THIS IS NOT ABOUT RUNNING

A grim memoir by an elite runner.

Cain, writing in the present tense in short, crisp chapters, describes her life as a middle-distance runner from the time she was in middle school up through her giving up professional competition in a sport that badly damaged her body and mind when she was 20. Now 29 and attending Stanford Medical School, she looks back not, as the title of the book indicates, at the experience of running or any pleasure she might have taken in it, but at the small and greater insults and injuries adjacent to the sport itself: girls and parents who bullied her; a 60-something middle school coach at her suburban New York school whose favorites were “the girls who will talk to him about parties and boys and sex”; or social media trolls who suggest that she has “crazy hair,” needs “ear reduction surgery,” and may actually be male. By the time she was 16 and alienated from the other members of her high school team, she jumped at the chance to go professional, join the Nike Oregon Project, and work with former marathoner and well-regarded coach Alberto Salazar, who, the author says, would go on to criticize her about her weight and separate her from her family. Hungry, tired, and emotionally distraught, she cut herself and, as she says with pitch-dark humor, “maybe, sometimes, occasionally, I imagine killing myself.” In 2016, she left the Nike project, still hoping to “fix” herself and return to Salazar to make him happy. Instead, in 2021, she went on to sue and then, in 2023, to settle with Salazar and Nike. What’s most horrifying about her story, which she tells bluntly, directly, and with determination, is not that it’s so unusual, but that it seems so piercingly ordinary.

A convincing condemnation of the treatment of young athletes.