The funny thing about 50 Marathons in 50 Days was that I didn't expect it to be a book. The subtitle says something about how it will give the reader “the secrets to super endurance.” Opening the first page, there’s a lot of guff about how Dean Karnazes may well be the fittest man on the planet, as a bunch of Americans and American magazines have described him, but that he’s really an ordinary guy, “an extremely ordinary guy.” Get it? “Extreme.” Like, yeah. So. If he’s like extreme then that like must mean he’s amazing, right? End result: I expected a manual written by an American with a big ego and a naff-writing style.
But the thing that surprised me was that I obviously have particular rules about the qualities that allow a bound set of pages to be called a “book,” and 50 Marathons, according to these rules, didn’t qualify. I thought it was going to be information (the magic spells which would give me super endurance) and that this information just happened to be transmitted to me in the same way real books are.
I realised I have the same prejudice against cookbooks, textbooks, Self-Help books and all guidebooks whether they guide me to run faster or find the cheapest hostel in Budapest. There is no need for any of these chunks of information to be “books” at all. The information exists independent of the structure and organization of the pages, the paper or the experience of holding it. If I get someone to read a cookbook to me while I’m cooking, I’m not really reading it, but I am using it in exactly the way it was meant to be used – to prepare food. Having a coach show me how to run faster is almost always better than reading a book (depending on the coach). And if I go to a website to find out information relevant to my journey, the order of my search will not follow any narrative design implicit in the existence of a book with a front and back cover and numbered pages.
Am I alone in approaching these “books” differently, as if they are a kind of retarded version of a real book? I don’t expect to stay with them all the way through; I expect to be able to dip in and out fairly randomly without any great loss in continuity or sense of connection, because I don’t expect to have any great sense of connection in the first place. I guess I really just expect the non-book to tell me what I want to know, when I want to know it, as efficiently as possible. If I’m cooking mushroom risotto tonight, I just want the recipe for mushroom risotto, thanks very much, not the incredible story of how mushrooms grow and how exciting it is to go hunting with a forager in the glades where, six weeks after a burn, the mushrooms are just coming on. (Read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore's Dilemma if you want that story.)
Perhaps more people will join my point of view if I suggest that I don’t see car, computer, stereo, vacuum cleaner or any other kind of manuals as books. These kinds of manuals are just what you get when you can’t find a person or a decent website to show you what to do. It seems obvious to me now, but it was an odd realisation – to open a book and realise my expectations for it were so low – and this made me think about what for me divides books from mere manuals.
I expect a book to have a narrative, something that will propel me through the book in the order it was written, bound and published. I expect it to at least try to suck me in and gain an emotional connection with at least one character.*
 |
*Just for the record, I think an idea or a place or an object can carry the weight of being this character. I think A Short History of Progress did a fantastic job of constructing a narrative thread around the idea that throughout history mankind has run into “progress traps” – dead ends that were not visible from the perspective of the people making what they thought were advances in technology. The narrative engine of this book was simply whether or not this idea would be proved wrong. Could we, today, be the first people in history to make advances that don’t have these disastrous dead ends hidden just beyond the limits of our perception? It’s a cliff-hanger question. If we go with the conceit and give the idea life, the book is about whether or not the idea will live or die. If it lives, we know lots of other things will go wrong; we just don’t know what. If it dies, something really interesting must have happened. |
And I guess I expect the interaction to be intended to happen in book form. I think audiobooks are a little weird. I think authors want me to pay attention to the language, to hear the words in my head and to appreciate the rhythm and tone and what they’ve decided to include or leave out, but in general I think they expect me to do this in my head. Writing is an intimate act. Reading is the other half of that relationship. It’s having sweet nothings (and everythings) whispered in my ear while the other ear is on the pillow. It’s not supposed to be bandied about like schoolkids gossipping on a tram. It’s in a book so that this the relationship can happen in the right way. A book is a book because it needs to be book.
I approached 50 Marathons in 50 Days thinking it was going to be a manual, not a book. I was half wrong, and that’s it’s great strength. It has a simple narrative engine: will Dean make it through all 50 marathons? (Will his family be okay? Will the team stay together? Will something simply go wrong?) And: what will he learn along the way? These questions can only be answered at the end of the book, but can only be properly understood be reading the whole book. And Dean is a likeable character.*
So while 50 Marathons is very simple in both language and information, it has a good engine, which kept me going through to the end.
The idea of a “narrative engine” comes from an essay in Telling True Stories, which is a wonderful book about – you guessed it – writing non-fiction narratives (okay, yes: telling true stories).
Born to Run is perhaps the best book on running ever. It’s the best I’ve read, but more than that it has sold x-million copies and has been influential in the rise of barefoot, minimalist shoe and ultra-distance running. The sales of Vibram’s FiveFingers have multiplied X-fold, and every major running shoe company seems to be producing a barefoot line, with Adidas’s X the most recent addition to the crop. Why? It may be a question of timing and that barefoot running was ready to reach its tipping point when Born to Run was published anyway. In itself, that may involve visionary timing or perhaps just a giant chunk of luck. (I wonder how many other journalist-runners with sore feet are wishing they’d written it.) But beyond that, it’s easy to see the things that make Born to Run so good. Simply: it’s a book.
Born to Run is vividly written and has a vibrant, adventurous curiosity which drives the journey from his home to remote valleys in the Mexican Rio Grande, from science labs to 100km races with the world’s best and some of its perhaps craziest, perhaps most visionary, runners. But it’s the fact that it has a deceptively great narrative engine that makes it work so well. Its narrative engine comes from Chris McDougall’s simple question: “Why do my feet hurt when I run?” His answer to this question is the quest that starts the narrative. It then gets complicated, and copious adventures, both physical and intellectual, ensue. Finally, the question is apparently resolved. This is how Born to Run became so much more than a manual on running or biology or anthropology, all of which could equally answer the question “Why do my feet hurt when I run?” and still not be a book worth calling a book.
Who, apart from people (like me) who want to write books, cares about a distinction between books and manuals?
Anyone who teaches anyone anything.
(And perhaps anyone interested in religion, or at least the power of religious texts, which straddle the line between stories and manuals… but that’s a-whole-nother story.)
For two reasons: 1: it’s the way we learn things; and 2: it’s how we learn how to be, not just how to do.
When toddlers stand up in their cot at night and babble to themselves in a language that isn’t quite decipherable, but is quite recognizable as speech, researchers have found that what they’re doing is narrating the day’s events back to themselves. As language develops, this habit doesn’t change much. Some of what gets narrated may be bizarre: “And then mummy flew over the house and then she was in the cupboard and then I had bananas and then I fought a lion.” But it’s story, and it’s how we make sense of the world.
Lily has been studying recently the difference between nominal and verbal writing. Verbal writing is “normal” storytelling style. It forces the narrator into a situation where he or she has to say (and therefore work out, if it isn’t already obvious) who did what to whom, when and where. “I fought a lion today, in the forest.” Then what? “I won, and now the lion and I are friends.”
Nominal writing is the academic tradition. “A fight occurred between a lion and a toddler. It happened earlier today, in the forest.” Same information, no energy.
If you were trying to learn something, which way would work for you?
I used to run a program where I trained students for a run up a local mountain: Mt Beckworth. The training program was seven weeks long and the run to the top of the mountain was about 11kms: longer than almost all of the students had ever run before. I used to do two introductions to the final run. First, I would give them all the information: where each of the water stops were; where the hard bits were; where they would have to run as a pack and where they would be able to run at their own pace. At the end of that, most students were okay, but most were going to be okay anyway. The few who weren’t still had questions, were still confused.
The second introduction I ran was to tell them the story of my running up the mountain that day, with them. I would describe how my knee might hurt a bit after five kilometres, but that it would get better. I would describe the bits where I found it tough and what I had to do to get through those bits. I would describe how it was to run with the pack, to chat with others, and then what it was like running at my own pace, with only one or two others around. At the end of that session, there were hardly ever any questions, and I know it worked, because students would tell me afterwards exactly how my story had matched or differed from theirs, and if I’d left out bits they wished I hadn’t! Stories are how we relate to our world; it’s how we narrate our way through it, so we don’t need a manual for it, we need stories. And it’s stories that offer stuff that’s not just more memorable, but also deeper.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a cricketer. The “being” part of that sentence is the key bit, not the “cricketer” bit. When I was really little, I got my first set of wicket-keeping gloves. I was excited because at that time Rod Marsh was the best wicket-keeper in the world (this is later in his career, when he was indeed an incredible gloveman and not just a fantastic slogger who could catch) and I wanted to be just like Rod Marsh. I sat and watched an entire Test match that summer, and for every session I put my pads and gloves on just to watch TV.
My school cricket team used to play a game, once a year, against a team of district and state players, and some former international players. It was an occasion we sort of looked forward to, but to be honest not overly. Even if we did have some success it always felt like a fluke or it was easy to say they weren’t really trying. When I danced down the wicket and on-drove Ray Bright for four my only thought was, Well that was easy. This guy played for Australia. Must have been a fluke. They usually beat us easily then give us feedback on how we spoke on the field and whether or not we’d tucked or whites into our socks or not. (I played three games against this team and each year the same debate came up. As far as I could see, it made sense, when batting, to tuck your pants into your socks. I never stayed in long enough for it to make much difference, but for people who batted for long enough to make runs, tucking their pants into their socks kept them from flapping around. And when you were wearing pads, no one could see anyway, right? Wrong. Tucking your whites into your socks at any time is bad form. Baseballers tuck their pants into their socks; cricketers do not. It was these kinds of areas of cricketing culture that the Crusaders – which is what I think they were actually called – were trying to pass on to us, the next generation of standard bearers.)
I can see that the content was wrong, but the idea was right. These guys were there not to teach us how to play cricket, but how to be cricketers.
Because being a cricketer is more complicated than just playing the game. Cricket has a great tradition of being obsessed with itself. The absurd side of this is in its ability to produce a statistic for every occasion; the stupid side is the esteem with which getting drunk anywhere, but specifically on the flight from Australia to London is held; but the great side of this is cricket’s ability to produce histories.
I recently had dinner with a friend who has three boys, all of whom play cricket. The oldest, who is about 11, showed me his favourite cricket books – a fat history of the game and, his favourite: a thinner book about Don Bradman. Both books had been loved until the pages were in danger of falling out. As a kid, I had a book of Bradman’s and a history of all the Test Cricket Captains of Australia. It’s lost now, but had a blue cover and each captain had a chapter devoted to him, telling the story of where he was born, how he’d grown up, how hard he’d trained, who he’d played for and what he’d achieved while playing and then captaining Australia. I probably read that book every summer between the ages of ten and fifteen. In the Bradman book, it had descriptions of how Bradman played the back cut, or the off-drive, and I tried to take those on board, but more than anything I absorbed the stories of how to be a cricketer – or just be good at anything. Reading about Bradman spending hours hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump as is ricocheted off a water tank: that isn’t a lesson in how to play the back foot defence (which, in my experience, is the shot you end up playing more than any other if you try to hit a golf ball with a cricket stump – it’s the shot where your eye is closest to bat and ball at the point of impact). What that story is about is dedication, focus, perseverance, and always raising the bar a little higher.
Seeing Lachie with his books reminded me that what was true for me as a kid is still true now. Being good at something takes very little direction and a lot of practice. If I play 10,000 back foot defence shots, I will work out how to play it pretty well by the end. Same goes with running. I don’t need to read a book to find out how to run 50 marathons. In fact, I can’t learn that: except by running 50 marathons. (If I’d listened to The Crusaders, all I would have practiced was not tucking my pants in.) Sure, in learning to run faster for longer, a few tips might help. I was struck by the fact that he trained so that he could run a four hour marathon with a heart rate of 110. That’s low. But in between the tips and tricks is the stuff about being a runner – being the kind of person who runs.
Michael Pollan is a fantastic food writer who wrote a small book called The Food Rules. Apart from being a boring cash-in on the superbly researched and written The Omnivore's Dilemma, it has some interesting and easily consumable moments. One of the rules is: “Be the kind of person who takes vitamin supplements, then don’t take the supplements.” I have a friend who writes cookbooks who says that one of the good things about writing cookbooks is that people never read them. But I’m willing to bet that people who buy cookbooks do cook better meals, on average, than people who don’t. They’re interested in food. Michael Pollan’s point about supplements was that people who take supplements are more interested in health and healthy eating than those who don’t. The problem with buying a cookbook, then, or taking supplements, is that neither of them show us how to be the kind of person who takes supplements, or who cooks great meals. This is why supplements get thrown out and cookbooks remain unopened on the shelf above the pantry.
So Dean is a runner, and by talking about when, how, why and where he runs, and who he runs with (and why they run) he gave me some ideas on how to be a runner. The book has a good engine, which kept me going, and without thinking it was a particularly good book, it became, at least and beyond all my expectations, a book. When I finished, I had more energy for running and for being a runner, with all that might mean.
I’d explain, but to do so I’d probably have to write a manual; so I won’t.