I expected a book seemingly about running and actually about writing. It’s actually a book about doing difficult things with no hope about their outcome, things that include running long distance and writing novels (but it's mostly about running).

The many obstacles are, of course, the body, that thing that is ours without being ours and which has its own mind, and the mind itself and its many movements: he mentions some bad days quietly pushing him towards some full-blown paranoia he has to ignore.

I am always surprised by how often the feeling of accomplishment happens through not being yourself, through getting over or beyond yourself, or even not being at all. The internal reward is there when you melt yourself through effort into the mold of an ever-moving process, for a limited time.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.

The whole book seems to explore that tension between effort and expectation, where one has to find the right spot. In the end, it seems to be about holding a line while not being held by it, a difficult exercise.