This Is Not About Running, by Mary Cain: Just Don't Do It (Support Nike, That Is)

In 2019, runner Mary Cain penned a shocking and revelatory piece in the NYT detailing her physical and mental abuse in the Nike Oregon Project under coach Alberto Salazar. She has expanded that piece and turned it into this book.

This Is Not About Running (out April 28) is now the third book about Salazar and the abusive culture at Nike in the 2010s. Runner Kara Goucher's book The Longest Race also details Salazar's abuse, pseudo-scientific coaching practices, and his penchant for coming up with "creative" ways for athletes to dope without getting caught. Win At All Costs by journalist Matt Hart is based on the US Anti-Doping Agency's investigation and report on Salazar, as well as interviews with some of his former athletes. They're both enraging reads -- not just regarding how such a shitty human could have been in charge of coaching athletes for so long, but also how Nike constantly defended him.

Mary Cain's book, though, is especially damning, because Mary was a teenager during her time with Salazar. The fastest 1,500m runner in the US at age 17, Mary moved cross country from her home in New York to train with Salazar in Portland. She was Salazar's next prodigy -- a can't-miss phenom who would smash world records.

But it didn't happen. And this book explains why. The book, written in present tense so, as Cain explains, you feel like you are right there with her as Salazar is calling her fat, as she cuts herself, as he thinks about suicide, is, in a word, shocking. 

Salazar became obsessed with an arbitrary weight target, which even starving herself, she couldn't hit. In running, confidence is just important as peak fitness, and Salazar (and his shady "sports psychologist" whom Mary had to see) absolutely destroyed her confidence. She got to the point where she couldn't get through a workout without breaking down in a fit of sobs because she was terrified Salazar would scream at her. He often did. Her teammates were mean to her and she had few friends. Salazar even made her stop talking to her parents, not wanting them to "meddle" in her training. Just all absolutely horrific. 

Salazar has since been banned for life from coaching for both doping and abuse, which is justice, but also real justice would be him rotting in jail. Just as infuriating as Salazar's abuse, though, is Cain's details of how Nike treated her after she quit the Oregon Project. As she says, it would've cost very little for a multi-billion dollar company to do the right thing. Instead, when she sued them, they fought her tooth and nail at every turn, trying to make themselves the victim, or blaming Cain as the actual victim. 

Don't read this if you don't want to be angry. Don't read this if you're a Nike apologist. But definitely read if you're a runner or anyone else interested in the very, very bad culture at Nike. 

I Am So Sorry, I Don't Know How to Read Poetry (But I Want to Learn!)

Happy National Poetry Month! I have a confession to make: I don't know how to read poetry. 

I'm only exaggerating a little. I mean, I know how to read poetry. What I don't know is how to understand poetry on the same level I understand prose. Or on the level seemingly every other avid reader does. Or on the level the poet intends. 

I've been a reader my entire life. I've hundreds of novels, memoirs, short story collections, history books, shit, even Dan Brown. I've barely read any poetry. 

Somehow I managed to graduate college with an English/Creative Writing degree having taken exactly ZERO poetry classes. The only time I can recall poetry coming up at all in my college classes was studying a few Shakespeare sonnets. Maybe there was something about John Donne in a Very Old Literature By White Guys class (probably not the actual name of the class) for a minute. But I definitely didn't study anything written in the last 300 years. 

But then so why has poetry eluded me for so long? 

I don't have a good answer. One reason that occurs to me is that my brain works very literally and I like clarity and resolution. Growing up, I loved to read, but I was really good at math and science, too. I was even a chemistry major in college for a few ill-fated semesters. It was the war of my youth: My left brain vs. my right brain...and ultimately my right brain won. But I feel like when I try to engage with poetry, my left brain sneaks over and whispers to my right brain: "Hey man, you're not going to understand this. It's too flowery. Too subjective. There's only barely a story. There are no easy answers." And my right brain, dressed in a linen suit and drinking mint tea, hasn't had the heart to tell my left brain to STFU.

One after another in rapid succession, metaphor, image, symbol, and simile, and even the structure of the poem -- itself imbued with meaning -- means you can't just fly through a poem and go on with your day. A poem requires a close read, and then another. And then probably many more. In this economy? Who's got time for that? 

This is a cop-out, of course. Of course, there is frequent poetic language in the novels and prose I love, too. But they're not so concentrated. You can catch one or two at a time and stop and think and then continue. And if you miss something it's maybe not the end of the world.

But honestly, another reason I haven't read a lot of poetry is because I haven't really tried very hard to learn, either. It's a negative feedback loop and I've been felled by inertia. I'm like a person who tried running for a month in their early 20s, decided they hated running, and hasn't tried again since. (If that sounds like an oddly specific example, well, I lived it. But about a decade ago, I DID try running again, and realized I loved it. And haven't stopped since. Hmm...do we have another possible parallel incoming?)

And so now I'm determined to try reading poems again. No better time than National Poetry Month to learn how to read poetry. To enjoy poetry. To love poetry? 

Look, I know you can't just tell yourself to love something. And then do it. But by putting in some time and equipping yourself with the right tools, I can at least maybe identify why it hasn't worked yet. 

I've also just picked up a book titled Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems, by Harvard professor Stephanie Burt. The book is supposedly "an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, enjoying, and learning from poems." The words "seemingly daunting task" are doing some seriously heavily lifting in that blurb. 

It does feel daunting. But having been a reader my whole life, I feel like I'm in a good spot to finally figure this out. 

And I have a good collection to start. Every year at AWP (that's the big annual conference for writers), I seem to collect poetry collections. It's always good to support small presses, which are, generally speaking, the purveyors of poetry. So each of the last four years I've come home with a fistful of poetry...that has just sat on my nightstand. 

Collected poetry collections in the photo above:

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown

A Fortune for Your Disaster, by Hanif Abdurraqib

The New Testament, by Jericho Brown

REPLICA, by Lisa Low

Calling a Wolf a Wolf, by Kaveh Akbar

A Map of My Want, by Faylita Hicks

Pilgrim Bell, by Kaveh Akbar

Pisces Urges, by Czaerra Galicinao Ucol

Karaoke at the End of the World, by Genevieve DeGuzman

1919, by Eve L. Ewing

Electric Arches, by Eve L. Ewing

So off we go on the Good Ship Poetry. If anyone has any advice for me, I'm all ears. 

If you're like me and want to learn more about poetry, my employer, StoryStudio Chicago, has several upcoming poetry events and workshops, both online and in person. Check 'em out here.