Contemporary Authors

• The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion Crown (New York, NY), 2017

1. The Long Run : a memoir of loss and life in motion LCCN 2016040255 Type of material Book Personal name Menzies-Pike, Catriona, author. Main title The Long Run : a memoir of loss and life in motion / Catriona Menzies-Pike. Edition First American Edition. Published/Produced New York : Crown Publishers, [2016] Description 244 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781524759445 (hardcover) 9781524759452 (trade pbk.) CALL NUMBER GV1061.15.M47 A3 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• The Sydney Morning Herald - http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/catriona-menziespike-the-books-that-changed-me-20160311-gngpea.html

  Catriona Menzies-Pike: books that changed me

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  Catriona Menzies-Pike is a Sydney writer, editor and former academic. She is the editor of the Sydney Review of Books and holds a doctorate in English literature. Her new book The Long Run (Affirm) is about women and running. In 2007 she ran her first half-marathon and she's been running ever since.

  The Magic Pudding

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  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/catriona-menziespike-the-books-that-changed-me-20160311-gngpea.html
  Author Catriona Menzies-Pike was inspired by Jane Austen – and The Magic Pudding.
  Author Catriona Menzies-Pike was inspired by Jane Austen – and The Magic Pudding.
  Norman Lindsay

  The hardcover Angus & Robertson edition of The Magic Pudding that I was given as a small and bookish child still sits on my shelves. Then, as now, I was fascinated by the pudding: cantankerous of temperament, wondrously self-replenishing, and "always anxious to be eaten". As for model travellers, I continue to take inspiration from the example of the merry Bunyip Bluegum, who strolled off to see the world unburdened by an itinerary.

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  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/catriona-menziespike-the-books-that-changed-me-20160311-gngpea.html
  The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike
  The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike
  Pride and Prejudice

  Jane Austen

  Persuasion might be my favourite novel by Jane Austen, but P&P was my first, and I read it under the guidance of a brilliant and beloved high school English teacher (hi, Mr Hanly). As the class picked a path through Austen's delicious ironies, I was initiated into the pleasures and possibilities of critical reading, which, two decades later, haven't dimmed.

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  Nightwood

  Djuna Barnes

  If ever I'm asked to name my favourite novel – impossible question, impossible category – I point to Nightwood, because when I first read it as an undergraduate, it epitomised what I then thought literature should be: a gorgeous, slippery, shadowy, carnal dream of the night. Austen was for schoolgirls: here was la via bohème on the Left Bank. So I moved to Paris to see what Barnes and her cohort had left behind.

  Carpentaria

  Alexis Wright

  Bunyip Bluegum wasn't the only literary explorer of the Australian interior who caught my attention. If I'd compiled this list 10 years ago, Voss might have headed it, but the epic dimensions of the rambunctious, surreal Carpentaria make Patrick White's imagination of the Australian landscape feel somehow limited. An extraordinary, capacious book, Carpentaria transformed my sense of the stories that can be told about this country.

QUOE:
authentic account of surviving devastating loss through the art of running.

11/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Menzies-Pike , Catriona: THE LONG RUN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Menzies-Pike , Catriona THE LONG RUN Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 5, 23 ISBN: 978-1-5247-5944-5
A memoir of running, endurance, and overcoming grief.When Sydney Review of Books editor Menzies-Pike's parents
were killed in a plane crash, she didn't know how to handle her grief. At age 20, she was suddenly faced with being the
oldest in the family, in charge of her siblings and the estate, but all she wanted to do was run away from the
responsibilities. It took 10 years, time spent in school, traveling, and making bad decisions, before the author laced up
her shoes and started running on a treadmill to figure out the next phase of her life. In this honest, funny, and moving
memoir, which also serves as a meditation on the place of women in the running world, Menzies-Pike reveals how she
worked through her fears and found her own rhythm amid the clamor of running long-distance races. Beginning with a
half-marathon wasn't easy, but the author explains how she navigated the training one run at a time and gradually
found the ability to run outside, ignoring the catcalls and many fears about being attacked, slipping, or being too tired
to get back home. Interspersed with her personal reflections is an interesting history of the female pioneers who first
entered the sport of running, of how they overcame the stigmas of their time and gradually forced competitions to
accept them in races, which in turn provided a gateway for product development of shoes, sports bras, and clothing for
female athletes. For anyone contemplating running a half or full marathon, the author's thoughts on the physical toll
these types of runs can take on a body, as well as the joy she experienced after successfully completing them, are
highly useful. An authentic account of surviving devastating loss through the art of running.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Menzies-Pike , Catriona: THE LONG RUN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487668439&it=r&asid=de6580ad553f3404ac9da7a07535adc0.
Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668439
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QUOTE:
bravely shares
her most vulnerable moments, struggles, and victories as she takes her first steps--crawling, then walking, then
running--into her new life.
The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in
Motion
Glendy X. Mattalia
Booklist.
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion.
By Catriona Menzies-Pike.
May 2017. 256p. Crown, $26 (9781524759445). 796.4.
Sydney Review of Books editor Menzies-Pike's first book is an interesting look at the sport of long-distance running
and women's place in it. Through historical anecdotes, including the story of the first known woman to attempt running
a marathon, in 1896, readers learn that there has long been and, infuriatingly so, always may be discrimination against
women in the sport. Blatantly prejudicial attitudes towards women who dared to run persisted well into the twentieth
century, with women finally starting to make significant strides toward equality in the sport. However, Menzies-Pike's
entertaining, eye-opening, feminist war cry against those who would begrudge a woman her running shoes is not the
most absorbing element in her book. Rather, her own story of loss, a fall from grace, and the sport that ultimately
empowered her to deal with her grief is the star of the show. With trademark Aussie wit, Menzies-Pike bravely shares
her most vulnerable moments, struggles, and victories as she takes her first steps--crawling, then walking, then
running--into her new life.--Glendy X. Mattalia
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mattalia, Glendy X. "The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 11. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491487826&it=r&asid=8fe1ee5f177ddba5a6f793b11b751c8c.
Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487826
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QUOTE:
important and fascinating record of women's running
experiences.
The Long Run: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Long Run: A Memoir
Catriona Menzies-Pike. Crown, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-5247-5944-5
Menzies-Pike's engaging book braids together feminist and literary theory, cultural criticism, history, and a moving
personal narrative that explores the ways in which physical movement can lead to transcendence in the face of tragedy.
After her parents' plane crash immobilizes her with grief, Menzies-Pike, editor of the Sydney Review of Books, returns
home from wandering the world to run on a treadmill. As she trains for her first race, she recounts the challenges early
female runners faced. Violet Percy ran a marathon (and set a record) in short heels at a time when women were told
running would imperil their fertility. In the 1960s, "women in the United States were forbidden from racing any
distance over a mile and a half." Men tried to drag early female Boston Marathon runners off the course. Ultimately,
the narrative is one of reserved success. Women's running has gained wider acceptance, though some women worry
about running alone at night, and running remains largely a sport of the privileged. The frequent transitions between
memoir and criticism can be jarring, but this is still an important and fascinating record of women's running
experiences. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Long Run: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714210&it=r&asid=08e9bde45adfce431eabf9e4241ca399.
Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714210

"Menzies-Pike , Catriona: THE LONG RUN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487668439&it=r. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Mattalia, Glendy X. "The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 11. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491487826&it=r. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. "The Long Run: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714210&it=r. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

• The Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/the-long-run-catriona-menzies-pike-review/529863/
  Word count: 1411

  QUOTE:
  elegant and erudite
  gorgeously written and extremely moving.
  Running Through the Pain
  In The Long Run, Catriona Menzies-Pike delves into the history of women’s marathoning while considering the sport’s impact on her own life after unimaginable loss.

  Grete Waitz crosses the finish line of the L'Eggs Mini Marathon in Central Park on June 2, 1979Associated Press
  SOPHIE GILBERT JUN 12, 2017 CULTURE
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  Want to receive exclusive insights from The Atlantic—while supporting a sustainable future for independent journalism? Join our new membership program, The Masthead.
  In 1998, when Catriona Menzies-Pike was 20 years old, both her parents were killed in a plane crash. “It could be worse, I reminded myself,” she writes in her new book, The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion, “but actually, this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.” In retrospect, she notes, the platitudes she heard were the same kinds of things people tell long-distance runners: “Just keep going. It will all be over soon. You’ll get there.”

  This framing of grief as an endurance sport underpins The Long Run, which is an elegant and erudite jumble of different things. The author’s own experiences of learning to love running almost by accident are interspersed with sections of cultural criticism, and a surprising history of women’s running as a sport. Menzies-Pike quotes everyone from Boccaccio to Baudrillard while analyzing the fraught record of women participating in an event that was long considered dangerous and harmful to fertility. But the most resonant parts of her narrative deal with her own personal loss, and how tightly it becomes interwoven with her experiences as a runner.

  RELATED STORY

  Why Writers Run

  Menzies-Pike, the editor of the Sydney Review of Books, joins a well-documented list of running’s literary defenders. Joyce Carol Oates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Don DeLillo have all written about the sport. In his 2009 book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the Japanese author Haruki Murakami contemplates the activity alongside his lifelong habit of writing, and how the two endeavors relate to and support one another. As Menzies-Pike notes, “Stories about running are often like this, in that they’re about something else. They are tales of shape shifting, of the desire to shed one skin and step into another.”

  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.”

  * * *

  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.

  Menzies-Pike is interested in these women but she doesn’t seem to feel a particular kinship with them. Running, for her, is a personal affair, she explains, and the running community’s obsession with speedwork and intervals and accoutrements often leaves her cold. She’s particularly biting on the subject of women’s races—many of which, she argues, have become commercialized and marketed almost to the point of meaninglessness. The first chapter features her recounting an event in Sydney titled She Runs, which she notes is festooned with pink: “magenta, fluorescent pink, cutie-pie baby pink, stripper pink, and every shade of princess pink that’s ever tinted a plastic hairclip.”

  If it’s occasionally contrarian in its commentary, The Long Run is fascinating in its consideration of history. Menzies-Pike summarizes the origins of recreational jogging in the 1970s, which coincided with a new understanding that exercise was a means of self-preservation. She touches on cultural portrayals of women who run, from Ovid’s Daphne to House of Cards’s Claire Underwood. Running has a particular significance for women, she argues, because so often they need to escape, and “running for pleasure can be a safe simulation of these desperate flights,” she writes. She considers the TV trope of the jogger who happens upon a crime scene, and laments how running exposes women both to danger and to the gaze of onlookers. “It’s never neutral for women to run,” she states.

  In her detailed analysis, Menzies-Pike sometimes seems intent on picking holes in an activity that gives her so much fulfillment. But in the second half of the book, she loses herself in the simple pleasure of running, recounting marathon training and long runs and the first time she ran 26.2 miles. “Most of the time I didn’t worry whether I was refashioning patriarchal history or not,” she acknowledges. “I was just too tired.” Her descriptions of her marathon experiences, and of how she sensed her parents in a hallucination of dehydration and fatigue, are gorgeously written and extremely moving. The day after her first marathon, more than anything, she’s elated, feeling both acute pain and a newfound sense of potential.

  It’s here that The Long Run is at its most insightful, as Menzies-Pike weighs everything she’s experienced and concludes artfully what running has come to mean to her. “If there’s any analogy to be drawn between marathon running and enduring grief,” she deduces, “it shouldn’t turn on one great exhausted clash of will against circumstance. It should accommodate a million training runs, aches and doubts, stops and starts, setbacks, tiny advances, odd connections, and, ultimately, not triumph, but joy and renewal.”

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sophie Gilbert
  SOPHIE GILBERT is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.

• Kill Your Darlings
  https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/2016/04/womens-movement/
  Word count: 942

  The Women’s Movement: Catriona Menzies-Pike’s The Long Run
  BY STEPHANIE CONVERY
  27TH APR, 2016

  9781925344479
  I have always maintained that talking about running is only interesting to other people who run. It is perhaps fortunate, then, that there are so many of us to vivify the topic. About 8 per cent of Australians over the age of fifteen run for recreation or fitness, and that number has been steadily increasing over the last decade.

  Still, attempting to talk about running to people who don’t do it is, at least in my experience, a sure-fire way to kill an otherwise lively conversation. This is at least partly because running is a solitary pursuit: it lacks the team-bonding environment of, say, football or cricket; there is no obvious opponent to quash as in combat sports; there is none of the immediate and repeated satisfaction of scoring a goal or a perfectly-timed point. Unless one is at the elite end of the scale, competition in running is more likely to be self-generated: a faster time on this route; a longer distance than before; a new event in which to participate.

  Moreover, distance running establishes the conditions for long hours of inescapable introspection and – let’s be honest – boredom. The epiphanies experienced on a long-haul slog can be transformative, but they are also deeply personal. They are difficult to relate in a way that feels different, that feels fresh – that enables them to stand apart from the fitspo clichés and gym-bro rhetoric that dominate so much public discussion about sport and physical activity.

  This intimacy and introspection is perhaps part of the reason why running and writing have such a close relationship. Released this month, Catriona Menzies-Pike’s The Long Run is one of the more recent additions to the library of literary books about running. The current editor of the Sydney Review of Books and a long-time literature nerd, Menzies-Pike admits she was hardly the most obvious candidate to write a running memoir. ‘I find it hard to call myself a runner without quickly adding a few qualifications,’ she explains, noting particularly the fact that she does not run very fast. ‘What I really am is a reader.’

  Her contribution to the genre, however, is thankfully free of the kind of extended humblebrag that characterises, say, Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It also gives wide berth to the tabloid tenor of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run (an investigation into the endurance capabilities of the Tarahumara), and studiously avoids the sanctimonious self-help platitudes of any of a dozen ‘running for women’ books to be found in the ‘health and fitness’ section of Dymocks. It preaches neither meditation nor discipline, and does not make patronising assumptions of the reader.

  The Long Run is as much a tribute to the women who push against cultural expectations as it is to running itself.
  Rather, The Long Run is an intimate reflection on the relationship between physical activity and the internal lives of women. That these elements have both been shaped and constrained by social and productive forces is not an afterthought; in some ways, The Long Run is as much a tribute to the women who push against cultural expectations as it is to running itself. The reasons why women don’t run are just as telling as why they do, and in a patriarchal culture, women run from (or for) men. For a woman to run for the sheer joy of movement – invisible, independent – is, in its own way, an act of defiance.

  The women’s movement, political, is inextricable from women’s movement, physical, and Menzies-Pike traverses this terrain carefully, drawing on her experience of grief and her conceptions of her own identity before and after she lost her parents unexpectedly at the age of twenty to reflect on what it means to be female and to move in such a way. It is an unashamedly literary text, and history and the classics take centre stage to gently make an argument about the significance of being an active woman.

  The women’s movement, political, is inextricable from women’s movement, physical.
  For all that, however, it’s hard to leave the book without feeling that something is wanting. A stronger narrative arc, or a more strident argument about the socio-political forces that still coerce women into physical inertia. These elements are present, but they feel muted, and there are hints throughout that while the author herself has a deeper knowledge of the topics at hand, we are only treated to the very top layer. Skating over these aspects allows the personal narrative to breathe, but I admit I found the balance frustrating.

  Still, it is the quiet refusal of its author to fit into the shoes of the more conventional jock that gives The Long Run its personality, and there is a politics to Menzies-Pike’s sustained rejection of this category. There is value in movement for its own sake, even for the least athletic and coordinated of us. Rather than offering a series of false promises about a potential new ‘you’, here, instead, is an introduction to the history of female activity, and the story of someone who became stronger for having found her way into the practice. That can only be a good thing.

  The Long Run is available now through Readings.

  End

  Stephanie Convery is the deputy editor of Overland and a Melbourne-based writer.

• Readings
  https://www.readings.com.au/review/the-long-run-by-catriona-menzies-pike
  Word count: 392

  The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike
  Reviewed by Hilary Simmons
  1 MAR 2016
  Catriona Menzies-Pike came late to running. Until she turned 30, she was known to friends and family as the person ‘least likely to run around the block’; a gin-addled bookworm who rolled her eyes at runners prancing through the park. There was no great, revelatory moment in which she realised that running could be an emotional refuge as well as a physical act. She simply started running on a treadmill in a grimy Kings Cross gym after arbitrarily announcing to her family that she would someday run a marathon. Her description of that first visit introduces the first of many interesting facts: did you know the treadmill was actually invented to punish inmates in 19th-century prisons? Menzies-Pike, who is editor of the Sydney Review of Books, soon shirks the gym for leafy streets and parks, but keeps running. She becomes fascinated by the connection between running and feminism, and the stories of female long-distance runners in history.

  If you’ve never thought of running as being culturally significant for women, consider this: until 1984, women were banned from entering the Olympic marathon. Up until very recently, the most common historical depictions of women running were of women running from danger or disgrace. Menzies-Pike explores the Western world’s uneasiness with women running through their representation in books, film and art. She derides the ‘pinkification’ of women’s-only running events and skewers TV tropes like ‘Joggers Find Death’ for perpetuating the irrational sense that women look or become vulnerable when they run.

  There is a personal journey here, too. Despite her insistence that she has nothing coherent to say about her parents’ premature death, Menzies-Pike is eloquent and articulate when writing about grief. She posits that movement can simultaneously be a metaphor and an action; that running can transform the body into a medium of perception.

  There is a lot of literature on running already around – Murakami’s memoir springs to mind – but none of it speaks specifically to, and of, women’s experience in what was up until the 1960s an exclusively male domain. This is a deftly researched and deeply satisfying book, which ultimately covers a great deal of ground.

  Hilary Simmons works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.

• Salon
  https://www.salon.com/2017/05/19/the-long-run-a-memoir-of-loss-and-life-in-motion-catriona-menzies-pike/
  Word count: 2478

  QUOTE:
  insightful and intimate
  I also hope that the book is read as an endorsement of the stories that don’t so often get told about running and about recovery — and those are stories about slowness, about failure, about awkwardness, about self-consciousness. I love running and I’m fascinated by running culture, but there’s a triumphalism that is the dominant mode. I think that’s really intimidating, particularly for a lot of women. I hope the book emboldens people who are intimidated by that triumphalism, that it makes a space for thinking about aspects of running that aren’t just about speed and huge achievements, that allow for the real joy of running to come to the fore.
  “The Long Run”: An author processes grief and feminism through running
  Catriona Menzies-Pike dives deep into the death of her parents and the history of women in motion in her new memoir

  8
  MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
  05.19.2017•3:58 PM •0 COMMENTS
  A woman in motion is a powerful thing. Perhaps that's why her ability to go forward independently is always subject to concern and criticism. She walks down the street to a chorus of catcalls. She drives down the road, knowing that in other countries that right is restricted. And she runs, her sneakered feet treading a path generations of other women fought for her to pound.
  Australian writer Catriona Menzies-Pike is an unlikely marathoner. Yet in her insightful and intimate new book "The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion," she traces her own evolution as a dedicated — if not especially athletic — runner who came to the sport during the long grieving of her parents' untimely death. She also uses this journey into the self to explore the hidden history of women as runners — the decades of concern trolling over their health and safety, the outright opposition to a pursuit so ostensibly unladylike.
  Salon spoke recently to Menzies-Pike about women, endurance and the secret history of women in running.
  I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which running has transformed from being thought of as a very masculine pursuit to being considered really much more feminine. It's so much about the way that women’s mobility has been hampered historically and how the notion of women being able to literally move freely has been so repressed.
  Yeah, I started running in Sydney. It’s a city full of women runners, but 30 years ago that wouldn’t have been the case. There are also the places around the world that you can visit where it’s not possible for women to go out running in the way that you do in the park across the road from your home, or the way that I do.
  There’s a flashback scene early on in "The Handmaid’s Tale" of Offred and her friend just running freely through the street. They’ve got their headphones in but you can see people glaring at them. I’ve had experiences running through New York City where I’ve been training, and if you’re running in the early morning and you’re in your shorts and you’re in a sports bra, the sense of judgment and danger is so real. In the park where I run, a runner was murdered and the crime’s never been solved. It makes me think of all the danger to women as well as this empowerment that we have when women run en masse. There’s a freedom we don’t have as much when we run as individuals.
  I think you’re right. There are these feelings of being more conspicuous, especially if you’re running alone. For some women that’s not a big deal, but I’ve spoken to so many women runners who say, “I get uncomfortable running after dark in new places.” I don’t think it’s anything any woman runner wouldn’t have at one point asked herself -- questions about safety and visibility in public spaces. How do you square that up against this tremendous feeling of physical power? Being fit and being fit enough to run for an hour is a really amazing sensation. The feeling of vulnerability that trails a lot of women runners is a strange companion to that feeling of great independence and mobility.

  So tell me a little about the choice for you to write a book that was really about loss and grief and your personal experience, as well as one that really traces that narrative of women as runners.
  Certainly the thing that I wanted to write about was the amazing history of women’s long-distance running. I came to running quite late and it’s really hard for me to explain how unlikely it was that I would actually keep running when I started. I’m a really, really clumsy runner still. I just had this mystical idea in my head about what it might feel like to run for hours.
  I started running and completely loved it. I avoided any sporting history because, for 30 years, I just did not want to know anything about anything to do with sports. I started to encounter these little snippets about really famous women athletes like Kathrine Switzer and tune into the fact that the women’s marathon wasn’t run in the Olympics until 1984. This seemed to me like the scaffolding for really extraordinary feminist history. Not just because of the women who populated it, but because of the constant theme of the exclusion, because of this idea that bodies moving around in public is such a charged political topic. I just kept reading and I kept finding all this interesting stuff and I thought, “My God, this is amazing and no one’s really written about it.” In fact, the further back you go, the records become really threadbare. It’s as if officials bent over backwards not to record any data about these really brave women who defied convention to go out and do this thing that was thought at best unladylike and at worst relatively dangerous.
  I started putting together some ideas about this; I started also thinking about representations of women running in film and in literature and public culture. I started to think about why I had had this antipathy to running and to think about women being scared about running in public or kind of awkward in their bodies. I was sort of hoping that I might write a book that encompassed some of the things that I felt when I started running, which was extremely self-conscious, extremely awkward, still kind of a bit repelled by the sort of rapid goal-setting of it all. I just kept circling closer and closer to the fact that that I was a really unlikely convert to marathon running, having been this kind of bookish, cocktail-drinking person. But it had really introduced big changes in my life and had set this process of grief which I’d been carrying around really heavily into motion and as I started to reflect on that and get closer to that material I realized that I needed to write about that as well. The book I wound up writing really does situate my own experiences as a runner in line with this kind of bigger set of stories about women and running, and it felt like the right path to tread.
  My parents died when I was quite young and my 20s were really, really shaped by that loss and ending in a really intense denial of that horrible reality. Then suddenly, you know, you run for two hours and these emotions start to rise from places that have stayed dormant for a long time. You’re running and you’re an hour away from home, and the only thing you can do is just kind of keep going with that. For me the actual embodied experience of running was such a powerful conduit to recovery and moving forward with that, rather than pushing it away. When you’re that tired, you just have to confront some of the realities in your life -- and that’s a great thing. Then you have a great endorphin kick afterwards and you eat a bowl of fruit and feel great.
  What I’ve seen in just the past few years that I’ve been a runner is change in the way that running has become so much more feminized. When you do a half marathon, the number of women is extraordinary.
  It suggests that the rise in the number of runners worldwide is really driven by more women running. Even in the time that I’ve been a runner I think there’s been a real expansion. There's a whole lot of different kinds of models for women runners -- not only athletes who train really, really hard and are absolutely committed but I think there’s a lot more space for slower runners. Groups for women who want to run together who are running to spend time with other women, who feel more comfortable running in groups than by themselves. I think the ways in which you can present yourself to the world as a woman runner have become much more numerous.
  I was trying to figure out what the tipping point was, and I was wondering if it was when Oprah did the Chicago marathon and it was such a high-profile thing that this woman who was not 25, who was not skinny, who was not your typical marathon runner, ran a marathon. Then when Oprah does it, running is the new book club.
  When someone who is a mother or older or just a woman who hasn’t spent her life devoted to training says, “I’m going to run a marathon and see if I can do it," and they do it, there’s something really, really stirring and kind of equalizing about that. You might be Oprah, but it’s still a really long way to run and I think you can identify with that in an important way. I do think those kinds of stories are gripping, stirring.
  Running is also one of the easiest things you can possibly do. All you really need is a pair of sneakers and a pair of feet or equivalent to get out there and do it. It’s not like, “How am I ever going to become a tennis player?” “How am I ever going to be a saxophone player?” If you want to run, you actually can figure out a way to do that.
  That’s why I’m so amazed that this is a really, really recent phenomenon. Writing the book made me think about my mother. When she was in her twenties, women weren’t going to say, “Ah, I’m going to run a 10-kilometer run this summer.”
  Those runners who were making headlines in the late ’60s, that’s really not that long ago and there were outliers. There were people who were outraged that these young women were forcing their way into these distance events. They thought it was incredibly reckless and dangerous. And then it could go, in just over a generation, from this being for renegades to being something that all sorts of people do. Everyone knows someone who's run a marathon or run an ultra-marathon or is starting to train for a half marathon. It’s an incredible shift, and I think one that’s worth celebrating. But as we celebrate, we should think about why did it take so long for the Olympic women’s marathon to be run? In that year it wasn’t just the marathon that was closed to women but also the 10,000 meters and it was closed on this idea that it just wasn’t quite right for women. It was dangerous for women to run that distance. Now that sounds absolutely ludicrous.
  What do you think it is about that? Do you think it really was a misguided concern for women’s physical well-being or is there something really, really political about a woman running?
  I think that late in the 20th century, you go [away] from these claims about women’s health being used. If you look in the 19th and early 20th century, at the way people talked about women athletes generally and women running particularly, yes there’s a concern that they might injure themselves. Really, what people had to say was that these women are unladylike, it’s indecorous. It’s a very middle-class concern with modesty. I think it has to do with breasts, I think it has to do with sweat and movement. There are just numerous examples of commentators, sports officials, public figures decrying women.
  When you’re running for longer, the thing that makes it challenging, aside from the physical aspect, is that part where it’s, “Oh God I’m going to have to get into my head for so long.” You can’t run a marathon and not go into some dark places in your brain.
  Yeah, I’ve done some half marathons and I always found myself having these major-league emotions. At first I thought it must just be some strange thing that’s happening to me, but in fact it’s a really regular occurrence. You run for two hours, things come up and you know? It’s quite therapeutic in its own way.
  What do you hope this book tells people about women, particularly as runners and our history in this unusual pursuit?
  I believe that it brings that neglected history to people’s attention in the first place because I think those women athletes deserve to be celebrated. I hope it makes people reflect about the way in which we are the heirs to that history and the way things can change really quickly and how we experience our everyday lives.
  I also hope that the book is read as an endorsement of the stories that don’t so often get told about running and about recovery — and those are stories about slowness, about failure, about awkwardness, about self-consciousness. I love running and I’m fascinated by running culture, but there’s a triumphalism that is the dominant mode. I think that’s really intimidating, particularly for a lot of women. I hope the book emboldens people who are intimidated by that triumphalism, that it makes a space for thinking about aspects of running that aren’t just about speed and huge achievements, that allow for the real joy of running to come to the fore.

• Australian Book Review
  https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2016/april/3144-gillian-dooley-reviews-the-long-run-by-catriona-menzies-pike
  Word count: 699

  Australian Book Review

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  Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Long Run' by Catriona Menzies-Pike
  font sizedecrease font sizeincrease font sizePrintEmailCommentGILLIAN DOOLEYPublished in April 2016, no. 380
  Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Long Run' by Catriona Menzies-Pike
  THE LONG RUN
  by Catriona Menzies-Pike
  Affirm Press $29.99 pb, 268 pp, 9781925344479
  Gillian Dooley
  Gillian Dooley
  Gillian Dooley is Publishing Support Librarian and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University. Her publications
  ...
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  When I heard that there was a new book out on why women run, I assumed I would be reading about women fleeing domestic horrors rather than running marathons. Such a reaction might make Catriona Menzies-Pike sigh with frustration, and the cultural myopia which gave rise to my unthinking assumption is one of the reasons she wrote this book. 'I'd read a lot of books about running, but I struggled to recognise myself in any of them.'

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  Published in April 2016, no. 380

  More in this issue:
  « Richard Freadman reviews 'On Life-Writing' edited by Zachary Leader Alex Cothren reviews 'Sing Fox to Me' by Sarah Kanake » Tagged under Gillian DoyleCatriona MenziesPikeMemoirBiography and Memoirs
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