John L. Parker’s Once a Runner, the sine qua non of running fiction, made its debut in 1978 as a book without precedent, peer or publisher. More a legend than a book to some, Once a Runner and its author quickly passed into running lore, as generations of runners recounted the tale of Parker selling self-published copies of the book out of the trunk of his car at road races. Even runners who have never seen the book know something of the story of Quenton Cassidy, a collegiate distance runner who trains doggedly to challenge the world-record-holder in the mile. The chapter titles alone are intimate experiences only competitive distance runners know: “Twenty-four in the Rain,” “More Horse Than Rider,” “Demons,” “The Interval Workout,” “The Orb,” “A Stiller Town.”
Everyone who has lived some part of that experience has probably tried to tell their own take on the story at some point, most likely with more grandiosity and less poetry than Parker’s rendition. In Once a Runner’s lighter moments, Parker captures that too, the way collegiate runners tend to mythologize the rigors of their training to impress girls. And Once a Runner indulges in its own excesses—the tyrannical good ol’ boy football coach and a crusty old dean straight out of central casting. Farther-reaching books have featured running prominently, such as N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. But no one has ever written about running itself better than John L. Parker, Jr.
At one point in Once a Runner, Parker hints heavily at what he’d set out to do and why it needed doing, as he describes the reading material Cassidy took with him when he dropped out of school and sequestered himself in a cabin in the woods to train:
Soon Cassidy felt he had read everything ever written about running… The novels, while generally flawed technically in one way or another (sometimes tragically so), occasionally captured certain elements of his own striving…Often the day after a late-night reading jag, he took to the country roads and wooded trails with renewed energy, comparing his impressions to his historical and fictional counterparts. He decided that no one had quite captured the strained satisfaction of tooling through the middle miles of a hard fifteen-mile run.
A 4:06 miler and Southeastern Conference champion collegiate runner himself, Parker spent two years in the early-1970s living in a shed by the University of Florida track with Olympic distance runners Frank Shorter and Jack Bacheler, and trained with them twice daily while pursuing his law degree. He knew whereof he wrote, and in Once a Runner he achieved exactly what Cassidy found wanting in the running novels available to him.
Parker described writing Once a Runner as akin to “cutting the top off my head and pouring out everything about running that was in there into this thing and just making sure it wove into the plotline.” If one measure of a good novel is how successfully it collects, distills, and conveys all of the singular and most important things an author knows, and rolls them into a compelling narrative, John L. Parker’s Once a Runner could stand among the most fully realized novels ever written.
Of course, there’s more to novel-writing and publishing than imparting esoteric stuff a writer knows. For whatever reason, in 1978 publishers didn’t bite. So Parker started his own press, and typeset and printed the book himself. Beyond the road-race sales of legend, he peddled the book to running stores, where it was intermittently available by the 1990s, at least in major cities.
In 2007, a Once a Runner sequel called Again to Carthage appeared on a small specialty press called Breakaway Books. Again to Carthage chronicled Cassidy’s return to elite running in his early 30s, and provided fascinating insight into the way endurance athletes experience physical decline more minutely than others to whom aging’s initial onset might be all but imperceptible. In 2009, Simon & Schuster picked up the rights to Once a Runner and Again to Carthage and brought both books out in hardcover.
More than 30 years after it became essential reading for competitive runners, Once a Runner was finally, improbably, in print. Now Parker has completed the Quenton Cassidy trilogy with Simon & Schuster/Scribner’s publication of a prequel titled Racing the Rain.
One of Once a Runner’s loveliest chapters, “A Too Early Death,” offered a brief but captivating flashback to Quenton Cassidy’s childhood in coastal Florida. Parker described how a 10-year-old Cassidy “had learned to slip into the sea and plummet like a stone to fifty, sixty feet, there to look around leisurely before floating back, calm and haughty in his control of the pale green waters.” He would use his already-apparent lung capacity to dive deep and hold his breath to frolic among the coral and spear fish, and often to dislodge his father’s fishing boat’s anchor when it got stuck. In the incident described in “A Too Early Death,” Cassidy dives to free a hooked fish trapped in a coral head, hyperventilates, and nearly dies.
Racing the Rain picks up roughly where “A Too Early Death” leaves off, with 11-year-old Cassidy and his friends sharing the barefoot delights of a coastal Florida childhood in the late-1950s—shirts-and-skins basketball, A & W root beer and jerked sodas, mangoes and guavas and loquats right off the trees, swimming, canoeing, spearing fish and racing in the rain.