Why We Run

IT’S SAID THAT writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and there’s a similar dilemma with running. It isn’t a process that readily transfers into words. Running, especially long distances, often becomes such a compelling or even spiritual experience that it seems beyond words, or at least those easily written.

The last thing Robin Harvie is short of is words, which is not necessarily a good thing: in Why We Run, the Londoner’s memoir, economy soon defeats him. Fortunately for the reader his obsession with running doesn’t, and that’s enough to maintain our interest until the end – which, by the way, is definitely the best part.

“I have not won a single race in my life, nor can I run particularly quickly,” Harvie writes near the beginning, leaving us in no doubt that he’s just an ordinary runner, swept up, like so many others, by the running boom. Having run his first marathon at university in 1999 (for a bet, evidently), he gradually realises that a mere 42km is not enough to satisfy his obsession – and so, in September 2009, he takes on the Spartathlon, 245km from Athens to Sparta, which participants must complete in less than 36 hours.

With that the journey begins, in more ways than one: Harvie obliges with tales of historical endurance, but these frequently divert our attention. He initially structures his narrative around the family history in Denmark and the sudden death of his father-in-law, in France, but far too randomly interrupts with anecdotes and references to philosophers, poets and painters.

Worse still are the jaded lessons on famous runners and races, some of which should have been more rigorously checked. Why We Runwould have been better served with Harvie fleshing out the details of his background: even though he attempts to describe his upbringing along the Thames, and why running became such a part of his lifestyle, he remains somewhat distant, at least in the early stages.

That’s not to say that when he starts writing about running itself he doesn’t generate some worthy passages. As he builds towards the Spartathlon, the Holy Grail of ultra-marathon runners, he takes on the Round Rotherham 80km race, and at last – 154 pages into the book – his story comes alive. He meets Rory Coleman, a former alcoholic who has set nine Guinness world records in long-distance running; he takes on the Bob Graham Round – 115km over 42 peaks of the Lake District – and fails to finish; he even joins a gym to help shed the last few grams of body fat. “With the day’s news pouring from the wall of plasma screens, all athletic expression has been neutered,” he writes. “I went for two hours twice a week without fail and I hated every minute of it.”

Eventually, Harvie takes us to the Spartathlon, although not before his extreme preparations are very nearly foiled in the week before the race. Inspired by events in 490 BC, when the Athenians, under siege from the Persians, sent a messenger called Pheidippides to seek help from the Spartans, 250km away, the Spartathlon is widely regarded as the hardest distance-running race to complete. With no one to stop him from quitting, Harvie reaches the “absolute extremity of my own being”; he hallucinates, he vomits and, after almost 300 pages, finally delivers some good storytelling. “A week ago I was not born,” he says after his return, and for once we are utterly convinced.

It’s just a pity that Harvie didn’t take his inspiration from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a mere 40-page novella, or perhaps Tim Krabbe’s The Rider, a 148-page cycling classic, and realise that less, even for an ultra-marathon runner, is sometimes more.