In a 1993 interview published in The Paris Review, notoriously media-shy novelist Don DeLillo revealed something about himself: he is also a runner. “I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours.¹” So when Underworld was published four years later, you can see some of his own running experiences informing his writing. For example, in the Prologue we meet Cotter Martin, a teenage boy who skips a day of school to attend the October 3, 1951, National League pennant playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. With no entry ticket to the game, Cotter slips past the ticket booth into the baseball stadium. DeLillo writes, “he picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.²” 

Haruki Murakami reveals his running habit in the opposite order. You detect a runner’s sensitivity in his 1983 short story “Barn Burning,”  in which the narrator plans morning routes to run based on his investigation of a mysterious character. Murakami writes, “the following morning at six, I put on my training wear and jogging shoes and ran the course. I run six kilometers every morning anyway, so adding an extra kilometer wouldn’t kill me. There were two railroad crossings along the way, but they rarely held you up. And otherwise, the scenery wouldn’t be bad.³” “Burn Burning” was not published in English translation until 1992, but that’s still fifteen years before he releases the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. In the memoir’s series of essays, Murakami tells us that he ran his first 5K in 1983, the same year that “Barn Burning” published, and gradually increased his training distances to the point that he now runs a marathon every year. He spends the majority of the book describing how he hones the talent, focus, and endurance required to be a good novelist by running daily. He says, that talent, focus, and endurance are also what one needs to be a marathoner. “Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance— are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of [leg] muscles I wrote of a moment ago.⁴”

In a July 19, 1999 article from a series called “Writers on Writing,” in the New York Times, novelist Joyce Carol Oates details for readers the sensations of running and exhorts any writers to take up running. She writes, “ideally, the runner who’s a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting” and later, “the structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.⁵”

Award winning poets Helen Mort and Kay Ryan have both been profiled by Runner’s World magazine. Mort is a sub-3 hour marathoner and an avid trail runner. And Ryan, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010, finishes her poem “This Life” drawing a comparison between Zeno’s paradox and that feeling of exhaustion near the end of a race. 

These are just a few examples. There’s something here worth exploring, something about the compatibility of writing and running, something about people who work with words and also need to move their bodies through the world, something about the relationship between a uniquely human activity and one we share with nearly every other mammal on the planet. The conversations in Writers On the Run focus on this pairing. 

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1. “Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction” No. 135. The Paris Review. Interviews. 1993. p. 280.
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2. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1998. p. 13.
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3. Murakami, Haruki. The Elephant Vanishes. First Vintage International edition. Vintage International, Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1994. p. 145. ↩︎
4. Murakami, Haruki. What I Talk about When I Talk about Running: A Memoir. 1st U.S. ed. Translated by Philip Gabriel. Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. p. 78. ↩︎
5. Oates, Joyce Carol. “To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet.” Arts. The New York Times, July 19, 1999. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/19/arts/to-invigorate-literary-mind-start-moving-literary-feet.html.
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6. Ryan, Kay. The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. 1st ed. Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2010.
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