We Loved to Run

by Stephanie Reents

I had a love/hate relationship with running for a number of years. I grew up with no interest in physical activity whatsoever, partly because I was in that generation of girls raised to assume sports were for boys, partly because even as a kid I lived mostly in my head.

I took it up in the mid-seventies when it seemed everyone was running.

Mostly, I hated it.

My first Walkman improved my attitude considerably, though; I spent hours making mixtapes, then remaking them to include only the songs that suited my stride. Weirdly, I remember very particular moments: passing a certain house on my boring-yet-never-changing route when David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” came on, turning a corner on that same route to Steve Winwood’s “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.” I remember crossing a 5K finish line in first place in the (extremely small) women’s division to Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money,” spurred on by the unworthy desire to beat a perfectly nice woman I knew in high school who had been a cheerleader.

I remember running to an entire sixty-minute tape of the Doobie Brothers’ “One by One” after a series of brutal disappointments in my writing life for the single line, “You’ll always have the chance to give up, so why do it now?”

As I ran more and struggled less, endorphins would kick in and I’d think, okay, I get why people do it.

Then think, but do I really care?

Plus, people were so, I don’t know, communal about running. How the hell could they run and breathe and chat?

Also, I am not by nature a team person.

So why is it that I could not put down Stephanie Reents’ We Loved to Run, a novel about a women’s cross-country team at a small liberal arts college in the run up to 1992 Division Three Championship?

Maybe at least partly because those young women had a love/hate relationship with running, too. In fact, the novel starts with a litany of what they hated most:

We hated a lot of things. A gradual hill in the second mile of a cross country race. Two hard workouts in a row. The little packets of Lorna Doones in our brown-bag lunches that Assistant Coach picked up from the college cafeteria: like vanilla chalk. Big toenails that were a tad too long. When our coach said, Here’s where you make your move. Inner-thigh friction. Holes in our socks. Our mothers’ Shouldn’t you take off one day a week?

In any case, it’s fall, 1992, and the team, led by Danielle, has its heart set to make it to the New England Division Three Championships. Chloe is the fastest runner, Kirsten at her heels. Harriet, A collective narrator, “We”, tells the story of the season, interspersed with the stories of Danielle and Kirsten, both of whom Danielle is the captain. Chloe and Kirsten, the fastest runners—in that order. Followed by Harriet, Patricia and Liv.

The story is told from three alternating points of view: Danielle, to whom the championship means the most; Kirsten, struggling to overcome something traumatic that happened over the summer, and the collective “we” of the team.

Never having experienced team sports, I was fascinated by how the already complicated, often fraught relationships among young women were complicated by the paradox of intimacy and competition. How, as always, the secrets each one held created tensions they couldn’t always understand.

Harriet is discovering her sexuality; Patricia hates New England and wants to transfer to a school in the Southwest, where she’d from; Liv has a boyfriend who may or may not love her as much as she loves him. Chloe’s lonely. Danielle drinks too much and can’t always remember what happened the morning after a party.

I loved how We Loved to Run revealed bits and pieces of their backgrounds as it went along. I swear, the section where we learn what happened to Kirsten scared me as much as it scared her! Throughout, there are so many insights about the ways in which young women’s sense of themselves is affected badly by their experiences with young men. Not to mention the male coaches who too often make them feel ashamed of their own bodies.

I also loved the “we” sections, especially the ones that not only made me feel the joy of running but made me understand why these young women ran. No doubt, they’re so good because Stephanie Reents was a runner herself, on Amherst College’s cross-country team.

Also, I had the pleasure of listening to a few hours of the audio book with a friend who was been a college volleyball player while we were on a road trip together. It was fun watching her react to parts of the novel that rang true to her.

Clearly, Reents had captured what it’s like to be on a team.

We Loved to Run didn’t make me wish I’d been on a cross-country team myself but it sort of made me want to hit the streets again.

And sort of glad I’m too old for it now.

But is there a yoga team I could join?