Roger Robinson’s new book rewrites running’s most iconic and important stories. With a combination of vivid story-telling and original historical research, Roger shows why he is widely praised as the world’s most expert and compelling writer on running.
Ahead of this weekend’s London Marathon, Roger talks to us about Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told.
Q Why did you write this new book, Roger?
A I love well-told stories. I love true history. I love running. Put those three together and you get this book. Running is so basic to human life, it’s no surprise that there are so many running stories. Millions of people who identify themselves in part as runners find inspiration from learning that their own story is part of a long tradition of stories. They deserve to have the stories told well, and told right.
Q By “told right” you mean you have challenged some accepted versions?
A Every book or speech on the marathon begins with a hazy tenth-hand version of Pheidippides dropping dead. He didn’t. He didn’t even run to Athens. That variant was invented six hundred years later. You know the others – the marathon distance happened because the royal children wanted to watch the start from their nursery in Windsor Castle; Arthur Conan Doyle helped support Dorando Pietri to the finish in 1908; all the women in the first Olympic 800 metres collapsed from exhaustion. All wrong, or quarter-truth, or with the last one, a disgraceful litany of lies by the world’s male journalists. I did the work to find out what really happened. If I could not establish that for sure, I lay out the evidence so readers can decide what they choose to believe.
Q You must have spent years in dusty libraries.
A Yes, and that can bring exciting moments of discovery. I’m a literary scholar as well as running writer. The cross-country chapter revealed totally new material about the life and character of the writer Samuel Butler. The footmen race is important for novelist Daniel Defoe as well as the history of journalism and the history of running. But research for a running book also requires doing some running. One break-through came after I spent days running in the countryside around Shrewsbury in England looking for a wet ditch. Another investigation involved running around Central Park in New York carrying a five-foot long tree branch. (I chose Central Park because it’s full of other nut-cases.) In chapter after chapter, I draw on my lifetime insights into running, especially pace-judgment on the track or road. That leads to new interpretations of the stories of Spiridon Louis, Sohn Kee Chung, Billy Mills, or Joan Benoit. (Sohn was a Korean who won the 1936 Olympic marathon for Japan – another story that I researched and told carefully.)
Q The book goes from ancient Greece to Allison Roe and Joan Benoit. How tough was it doing original work throughout so many different periods of time?
A It’s in character. As a literary scholar, I never wanted to be “the Thomas Hardy man” or the “Katherine Mansfield expert.” I did important work on Hardy and Mansfield, and Dickens, Stevenson, and many others, but my writing and teaching were enriched by the range of my interests. Same now. One of my best contributions as a running writer is my internationalism. I’m never content to write only about local matters. I have lived in three countries, I know their running histories from the inside, and this book reflects that insight. Not many writers could be personal friends with the English Roger Bannister, with Kiwi Allison Roe, and with American Kathrine Switzer. (Well, full disclosure, Kathrine and I have been married for 35 years so that’s a very personal friendship, and a priceless source of information about women’s running.)
Q You don’t tell her story in this book.
A I do, in fact, briefly, as part of a seminal history of women’s running that is prelude to the chapter about Joan Benoit Samuelson in the first women’s Olympic marathon. But I explain in the book’s Introduction that one principle behind my choices was that I had to be able to add something new to the story. I could do that even with well-known stories like the Berlin Olympics or the Four-Minute Mile, but Kathrine has told her own story fully and well, and a movie is on the way. I dedicated the book to her instead.
Q A last word? Is there anything in the book specially important to you as a person?
A It’s not only about great and famous runners. One reviewer astutely commented that I have a special sympathy for the outsiders, the unprivileged, the forgotten, the back of the packers, and those who have been left out by history. Two of my favourite chapters are about those. One is called “The Messengers,” and collects stories about all the running messengers who kept human communications alive throughout time, before the internet, great and important runners even though we know hardly any of their names. The other is about “Marathon Mania,” the craze for indoor marathons in 1908 to 1910, which the histories leave out because they have all been about the pure amateur sport, and the Marathon Mania runners were racing for prize money. That chapter has a great cast of colourful characters, and wonderful stories. Let me end with one of the greatest runners of all time who you probably have never heard of. He was a French waiter, and his name was Henri St Yves. I got inside information from his Canadian grandson. He ended up as a stunt flyer in the first wood and canvas biplanes. To enjoy his story, read the book.
Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told is available now through all good bookstores and online retailers.
