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Running Books: Review of Rachel Toor’s Personal Record

03.12.09 | in Fitness | 1 Comments Share

Running book review! Amy Güth reviews Rachel Toor's book Personal Record.

Writer, runner and Bonkless helmsperson Amy Güth offers her considerable insight on selected running-oriented literature. Check out our interview with Amy for background and contact information.

Rachel Toor, author of Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running, is the woman many of us know as an ultra-marathon champion, some as the academic insider, while still others know her confessional, often touching and usually very funny work as an essayist and columnist.

Though it is essential to take each piece from a given author as stand-alone, in Personal Record, Toor's writing is a bit detached at times, especially at first, as she tends to tell us what and whom she loves, in lieu of demonstrating such emotion outright. And, admittedly, this seems odd from Toor. When she does approach vulnerable places in her writing, she tends, most certainly, to skew in a direction of showing and sharing from arm's length. Still, though it seems odd, this awkward tide turns soon enough as even her detachment is uniquely and endearingly Toor; sweetly done, fiercely done, boldly and gingerly, and in doing so, in sharing such personal triumphs and heartbreaks from just out of reach, she leaves us—her readers—in her wake both eager to find her near us one day at a race in hopes of even the briefest conversation to see and hear and understand more, while solidly aware we stand before a winged goddess of the highest order—able to list her accomplishments without a shred of false modesty yet without a bit of condescension, either, and hardly caught up for even a moment in the cliched and false trap of jock v. geek, brain v. brawn discussion. Toor is Toor and what reads as unusual detachment and arm's length emotional disconnect initially, blossoms quickly enough into quirky self-acceptance. Toor pulls all of these things which seem contradictory and unclear at surface—cockiness and vulnerability, athleticism and intellect, even bold sexuality and sharp femininity paired with her giant, clunky men's watch ("But this watch—black, plastic, ugly..."), her respectable academic profile with her clear goofiness and tender heart—to exist on her pages in an uncomplicated way.

Toor is admirably quick to point out slights runners and women perpetuate against themselves, and to freely and openly admire the men from whom she learned the most. Toor loves men, and in fact, beautifully so with the humor and discipline she points out, even if by pointing out female athletes' frustrating lack of both. Despite this, no mistake should be made; Toor critiques women because she admirably learned to demand the excellence from herself so many men self-expect unquestioningly. She, without a shred of perfectionism, demands excellence and believes so very much in the women around her, she seems, in a small, slight way to be begging women to tread not so frailly and gingerly, but to demand the same excellence and guts from themselves. And as such, in a lovely section, Toor describes the pride she felt in having paced a first-time marathoner through the trenches of the New York City marathon after September 2001's disaster and fragility; she saw the runner's need for a success—any success, to grasp at some dangling thread of positivity in such a despairing time—and guided her, this runner, this stranger, in on strange and perfect wings of trial and experience, of know-how and confidence.

Where Toor does illustrate the most heart and guts in her writing, she does so boldly—sobbing for an unraveled relationship, proclaiming her love for her pet rat, Iris, and in perhaps the loveliest chapter of the entire book, the chapter she dares show rather than tell and looks remarkably human and lovable for doing so; Toor agrees to pace a friend through the darkness of The Western State ultra-marathon. At a point, she fears she has gone off the trail and cost her friend precious time ("I'm thinking to myself—ohshitohshitohshit—have I led him off the trail?") and, in perhaps the most touching moment of the entire book, fights tears post-race—"I stay off to the side. Suddenly I am overcome. My throat tightens. I clench my jaw. I am terrified that I am about to cry. This is not my race. I will not cry."—only long enough to hide in her car—"...He points at me and says nothing. But I know. I know.... As soon as I get in the car, I cry." And through these races she re-runs for us in Personal Record, Toor speaks of running in the secret language all of us know as runners, in the slang strange to outsiders, but she does so—and this is outstandingly key—in such a masterful way as to make the runner culture understood to civilians without overstating the obvious or boring those of us already initiated.

In fact, her vulnerability, glimpsed only slightly in self-deprecating humor, and in her funny do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did-and-learned-the-hard-way anecdotes, this very thing she seems to work so much to hide in her confident narration, is what makes us care for her, about her and makes us want to see her succeed at all her undertakings. In a pivotal scene in which Toor describes a confrontation with a hostile race director, it is around this point in the story we realize we do indeed care for Toor in her storytelling, it is then we relate and identify. We cheer for her only once we know her. And she masterfully converts us, too; we are not at once taken with her, we are not immediately in awe of her, we are not growing along with her or reminiscing own own athletic beginnings as she speaks of her own. No, she's not in our club at first at all, she's the outsider who shows up for a group run and shifts the entire club dynamic, making the comfortably familiar routines new and strange, and then suddenly, in the way that all the best members of a club exist, time passes, stories unfold, new routines replace the old and we are solidly in her corner, involved in her story, and we can't, in the end, much recall the way we felt unsure in the beginning.

Aside from the feeling that each of Toor's stories are somewhat under-told, each undeniably filled with greater detail and so many things she presents not as subtext but avoids entirely, Personal Record is an excellent read, and one surely to become a quotable favorite of champions and coaches, veteran marathoners and hopeful novices as it may. I wanted more fluidity to the story, I'll admit, and the raised emotional stakes that surely would have come with it, but Toor does satisfy with her dropped-in life vignettes rather than the overview of the longer narrative. In fact, in so doing, in offering only small, choppy sections of her life instead of placing her life's moments in context of a larger storytelling, in leaving us as abruptly as she greets us in each chapter, she does manage to mirror a sense of the momentary buddy who runs up during a race, makes conversation, often bonding with us in mere moments due to circumstances, who then dashes away, giving just a smile, the anecdote, the well-timed let's-talk-about-something-else-to-get-us-through-these-dreadful-hills that guides us to our finish lines.

Book signing image courtesy Nebraska Press.

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