I’ve been a runner since I was fifteen, and over the years some of my closest friends have been my teammates and fellow runners. I’ve occasionally tried to make sense of our common compulsion by writing about it. The two articles below were published in slightly different form in Sports Illustrated on June 13, 1983, and November 14, 1983.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve been able to run less and less because of deteriorating joints and nagging injuries, common runner’s complaints. But running has been such an important part of my life and psyche for so long that I haven’t been able to give it up entirely, so that a couple of days a week I still pull on my shorts and shoes and plod through one of my neighborhood routes. In the following essay, written many years ago now, I tried to synthesize, in a terse, no-nonsense manner—like a hard interval workout—what the sport has meant to me.