds.

Little’s emphasis on not just running well but living well distinguishes her approach from that of many other runners and runner-writers. In a persuasive chapter on the celebration of “limitless” running, she argues that there are in fact “limits to the amount of training we can absorb,” and that we would do well to accept these limits and to run within them. The alternative, she suggests, is to push ourselves too hard, achieve success temporarily, then swiftly descend into injury, frustration, and fatigue. Better to “make peace with our physical restraints” and run moderately—and, crucially, to find joy and beauty in doing so. “My miles can be beautiful even if not maximally fast,” Little writes, reflecting on how her own running goals have shifted due to the demands of work and family.

“What would it be like to look happily upon our constraints as people, or to live full lives within our means?” Little asks near the end of her book. This is a profound question, and it doesn’t only apply to running. In a culture that preaches the values of striving and self-discipline, it can be all too easy to beat ourselves up for perceived lapses—missing a deadline, turning down a job opportunity—and to fetishize needless suffering. Little reminds us that there are ways to live what philosophers call “the good life,” even if we don’t achieve every goal we set for ourselves. It’s a compelling vision of a well-rounded life, one that makes room for achievement, and for so much more.

In the weeks I spent writing this piece, I made my tentative return to running. It seemed only fair: How could I evaluate books about distance running unless I reacquainted myself with the sport’s joys and demands? I’d been out of the game for roughly a decade, having traded in my daily runs for physical activities that I found more difficult (although, alas, not impossible) to abuse. But running is among the more accessible sports; one can pick it up easily, even after many years away.

My first runs back were humbling. I felt the jolts of each stride in my joints, something I didn’t remember from my youth. Keeping Little’s moderate approach in mind, I broke up my runs with stretches of walking, and I kept my pace comfortable, the speed at which I could hold a conversation. Each week, my walking intervals grew shorter, the running intervals easier, and my enjoyment of the miles more sustained. I’d forgotten what it felt like to run outdoors in early spring, as the natural world reawakened. I felt something within me rouse itself, too: a curiosity about what my body, when pushed, could do.

One afternoon in late April, I put on sneakers and a sweatshirt and began a run around a nearby pond. It was a cool, gray day, and a fine mist was falling: to my mind, ideal conditions for a run. I started out slowly, cautiously, then picked up my pace. The run felt surprisingly easy, like slicing through soft silk with sharp shears. An old feeling surged up: I was strong, capable; there was nothing I couldn’t do. I completed my run around the pond and was tempted, briefly, by the idea that I could—should—run a second circuit. Why not harness this fleeting good feeling and push myself as far as I can? It’s what I would have done years ago. But I’m older now, and I know my limits. I slowed to a walk and turned toward home.