Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Footnotes
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://psychojography.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/staff/creganreid.html * https://us.macmillan.com/author/vybarrcreganreid/ * https://psychojography.com/about/ * https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/running-books-jogging-health-science/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nb2010030258
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nb2010030258
HEADING: Cregan-Reid, Vybarr
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100 1_ |a Cregan-Reid, Vybarr
400 1_ |a Reid, Vybarr Cregan-
670 __ |a New woman fiction, 1881-1899, 2010: |b t.p. (Vybarr Cregan-Reid)
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, U.K., reader in Engish and environmental humantities.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online media, including Literary Review; Washington Post;Telegraph; Guardian; Big Issue; Wanderlust; Independent; I News; New Zealand Herald; and World Economic Forum.
SIDELIGHTS
A lecturer in English and environmental humanities at the University of Kent, Vybarr Cregan-Reid has written for both academic and general audiences. His first book, Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative, and the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture examines the cultural impact of the 1872 discovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Mesopotamia thought to be the world’s earliest surviving major work of literature. The clay tablets containing the epic poem were discovered by Iraqi scholar Hormuzd Rassam, and as Cregan-Reid argues in the book, profoundly influenced Victorian England’s attitudes toward landscape, history, and narrative.
In Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human, Cregan-Reid explains how running is a natural and beneficial human activity. He also shares his own experiences as a runner. Noting that many people dislike running or complain of running-related injuries, the author says that this happens because people are doing it wrong. Humans evolved to run, he says, but running has become problematic for many because of modern sedentary lifestyles. Not only has sitting for long periods affected musculature; the motivation to run has also changed. Ancient humans became runners in order to hunt and to survive. But in the modern world, people in developed societies are motivated mostly by the need to lose weight and increase fitness or by the wish to compete in sports. For many, running has become an unpleasant duty, writes Cregan-Reid, when it should be an uncomplicated and rewarding experience.
Running is “innate to who we are as a species,” the author told National Geographic interviewer Simon Worrall. Human beings evolved to stand and move upright, and this provides a good center of gravity while running. It also means that human bodies are exposed to significantly less midday sunlight than for most other mammals, making humans more efficient at cooling off–a distinct advantage for hunters. Though other mammals can sprint much faster than humans, humans perform better than any other animal at distance running. Not only can they cool themselves efficiently; they also benefit from the pain-numbing endorphins that running releases into the bloodstream. These advantages enabled early hunters to run for many hours or even days, if need be, to reach their prey.
Cregan-Reid is a strong advocate for barefoot running. He explains that he sustained repeated injuries in his early years as a runner, and that he learned the proper way of running after he took off his supportive running shoes. These shoes provide too much cushioning for the foot, he writes, and therefore enable bad running technique because the foot cannot feel what it is running on. The author also argues against the use of treadmills–which, he points out, had originally been inventive as a way of punishing prisoners sentenced to hard labor. Describing modern treadmills as akin to junk food, he nevertheless concedes that this technology should not be entirely dismissed if it encourages people to enjoy exercise.
Among the many physical and emotional benefits of running, Cregan-Reid emphasizes that it provides people with the opportunity to connect with the natural environment and is also a deeply relaxing and meditative experience. Alluding to authors such as Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Chekhov, and Coleridge, the author writes that running makes people smarter, more attentive, and more confident. Though he appreciates that running helps make him fit, Cregan-Reid writes that when he focuses on his times or his calories burned, his runs become much less relaxing and enjoyable. For Cregan-Reid, running is primarily a meditative experience.
It is also an experience that should be easily available to most people, he insists. It requires no special equipment, training, or space, and provides a much-needed respite from the increasing stresses of modern life. Observing that he saw runners everywhere in Boston but nowhere during a visit to Detroit, the author acknowledged to Worrall that some would-be runners face real obstacles, such as lack of time or safety concerns. “I want to be able to keep running as free and democratic as possible,” he stated in the interview.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Cregan-Reid, Vybarr, Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 1, 2017, review of Footnotes, p. 55.
ONLINE
National Geographic, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/ (March 28, 2018), Simon Worrall, review of Footnotes.
University of Kent WebSite, https://www.kent.ac.uk/ (March 28, 2018), Cregan-Reid faculty profile.
Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid
School of English - Reader in English and Environmental Humanities
v.cregan-reid@kent.ac.uk 01227 824185
AboutPublicationsTeachingResearch supervision
About
I am currently working on my third book, Primate Change: how the world we’ve made is remaking us, to be published September 2018. It is a wide-ranging study of the Anthropocene body, and how, as we have altered the environment, it has slowly been changing us inside and out.
I also wrote, Footnotes: How Running Makes us Human (published by Ebury, Penguin RH, and by Macmillan in the US), a study of running, meaning and modern life. My work has been published and translated by a range of media outlets including The Literary Review, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Big Issue, Wanderlust, The Independent, The I News, The New Zealand Herald, The World Economic Forum; and, I have read my work and been interviewed about it on the BBC a number of times, as well on several other national radio stations in Scotland, Ireland, the US and Canada, as well as on Sky news. I write most regularly for The Conversation and the Literary Review.
The kinds of research I am interested in are based around nineteenth-century literature (especially Hardy and Dickens), landscape, science, nature-writing and the body. My first book was a monograph, Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative and the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture, (published by Manchester University Press in 2013), it focuses on the discovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 and the tremendous influence that it exerted upon theories of geology, history, narrative and aesthetics in the Victorian period.
Contact Information
Address
Office: NC35 (Rutherford Extension)
School of English
Links
Blog
Twitter
Print Marked Items
Footnotes: How Running Makes Us
Human
Publishers Weekly.
264.18 (May 1, 2017): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human
Vybarr Cregan-Reid. St. Martin's/Dunne, $26.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-250-12724-2
In this offbeat but entertaining take on the fitness memoir, Cregan-Reid (Discovering-Gilgamesh) shares his
discovery of and love of running, occasionally adding intimate details from his personal life and frequently
from his runs. It's a mashup that's equal parts philosophy, neuroscience, history, and love note to the author's
exercise of choice. Cregan-Reid takes readers on a running tour, stopping off at Boston's Spaulding National
Running Center to see an Ironman Triathlete's running injuries being diagnosed, sharing a memorable run
through the South Harrow countryside, and finishing the London Marathon "almost by accident." A selfdescribed
"challenged school student," Cregan-Reid eventually went through a metamorphosis (largely
unexplained here) that took him to graduate school; he discovered running while working on his doctoral
thesis. Today the author is a professor and literary scholar. That explains why, in addition to finding
information here about running retraining or selecting the right shoe, readers will also find liberal literary
references to such writers as Austen, Chekhov, Coleridge, and Tolstoy. The book's greatest strength,
however, is in its explanation of running's benefits (running makes "you smarter," more attentive, and even
makes you feel "more attractive," according to the author) and in the author's mystical, Anglicism-sprinkled
descriptions of running. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 55. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491575351/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d29c1735.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491575351
A very loose canon
Philip Hensher
Spectator.
300.9264 (Feb. 25, 2006): p35+.
COPYRIGHT 2006 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
A very loose canon
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited by Peter Boxall
Cassell, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 960, ISBN 9781844034178
16 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655
Perhaps deliberately, this book has been designed to look as little like a conventional literary history as
possible. Rather, it is pretty well the same in appearance as those very nice books Taschen produce, surveys
of some surprisingly recherche materials. It borrows, too, in its inaccurate title (it's not about 'books' but
about novels, or almost entirely so) from a series of frankly unlovely travel books, listing the world's
'greatest hits'. Applying this notion to the history of the novel is not without its problems, and this book,
though in practice too ignorant and badly executed to be worth recommending to anyone, could not have
been made a success even if it had been written by more intelligent or knowledgeable writers.
The whole idea of the 'canon' has been much debated in recent years, to no very useful effect. If there ever
were an unarguable body of classic works of literature, it has long since dissolved in dozens of viable
possibilities. There is the effect of the rediscovery of several literatures overlooked at the time, or
unavailable to most readers. The excellence of 'women's fiction' before the war has been rediscovered,
thanks to Virago and the wonderful Persephone Press. Classic African and Indian writing now has a much
wider readership than it had on first appearance. Plenty of other previously minority interests have brought
themselves, belatedly, to our attention, and the impression is of a canon constantly reinventing itself.
Actually, the only canon which counts is our personal one, a series of negotiations between one's own,
perhaps whimsical taste, generally accepted Great Masterpieces of the World, and, to be honest, what can be
bought in bookshops. Prejudice, the marketplace, and other people's opinions produce as many lists as there
are readers. Mine includes Pendennis, which I like as much as everyone else, but also novels like Ada
Leverson's which I don't much care whether anyone else enjoys or not.
All the same, this list could be a little less terrible. It is so amazing a series of obvious omissions, weird
inclusions and horrid middle-aged attempts at grooviness that you wonder who on earth it is intended for.
For a start, it is grotesquely weighted towards modem literature. If you believe these people, almost a fifth
of the novels worth reading in the world were written in the last 20 years, and the vast majority of such
books in the last 100. The list includes such obviously dead books as Carl Sagan's Contact, Joyce Carol
Oates's Blonde, Don De Lillo's total stinker The Body Artist, Kazuo Ishiguro's plank-like Never Let Me Go
and Salman Rushdie's Fury, as well as the collected works, or so it seems, of John Banville.
On the other hand, going back a little further in time, the list has skipped some very obvious highlights. It
isn't just a case of omitting the interesting minor novelist, though that is a constant problem; Elizabeth
Inchbald's celebrated A Simple Story isn't here, and I wouldn't be without Mrs Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks
or, for somewhat different reasons, the best of Ouida. No, the book also drops some of the most famous
novelists imaginable. No Peacock, no Firbank, no Meredith, no Compton-Burnett, no Elizabeth Taylor.
From individual novelists, the most idiotic choices; frankly, a history of the novel which doesn't include
Little Dorrit isn't worth recommending to anyone.
Various dashing forays have been made outside the core territory of the English-language novel for adults,
but the net result is to point up even more glaring omissions. (No Benjamin Constant, no Stifter, no
Sciascia.) There's no point in including any oriental fiction if you haven't heard of The Tale of Genii, or in
enthusing inaccurately about The Thousand Nights and One Night unless you're going to talk later about
Naguib Mahfouz. There are no Indian novels at all, apart from ones written in English --not even
Rabindranath Tagore's immensely famous A Grain of Sand--and when it comes to the English-language
ones, the volume's omission of Narayan suggests that those involved know nothing about the subject
anyway. There are surprising gaps in Australian literature--no Henry Handel Richardson, no Marcus Clarke,
no Miles Franklin. Children's literature is ventured into once or twice, but not seriously explored and
probably should have been omitted altogether. Jung Chang's Wild Swans is a most brilliant and vivid
classic, but one hadn't realised that this survey included memoirs. Volumes of short stories are sometimes
touched on, but the compilers obviously have no feeling for them and no knowledge whatsoever of the
history of the form; no Chekhov, no Kipling, no V. S. Pritchett. Personally, I do feel that a survey which
includes a novel as dim and unreadable as David Peace's Nineteen Seventy Seven at the expense of The
Wings of the Dove or A House for Mr Biswas is not one entitled to say 'must' to any sentient reader.
The list is bad enough, but the quality of writing about the individual books passes all belief. No cliche is
too banal, no phrasemaking too famous. 'Beautifully crafted sentences flow effortlessly through [Michael
Ondaatje's] work.' 'Like Life met with excellent reviews on its publication, and it is no secret that [Lorrie]
Moore crafts stories like a gem-cutter wields a chisel.' 'The Child in Time marked a turning-point novel in
Ian McEwan's career.' I'm sorry: people who write like this are proposing to pass judgment on works of
prose?
The predominant mode is of hideous, meaningless academic jargon--things are always being 'transcended'
and 'subverted' and 'transmuted'. The contributors fling the word 'eponymous' around like a 12-year-old
who's just looked it up. Abstractions take on a curiously self-supporting life, like the teapots in L 'enfant et
les Sortileges: 'Oscillations between ideological absurdity and mediated superficiality sketch out a wasteland
of seemingly empty but wildly proliferating signs.' Periodically, but not much more enchantingly, the style
gives way to an awful talking-down, and the reader finds that he has paid good money to be told that A
Room with a View 'offers a brilliant satire of early 20th-century middle England ... a simply delightful read.'
The editing is hopeless. American spellings come and go. Some idiot misguidedly read the whole of
Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum without apparently noticing how its hero's name, Casaubon, was spelt,
or indeed the same name in Middlemarch. There are mistakes in the titles of novels by Douglas Adams and
V. S. Naipaul. Really, nothing at all in this appalling production can be recommended, and you wonder how
on earth it was produced, and who on earth it was produced by.
The second question can be answered with a brief look at the contributors' biographies. Though the
contributors are described by their editor as 'a cross-section of the international reading community,
including critics, academics, novelists, poets, literary journalists', there is not one creative writer of any
reputation involved, nor any literary journalist I've ever heard of. Mr Peter Boxall, the editor, works at the
University of Sussex. So, in fact, do 35 other contributors out of about 100. No doubt the University of
Sussex is an excellent institution, but I can't help feeling that its Senior Common Room is hardly an exciting
cross-section of anything at all, and it is hard to think of academics in Brighton as thrilling arbiters of
literary taste, or sufficiently diversified by the addition of lots of other contributors also almost entirely from
provincial universities.
At least those own up to their provenance. The ones I feel sorry for are the 19 who can find absolutely
nothing to say in their biographies to recommend themselves, and we have no idea whatsoever why a Lizzie
Enfield, a Lisa Fishman, or a Seb Franklin were invited to contribute to this festival of idiocy. One of these
effectively anonymous contributors writes possibly the stupidest 200 words I have ever read on the subject
of P. G. Wodehouse's Thank You, Jeeves. It deserves to be quoted:
People seem not to know how to read
Wodehouse. Readers tend to see him as a
comic writer and expect jokes--but there are
none, just as there is little as regards an engaging
plot or interesting characterisation.
P. G. Wodehouse is now somewhat unfashionable
... the reactionary politics of his novels
have not stood the test of time.
Anyone who thinks that there are no jokes, characterisation or effective plotting in Wodehouse has dearly no
business asking for our attention on any subject. Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid will not, as Pope said of Johnson,
soon be deterre. This whole misguided volume may now be allowed to sink back into the darkness of
Sussex whence it rose.
Hensher, Philip
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hensher, Philip. "A very loose canon." Spectator, 25 Feb. 2006, p. 35+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A143216290/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=25f7fbed.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A143216290
BOOK TALK
We Evolved to Run—But We're Doing It All Wrong
Thinking about running as a slow, meditative practice provides more benefits than viewing it as a sport, author says.
Picture of China's National Games competition
VIEW IMAGES
China hopes to be world competitive in track and field soon. Races during the National Games competition.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL NICHOLS, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
By Simon Worrall
PUBLISHED JULY 30, 2017
These days, running seems to have little to do with survival—it’s all about sport watches and burning calories.
But for our remote ancestors, the ability to run over long distances in pursuit of prey, such as ostrich or antelope, gave us an evolutionary edge—as well as an Achilles tendon ideal for going the distance. (Related: "Humans Were Born to Run, Fossil Study Suggests.")
In his new book, Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human, University of Kent researcher Vybarr Cregan-Reid reminds us of this often forgotten history. To him, running is ultimately about freedom and leaving the gadgets behind to connect with nature (he calls treadmills the "junk food of exercise.")
On the phone from London, the author told National Geographic how he was inspired by his Irish uncle, who ran in the Olympics, and why he believes running barefoot is more natural—and less likely to result in injury.
You definitely win the prize for the most unusual name we have had on Book Talk. Tell us a bit about yourself—and how you got into running.
Both my parents are Irish and Vybarr is derived from an Irish name, Finbar. But it’s a family mystery as to why I’m called Vybarr. There are quite a few stories as to where the name came from but none of them add up.
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I have been running on and off since my early 20s, but only properly got into it about 10-15 years ago. I’m now nearly 50. There is running in my family. My uncle on my mother’s side was called Jim Cregan. He thought he couldn’t run under that name if he ran for England instead of Ireland, so he ran for Great Britain under the name of Jim Hogan. He came from 1930s rural Ireland, and my grandparents thought he was mad for being so into running. But he ran and ran, most of the time barefoot. He ran for Ireland and later for Great Britain in two Olympics. He also won a gold at the European championships in 1966.
I have to confess: I am someone who loves sports of all kinds, but I heartily dislike running. Convert me!
The first thing I’d say is, you’re probably not doing it right. Most people dislike running because they have memories of things like running for a bus. That kind of running is usually deeply unpleasant, almost vomit-inducing. Most beginners give up when they get injured because they’ve done too much, too soon. Most of the benefits from running derive from going very slowly.
I’m also suspicious of it being a sport. It doesn’t have to be practiced as one. It’s something innate to who we are as a species. It’s a means of getting in touch with the environment and our own thoughts. It’s also a way of releasing some of those body-made endorphins, almost like a “legal high,” that is actually good for us.
Picture of
VIEW IMAGES
You write, “we are born to run.” Explain the role of running in our evolution—and how it is even reflected in our anatomy.
Many aspects of our anatomy, from the tips of our toes to the top of our heads, are specifically there to make us good runners. We have a certain ligament called the nuchal ligament, which stops our heads from tipping forward. The fact that we have such flat faces, and teeth that are shoved quite far back in our heads, are also all about enabling us to have a have a good center of gravity while we’re running.
Being bipedal, moving around on two feet, means only about 40 percent of our bodies is exposed to the midday sun, compared to 70 percent in most mammals. As a result, we’re able to keep cooler. All these things helped our ancestors be good hunters. When it comes to sprinting, we are awful compared to other animals. But over certain distances, we are better than anything else on the planet. (Read how a runner almost broke the two-hour marathon barrier in 2017.)
If we were chasing down an antelope or a zebra, they would leave us in the dust over the first few hundred meters. But because we’re able to lose heat much more efficiently than a quadruped, we became more effective hunters over longer distances. Having a nervous system that can produce pain-killing endorphins also helped.
When—and why—did the modern craze for running start?
There was some running in the 19th century, but you wouldn’t have seen joggers on the streets. You don’t really need exercise until you have a predominantly sedentary work culture, which is why we have it now.
Running is also cheap and easy: Nobody has to learn how to do it. In a culture where we are spending more and more time in work, we also have less and less time to nourish our bodies with the kinds of motion they crave. Twenty to 30 years ago there weren’t as many gyms, either.
Picture of a crowd of runners waiting for the start of a 10K race.
VIEW IMAGES
A crowd of runners waiting for the start of a 10K race.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SKIP BROWN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
You are not your typical jogger, are you? In fact, you hate the term. You also run barefoot and have progressively ditched most tech accessories. Why is that?
The fact is, I am a jogger, but it has connotations of pastel tracksuits and sweatbands from the 1980s and sort of stinks of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, and all that individualism. Runner just sounds cooler, doesn’t it? The bare feet is a long story, but I was a runner who was repeatedly injured and one of the ways I learned to run properly was when I took my shoes off. (Get tips on barefoot running on National Geographic’s Adventure site.)
The reason it worked for me is because once you have no cushioning at all, you get really good haptic feedback from the ground about your running form. Cushioned shoes allow us to run badly, and our bare feet tell us a lot more about the world around us. There’s something in your brain that flicks on like a light switch as soon as you have nothing on your feet.
One of the things I love about running is that I don’t do it to get fit. Getting fit is a byproduct. What I like is time offline so I like my runs to be really relaxing, not frenetic. As soon as I am counting the time in which I’ve done the last mile, or checking to see how many steps I’ve done, it starts to be less relaxing. Nobody checks their calorie burn after an hour’s meditation. And for me, running is more like meditation than it is like keep fit.
Another of your aversions is treadmills in gyms. Explain that—and why is it so much better to run outside?
The treadmill was invented in the early 19th century, when penal philosophers were trying to work out a punishment that was just short of the death penalty. So for well over a hundred years the treadmill was something that people were punished with! Oscar Wilde was one of them. He went to prison in 1895 for two years' hard labor and found himself working a treadmill for up to six hours a day. It practically killed him. When he came out of prison, he died about three years later.
Picture of man at boot camp
VIEW IMAGES
A client runs on a treadmill during a "Butt & Legs" class led by Barry Jay, at the Chelsea location of Barry's Boot Camp in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, July 16, 2013. Pre-dawn and afternoon classes at Manhattan fitness studios SoulCycle, Barrys Bootcamp and Flywheel Sports are growing popular with bankers who want to bond without loading up on liquor and fatty foods, according to traders and salesmen.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT EELLS, BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Then there was a phenomenal PR job done on the treadmill, and after disappearing for about four decades, it was rebranded after WWII. To me, treadmills are like junk food, which gets rid of all the good stuff in food—like fiber, vitamins, and minerals—so all that’s left is the fat and sugar. (Read how we are wired to be outside.)
But anything that allows people to enjoy their exercise should be encouraged, whether it’s technology or not.
You begin the book with the question “Why do I run?” and end it in an unlikely place: Detroit. Did you find the answer there? And what is it?
In Boston there are runners everywhere. But during the week I spent in Detroit, I didn’t see a single runner. I’m sure there are all sorts of reasons for that, but one of them is definitely financial. It’s not easy to find time to run if you’re working two jobs, or if you feel the environment around you isn’t one that welcomes joggers.
I want to be able to keep running as free and democratic as possible. I run because it gives me far too much that I couldn’t possibly not. It makes us more intelligent, de-stresses us, and makes us fitter. It gets us away from technology, allows our brains to rest, and encourages creativity. Running can be all that.