RUNNING IS A KIND OF DREAMING

In his debut memoir, a clinical psychologist and ultrarunner looks back on an eventful life from the hard-won stability of middle age.

What brings a person to where they are? Anyone can profitably ask this question at any time, but there’s something about being on a 205-mile run that forces the issue. Thompson had completed numerous ultramarathons before attempting a four-day race around Lake Tahoe, his most challenging competition yet. The race presented the author with four days of increasing fatigue and disorientation during which deep self-reflection proved inescapable. “On the surface,” he writes, “an ultramarathon is neither necessary nor reasonable. And yet men and women in the tens of thousands appear compelled to do such things….It follows from the unreasonable nature of an ultramarathon that the ultrarunner’s motive must reside in a domain outside reason: the unconscious mind, the shadows of times forgotten, yet still felt.” In this book, the unconscious becomes conscious, the forgotten is recalled, and feelings become thoughts. Thompson, a staff psychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is out to challenge the norm that “mental health professionals almost never tell their own stories” in what is much less a running book than a psychological self-interrogation. For Thompson, running is one method of treatment—along with therapy and Zen practice—that works for him in learning to face up to his childhood trauma, mental illness, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, and lifelong tendency to run away from difficult experiences. A therapist might grant that revisiting the minute details of childhood serves as a healing process, but readers may be less patient with Thompson’s tireless self-examination, which sometimes crosses into self-indulgence. But if that is the price of the author’s keen insight into the psyche and the profound observations of which he is capable, so be it.

Like a long run, there are difficult stretches along the way, but in the end, they’re worth the reward.