You know when you pick up a book and you are so enchanted with the story and the writer’s way with language that you almost don’t want to keep reading because you don’t want the book to end? That is how I felt about Katie Arnold’s memoir. I expected based on our shared age and love of running and the outdoors, not to mention her professional work for Outside magazine (a publication I’ve found to consistently hire articulate and thoughtful writers), that I would enjoy the book – and I did. It is a lovely, touching, and moving work that leads you to consider your own thoughts towards life, running, and love.
Arnold charts her exploration of running and life through the lens of loss and gain: her parent’s divorce, her father’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent death, falling in love, the birth of her two daughters, her crushing struggles with grief and anxiety, and her emergence as a competitive trail runner. As she travels this path, often choked with fear and worry, she works to define what is most important to her, and to decide how she wants to live: “In a few months, I’ll turn forty, but here between the walls, my hair caked with silt and my shoulders freckled from the sun, I feel young for the first time all year. I think of people my age who want bigger, beautiful houses, high heels, new haircuts, the best schools. I just want this: to move my body until it’s tired and dirty and write stories and sleep outside and love my girls and Steve as long and hard as possible. I know this as clearly as I know there’s no way of knowing anything, really. I’ll have to fling myself forward, with equal parts conviction and ease, just like the river. If I’m going to die, I want to live” (173).
In running this trail called life, we’re all trying to figure out how to be happy. You start out trying to do it all, even the things you don’t want to or don’t care about, because that seems to be what all the other adults are doing. But if you’re lucky or smart, you realize as you get older that life is a pretty short ride, and there’s barely enough time to do what is truly important to you and to love your dear ones while you’re here. Running Home is about one woman’s journey on the trail, but it offers lessons for all of us about finding the clarity to name what is most important and the confidence to pursue it: “It will take me many more long runs…to experience what the Navajo have always understood about long-distance running: It will teach us everything we need to know. Like how to want nothing, even for only one minute” (244). What we need to know is different for each of us; Arnold’s courage in exploring her path helped me to find my own.
For a snapshot into Arnold’s thoughtful perspective on the roles of athlete and mother, check out her recent Trail Runner contribution below: