Quenton Cassidy is not actually a real person, but the hero of John L. Parker novel Once a Runner, a cult object among serious distance runners. Since its publication in 1978, Once a Runner has purportedly sold more than 100,000 copies and spawned a sequel. Yet Parker sold the last of his original self-published editions in 2004 from the trunk of his car. Demand has never subsided. According to Bookfinder, the Google of dead books, the novel has been the most-searched-for out-of-print book in the past two years.

The story depicts the world of running in a way that no non-runner could possibly relate to. It is written for runners and to keep light joggers and couch potatoes out. I, resembling more the latter found fascinating moments where I think I almost “got it” to others where I couldn’t quite figure out why someone would want to do it or write about it. The overwhelming opinion is that this book nails the running life like no other novel ever has.

“He was stronger than they were; he wanted them to know it, but not to dwell on it. There is time, he would tell them; time and time and time. He wanted to impart some of the truths Bruce Denton had taught him that you don’t become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many days, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials. How could he make them understand?”

Quenton Cassidy is an undergraduate miler at the Southeastern University in Florida. He spends most of his time training with the cross country team and with Bruce Denton, an Olympic gold-medalist distance runner who lives nearby. The free-spirited runners are depicted as a liberal movement against the football establishment and a prejudiced university president. For dubious reasons that include Quenton’s authoring of a petition protesting a dress code, he is suspended from intercollegiate competition, prompting him to leave school altogether and move, alone, to a cabin in the woods to train full time. There he trains for a race, from which he has been banned, at the university against, the world-champion miler from New Zealand.

“Running to him was real, the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”

Parker captures how it feels during a tough workout where a random word or phrase will materialize in your mind and be turned over and played with like “seals with a beach ball”; how as you wander around a track meet you feel as though your personal record is the dominant fact of your life (”This gentleman here, perhaps you’d like to meet him, is 27:42″); how after a race your spine feels as though it’s “made of bamboo.”

This being a sports novel, there is a Big Race at the end where everything is on the line. But the book’s true climax comes during one of Quenton’s workouts in preparation for the race. In this interval session, he runs 60 quarter-miles with Denton who then forces him to run the final 20 alone: “I know you can do this thing because I once did it myself,” Denton tells him. “When it was over I knew some very important things.” It is after the workout, and not the race, that Quenton achieves true growth of self-knowledge. “I know,” Quenton gasps afterward. “But it is a very hard thing to have to know.”

GENRE: Realistic Fiction