Less frequently dissected, though, is how often people turn to running as a salve for grief, to impose order on chaos. Ida Keeling, a 102-year-old runner from Harlem who’s the current record-holder for American women aged 95 to 99 in the 60-meter dash, began running in her 60s after both her sons were murdered. Fauja Singh, widely considered to be the world’s oldest marathoner, also started running after the death of his wife, son, and daughter. “It’s my guess that the structure of training programs is what leads so many avowed non-runners to attempt marathons when their lives fall apart,” Menzies-Pike writes.

In her case, it wasn’t an immediate impulse at all. In her 20s, Menzies-Pike recalls, she did all the things that people orphaned far too early do: She buried herself in work, “got wrecked as often as I could,” and fled to countries on the opposite side of the world. At that time, she notes, “running would have seemed too literal a response. All I wanted to do was run away from my life.” It wasn’t until she was 30, returning to Sydney after a long period of travel, that she first set foot on a treadmill, so often the gateway drug for runners. “I was used to the sensory world yielding pain and fatigue,” she writes. “Now I was aware of my limbs and of my lungs, of the sweat dripping down my neck and the thudding rhythm of my feet.”

What Menzies-Pike only obliquely alludes to, but what many runners have likely found, is that running can be a relatively healthy and culturally sanctioned form of self-harm. In the midst of emotional pain that feels overwhelming, there’s something powerful about feeling physical pain instead—the kind that can be managed and identified and remedied. Describing one particularly arduous training regime, Menzies-Pike writes, “The aftermath of loss is exhausting, repetitious, and often very, very dull—and so is training for a marathon. But endurance can help turn elusive sorrows into something tangible, like aching muscles and blisters. Such pain can be easily described.”

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How many women have turned to running to obliterate the shadow of something else? It’s hard to say, because, as The Long Run explores, the history of women running is very poorly documented, and the history of women running for pleasure—toward something, as opposed to away from it—is even less so. It wasn’t until 1984 that a women’s marathon was included in the Olympic Games, and prior to 1960 the Games included no race for women longer than 800 meters. There were plenty of women who crashed men’s races, though, as Menzies-Pike details: Violet Piercy, who ran a marathon course in England from Windsor Castle to Stamford Bridge in 1926. Merry Lepper, who hid in the bushes at the start of the 1963 Western Hemisphere Marathon before joining the course. Kathrine Switzer, who became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as a numbered entry in 1967 after registering under her gender-neutral initials.