Book Review: The Running Body: A Memoir (OT)(a long-distance runner)

The Running Body: A Memoir, by Emily Pifer (Autumn House Press, 2022, 216 pp, $17.95 paperback)

The Plot or Lack Thereof

Not divided into chapters but into sections, The Running Body is a most unusual book - little in words but big in philosophy. 

Questions to Muse About

What makes an athlete? Why is one sport more suited for a certain person than another? Or you more suited for one sport than another? And what if you never find the sport that is meant for you? Do you then become a pentathlete or decathlete - or a spectator?

Does the author really love running, or just love what it does to her body and how it makes her body look? Did she become a long-distance runner because she idolized how female runners looked - thin in all the right places? Is she borderline anorexic? Where is that fine line drawn? Karen Carpenter's disease took a toll on her heart and Emily Pifer's constant striving takes a toll on her skeletal system yet she still manages to live the college experience and reside in Ohio and West Virginia and New York and Wyoming and Oregon.

What is disciplined eating for an athlete? Where is the line between pleasure (a high) and pain? Can one eat too little? Too much? And what about when other athletes and your coach remark on your seeming weight loss? What's more important: to look like a runner, to have a running body, or to be a successful winning runner? And then, you graduate.

Pain. Discipline. Overtraining. Undereating. Why do so many athletes incur injuries? What is the cost?

Style

Now a PhD candidate, author Emily Pifer writes in stream of consciousness style about how she finally found her sport and what it did to her - good and bad. Though a female college athlete, she relates college experiences a university football star also lives and explains the consequences, but those, mostly from a coed's point of view, focused on how her body looks and the striving for perfection.

Some of the sentences don't make a lot of sense alone but, strung together, they do. And Pifer keeps skipping around her life, back and forth, requiring some readers to stop and ponder, but is it really important?

I kept reading, not to see how the plot would unravel but because I was mesmerized - the flow reminded me of honey yet the sentences would repeat themselves, would be fragments, would be otherwise unique.

Title? Cover Illustration?

You will 'get' the title, but the cover is food for thought. . . .