Running For My Lives
Justin Quarry tests the truth of his classroom analogy that writing a novel is like running a marathon, and learns a lesson in revision of identity.
Sometime in my 30s, I stopped being able to remember my dreams, even minutes after waking, their afterimages vaporized by my sudden consciousness of the convoy of my reality: the novel to write, the dog to walk, the essays to grade, the Airbnb to clean. When I was 37, I began to wonder if I dreamed at all anymore—actually, began to worry I didn’t dream—so I started dream journaling. First thing every morning, as I sat on the toilet, rather than sorting men on swipe-apps or scrolling through news my phone curated for me, I chronicled anything I could recall of the stories I’d told myself through the night.
In these fragments, I soon noticed multiple repetitions of two things: Real Housewives and running. As intellectually alarming as was the former, the latter was far stranger, because as fanatically as I exercised now, and as often as others read my compact frame as a result of exactly that activity, I had always detested running. (Housewives I, admittedly, loved.) In junior high fit tests, among my other physical failures, I’d never been able to run a mile within the prescribed time for my age category. As an adult, I’d never run more than a handful of miles at a time, and I ran all those bored and begrudgingly.
But in my dreams now, I ran and ran, sometimes as if I were a species for whom running was my only means of locomotion. I ran in a number of states of being—terror, glee, anger, serenity. Still, I could never recollect whether I was running away or toward, nor could I recall whether what I was running away from or toward was a person, place, or thing. What seared my memory was merely the running itself, and the feelings it inspired in me.
I dismissed all the miles I logged in my sleep until one morning, after recording yet another apparently purposeless run, I thought of the novel I was still writing after all these years, and I thought about the fact that I often told my students that writing a novel was like running a marathon, and I thought about the fact that I’d never actually run a marathon—so how could I really know if the comparison was apt? And then, in my grogginess, I started to become convinced: I should run a marathon.
Of the comparison, I immediately proved at least this much true: I committed myself to running a marathon with the same absurdity and ambition and zeal as long before I’d committed myself to writing a book. Perhaps it was the extremity, the irrationality of the task that most appealed to me. I decided neither speed nor perfection were my goals—unrealistic notions I perpetually grappled with in writing, to the point of paralysis—but rather just to cross the finish line. To simply have the experience. To enact the scraps of my dreams, to put them in literal motion, rather than struggle to scrutinize and organize them for some psychoanalytic or narrative meaning.
I thought about the fact that I often told my students that writing a novel was like running a marathon, and I thought about the fact that I’d never actually run a marathon—so how could I really know if the comparison was apt? And then, in my grogginess, I started to become convinced: I should run a marathon.
Soon, I enlisted a running store to matchmake my feet to shoes, and in a single day I signed up for a 5K and a 10K at home in Nashville, and a half-marathon in Philadelphia, all ramping up to a full marathon in Miami in five months. Over the weeks that followed, I discovered, too, that the focus and tenacity I’d developed over years in service of writing applied directly to the execution of a marathon training schedule. On most training days, I never timed my pace, but I always ran and never walked nor stopped, completing every session, each week reaching a new milestone of distance. However, none of those successes astonished me: My compulsivity had never allowed me to fail to see through any major undertaking, and because of that I’d also, even over years and years, never doubted either my ability, eventually, to finish my novel.
What stunned me instead in my training was my rediscovered capacity to surprise myself. For the first time in memory, I, loping across trails and striding in place on treadmills, was seeing myself in a way I’d never expected. I was watching myself—feeling myself—in real time, transform my identity.
Furthermore, in the last weeks of training, once I began running more than four hours at a time as I traced and retraced the greenway along the Cumberland River, encircling Nashville, and with only the laboring rhythm of my breath for a soundtrack as I bore unremitting witness to the planet’s shift to night from day—I experienced a transcendent awareness of time and space, a seeming connectivity to the universe I’d never undergone (certainly not the few times I’d been stoned, not the innumerable ones I’d been in church as a child) nor could have imagined.
In school, I’d never been an athlete. The proverbial last or next-to-last picked for any number of P.E. teams, I therefore automatically assumed that no sport was “my thing.” Without the latitude, or fortitude, that the social hellscape of most secondary schools fails to offer one to experiment and to practice—much less to fail—I, as no doubt so many less athletically-inclined have done, had ruled out a host of physical possibilities for myself. In turn, I, like lots of young gay men eager to overachieve to compensate for their perceived shortcoming, had wrapped my entire self in scholastics, in which I more easily, more immediately succeeded.
During my 20s, only the premature deaths of my father and brother had scared me back into a gym, for health’s sake, and even after a decade of experience there I still only reluctantly referred to myself as a weightlifter or yogi. Lapping past 38 while I marathon-trained, I felt like an impostor calling myself a runner. And yet there I was, after all, running and running. What else was I, running repeatedly, whether with or without a purpose—ultimately having as close to a spiritual experience as I’d ever known as I did so—if not a runner?
After volunteers at racecourses’ ends draped half-marathon and marathon medals around my neck, what else had they christened me—ludicrous as it seems to write it even now that I’m 42—if not a marathoner?
I, as no doubt so many less athletically-inclined have done, had ruled out a host of physical possibilities for myself. In turn, I, like lots of young gay men eager to overachieve to compensate for their perceived shortcoming, had wrapped my entire self in scholastics, in which I more easily, more immediately succeeded.
Society defines and confines each of us in a multitude of ways, and to varying degrees, based solely on the facets of our most readily perceived characteristics—race, gender, age, class, sexuality, ability. We, too, often define and confine ourselves in accordance with this pigeonholing. Throughout most of my adult life—as a gay, working-class, first-generation college graduate, now upwardly mobile artist and professor—I’d struggled to escape my own theoretical limitations, which, by necessity, required the fierce and relentless invention of individuality.
However, in following the fabrications of my subconscious, in running a marathon, in succeeding at something so wildly unforeseen—I began to wonder: Had that same ferocity and relentlessness of my self-invention ultimately led to failures of imagination in its evolution? To restrictions, of my own making, as to what else I might do or where else I might go or who else I might be?
Sometimes even those who are lucky enough to have the resources to self-actualize—money, time, space, love, belonging—never do, for dread of the sheer amount of work it involves or fear of what they might find in the recesses of their minds. But for one who strives toward the refinement of their intrinsic talents and reaches self-fulfillment, might it not be equally cowardly or lazy to become too wedded to this fully realized identity? To believe too faithfully in the stories our conscious selves tell ourselves about ourselves on repeat?
As a writer and reader, I want to believe that any character is capable of change, and as a humanist I want to believe the same of people. Most often we associate coming-of-age stories with teens on the brink of adulthood, but in truth, because every story is about change, every story is a coming-of-age story. No character, none of us, who’s capable of change is ever too old to come into a new age. And if one leads an examined life—isn’t one perpetually coming into new ages?
As I approached mid-life, I’d come into a whole series of new ages of the mind, and now, at long last, I’d come into a new age of the body. I’d taught myself not only that, indeed, writing a novel is like writing a marathon, but also that running a marathon is simply—god help me—like writing a novel. More and more, with the improving perspective each additional year allows me to literally revise—to “resee”—myself, I see that, if I am to grow, each new draft of me, of both my mind and body, will require the utmost persistence, ingenuity, suspension of disbelief, and, always most difficult for me, self-forgiveness for my failures.
To continue the deconstruction of the ideas I’d for decades crafted about myself and my physicality, only a week after my marathon, I progressed to something else I’d once declared I’d never do. I enrolled in CrossFit—the closest experience I could find to junior-high P.E., the root of so many of my self-misconceptions. I specifically sought to revisit those moments when I revealed myself to an audience, on first and then second and third attempts, all eyes on me, as a struggling novice at a sport or an event. As one of the last people someone might want on their team. Having come into this age of understanding that failure is a necessary part of discovery, this age of recognizing that just because I can’t do something impeccably doesn’t mean I can’t do it at all, I wanted to know: What else was my body capable of, even if only unremarkably?
More and more, with the improving perspective each additional year allows me to literally revise—to “resee”—myself, I see that, if I am to grow, each new draft of me, of both my mind and body, will require the utmost persistence, ingenuity, suspension of disbelief, and, always most difficult for me, self-forgiveness for my failures.
For most of my life, like most people, I’ve only taken pride in the things I’m best at—for achievements in my expected artistic and academic trajectories. But now I see that there’s other pride, perhaps greater pride, to be had in the unexpected, in the uncharted, in that which I am only, at best, mediocre: running a marathon, maneuvering on Olympic rings, climbing a rope using only my hands to a 15-foot ceiling. Pride not in the victory of a thing but rather in the thing’s mere happening—and the imagination and daring and vulnerability required of me to set it, to set myself, in motion. Pride as I sense, in these alien actions of my body, my every micro-evolution, pride as I listen to a CrossFit coach, to classmates cheer for me in my struggle to a finish. As I live the dreams that tell me to never stop running both toward and away from myself.
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