"Hard As a Diamond": Running and Living Deliberately in Parker and Thoreau (Henry David Thoreau and John L. Parker, Jr.'S Works) (Critical Essay‪)‬

There is a passage in Thoreau's Walden (1854) that claims that trees are better than scholars. "Instead of calling on some scholar," Thoreau writes, "I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop" (Walden 248). Rambling to the "pine groves standing like temples" yields far better insights and company than the second hand knowledge a scholar might offer for Thoreau, who finds it "worth while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split [the] wood" (Walden 249). John L. Parker, Jr.'s protagonist of his cult classic among hard-core long distance runners, Once a Runner (1978), also favors the immediacy of intense physical experience and its transcendent promise "to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three dimensional world (and if Time was the fourth dimension, that too was his province)" (Parker 109). Quentin Cassidy, like Thoreau, is "uninterested in the perspective of the fringe runner, the philosopher runners, the training rats; those who sat around reading abstruse and meaningless articles in Runner's World" not because he is uninterested in seeking truth (109). The "philosopher runners," like "some scholar" Thoreau chooses not to visit, are of little interest to Cassidy because their idealistic portrayals of the sport mask a deeper cowardice and inaction, as they "were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings" prior to runs (Parker 110). Instead, they lie snugly in their beds like Thoreau's sleeping, spiritually half-conscious neighbors in the very first pages of Walden. It is ironic that "the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen Runners" Parker takes to task for their esoteric and pretentious approach to the sport would be embodied by the ethos of Runner's World magazine, the very publication that in the January 2007 issue placed Once A Runner atop its list of "the five best running books" (Parker 109, Cheever 78). Parker's novel has clearly transcended the status of Runner's World among the running populace. Runner's World may have changed considerably since 1978, when Parker's novel was first published, so that the soft, poet runners he mocks in the novel are less apparent now. Although one wonders what Parker would make of the defiantly non-competitive legions of "waddlers" who follow columnist John "The Penguin" Bingham's philosophical musings about the honor of "having the courage to start" and racing with "no need for speed." Readers inclined toward Cassidy's sensibility prefer the more serious Running Times, (1) whose very title bears the mark of its readers' obsession with the stopwatch.