Second marathon coming in < 10 weeks.
“Moving the left leg and then the right leg is a lot and is enough.”
Ben Ratliff, Run the Song
I’ve started back on longer runs the past two weeks to get ready for another marathon. ~10.5 miles the week before last. ~11.5 miles last week. ~12.5 miles planned this weekend. And as the time increases, I’ve been thinking about maybe adding a soundtrack to my long runs after reading Run the Song by Ben Ratliff, one of my favorite books from 2025.
It’s a book that’s right up my alley. A book about running, but not in a serious athelete training type of way. Also a book about music, some of it well known (to me) and a lot of it not so much. But mostly a book about how those two things, running and music, relate to one another.
“Music appears not to serve a measurable vital function, like air, water, light, food, or love; if it is less than those, it is also more.”
Ben Ratliff, Run the Song
As an avid NO MUSIC OR ANYTHING while running person, I am used to and really enjoy being alone with my thoughts. However, the thought of exploring some new music while I run sounds like it’s worth trying to see how it feels. With many 2+ hour running sessions in my future, I think I’ll at least give it a shot.
“This is a good place to be in, this place of not quite knowing but wanting to know more.”
Ben Ratliff, Run the Song
More favorite excerpts from Run the Song:
“I might be running from something. I hope I am. I do feel a constant need to distance myself from some old assumption or reflex or sentimental attachment. Many of these arise in middle age, and they harden fast. Running at least gives me the freedom and optimism to imagine that such distancing may be possible. At most it gives me a lot more besides, so the necessity of running from may lead to the intention of running to. I would like to keep moving in the direction of intention, and figuring out what intention could be.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“To love anything is to be satisfied by what’s already there.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“I find that a good way of keeping my distance from running, while looking forward to it, is to listen to music while I run. This way I am not in it only for the running.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“Intention is wonderful, but I would like only the intention to fall into running, as if a breath of wind had tipped me off a ledge. Too much consideration of the switch from walking to running strikes me as self-important, anyway.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“I’m not convinced that earphone music is its own category. If I am looking for the solitary chill—I hear what I am, I am what I hear, and nobody else needs to know or understand—I can get that by listening to Bach’s piano Partitas played out loud on a living room stereo, or even on a kitchen radio. The tenderizing force that makes me feel attended to, or even diagnosed, is in the music and the performance of it, not in the equipment.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“But the main reaction is the novelty of moving through a public space, alone, without earphones on. Most of them—I don’t mean some; I mean most—never walk alone without them. Increasingly, my students have made the investment of buying noise-canceling earphones and wearing them every time they go out to walk, sometimes every time they ride a bicycle. Normally they listen to music through the earphones, but just as often they don’t. Their earphones signal to the city world that they don’t want to be bothered; the earphones make them appear unreachable.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“If all music is intended as a gift, I tend to spend more time listening to the gifts for which I have not yet worked out a proper response as a recipient, because those are usually the gifts I didn’t know I wanted.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“If I listen to honor the past, my conscience warns me, I might stay there and never return.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
““Good” or “bad” as markers of the repetition will fall away after a while. The act will assume its own lesson and mark out a larger tendency. It will become great, if you like. Making art can be boring. Running can be boring. Asking the same questions can be boring. But now is a good time to ask the same impossible question day after day, in order to render the efficient answer inadequate. Whenever “boring” runs hot through intent or repetition, it becomes valuable.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“I now know that if you find something boring, it says more about you than about the thing.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“Running is dailiness, and one can choose to give the phrase “daily practice” a ring of holiness or of work ethic. It sounds like meditation, it sounds like taking inventory, it sounds like a regimen to protect the body. But what if daily practice is just doing something for no immediate result, just for the feeling, like making marks on paper to see how they look? When I meet my running with respect but no ambition, I can feel it best: bipedal constancy, the infinite present, the loosening of time.” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“Animals swerve, whereas humans are expected to angle, though bipedal bodies are no more suited to turning on an angle than four-footed ones are. But angled roads aren’t about physiology anyway; they’re about property. Establishing a ninety-degree turn to the left by the placement of a road promises a more equal apportioning of land than a slowly curving one, which favors the area of the landholder on the right. I should never forget that my running ways are determined by property. Town planners and lawyers make the path. But runners can create new life on a plane of old macadam” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
“A running way—let’s call it that—accepts you as you are on that day at that hour. The question of “how you are” presumes a range. Even if you eat the same meals every day, even if you go to sleep at the same time, even if your daily rounds seldom change, there are still the seasons, there is still the moon, there is still weather and aging and love and parents and the limits of one’s body. And then there are the other variables: not just what you drank last night but what your girlfriend said to you thirty years ago, waves of haplessness or artificial gusto, rare and happy feelings of being returned to yourself, and the rest. To fall asleep is to be unaware of who you might be when you wake up” (Ben Ratliff, Run the Song)
Comments welcome!