An Interview: Kathryn Schulz

Kathryn Schulz inherited her love of language from her father. Her love of running she discovered entirely on her own. What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about running, writing and the ways in which the two practices can work in tandem.

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Schulz is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Really Big One,” her story about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest that Ta-Nehisi Coates called one of the greatest pieces of writing he’s ever read. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Travel Writing. Her most recent book, Lost & Found, has been longlisted for a National Book Award. It’s a memoir in three parts: the story of losing her father; the tale of finding her life partner; and an examination of “&,” the 27th letter of the alphabet and the conjunctive force that links life’s opposing ideas.

Schulz is one of our finest living writers: a warm-hearted intellectual armed with a profound curiosity and a dazzlingly capacious and generous mind. She’s a critic, a journalist, a storyteller – and a runner.

Like Schulz’s memoir, Lost & Found, this is a conversation in three parts: a close discussion of what running means to a solitary practitioner of the sport; a loftier dialogue about the role running can play in our lives; and a look at the interplay between running and writing, wherein the blank mind achieved at the run’s end can often give the writer the courage to face the blank page at every story’s startline.

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Amory Rowe: When did you start running?

Kathryn Schulz: Late, as runners go. I definitely did not do any voluntary running as a child. I was raised, basically, to be a kind of disembodied bookworm. And I really embraced that. I played absolutely no sports in junior high or high school, and was perfectly content that way. And then in college I started playing Ultimate Frisbee, which was a ton of fun, but I still didn't really relish that those practices would start with everyone jogging around the field a handful of times to warm up. It was fine if I was running to chase something, like a Frisbee, but I did not enjoy running just to run. So it really was not until my early twenties, after college, that I took up running a little more seriously. I would get up in the mornings and I would go for a run and for a long time the drumbeat in my head was “When can I stop?”, which I think is a common drumbeat, especially for new runners. But I remember the day when for no reason I can possibly explain, except maybe just putting in the miles, it suddenly switched to: “I wonder how much further I can go?" And I would say that is the moment I actually became a runner.

AR: Do you track your runs? Do you wear a watch?

KS: I have at various points in my life. I used to have the world's simplest watch – you could turn it on, you could turn it off – that I would use for running. And I’ve occasionally used apps like Map My Run, but I’ve never been a truly obsessive tracker, chiefly because while I'll run anywhere in a pinch, I’m happiest when I'm trail running. And I found that I would check my time, and in some places because I knew exactly how long the trails were, I knew what [pace] I'd run. But trail running is really its own beast and I love it. I run chiefly to liberate myself from many things, including the tyranny of timekeeping, and the tyranny of the notion that we are all somehow to be improved upon. Although heaven knows we could all stand to be better in many, many ways.

AR: You’ve been managing an injury. How is your back?

KS: Not great. I wish it were better. I'm living in a kind of weird limbo since it's not exactly clear to me that I can truly heal it short of surgery, which I'm extraordinarily reluctant to do. For a long time I really babied it because I was honestly slightly terrified of being in that kind of pain again. It was excruciating and taught me a lot about pain. But at some point I thought, “Well, it’s not getting better. It's not getting worse. Maybe I can run anyway.” So that's what I've been doing. It's a really different kind of running. And I guess the best thing I can say is I'm so grateful for it. You know there's nothing like not being able to run to make you grateful for any amount of running you can do.

AR: It’s like that line in your book: “How do you make a man happy? You take away his donkey. And then you give it back.”

KS: It’s exactly like that. You know one time a zillion years ago I was running in a little state park somewhere near the Rhode Island coastline. One of the joys of being a runner is you just liberate yourself into some new environment and learn a little bit about it. So I was running through this state park and I was coming up to a little bridge over a small wetlands and there's this strikingly handsome old man on it, with a mane of silver hair and a silver beard and he's got a cane and he looks like Father Time. He's just this incredible looking figure in front of me. And I give him a wave and he turns this dazzling smile and his bright blue eyes to me and he says, “Run while you can.” I have never forgotten that. Even in that moment, in the peak of health, I thought, “Boy, that is true and sobering. Who knows how much longer I get to do this?” So every day I think, “Well, run while you can.”

AR: That man, he speaks the truth.

KS: That’s for sure.

AR: It sounds like you mostly run alone. Do you ever partner up and run with other people or with a group?

KS: Not if I can avoid it. I love people. Most of the time I’m delighted to be in their company. But I do really prefer to run alone. I have sometimes run with other people, but it's never been a staple of my running experience. You know, a handful of times I've run with a club. And I once did a little bit of speed training with an actual coach when I lived in New York City, but it's not really for me. I find I've enjoyed all of it – and certainly meeting other runners. The running community can be wonderful and supportive. But the thing, whatever it is, I am deeply craving from running I do think comes from running alone.

AR: Tell me about your earliest run, the first run you remember.

KS: I think it was the National Presidential Fitness Test, in fourth or fifth grade, and you're supposed to run a mile. And it was at my elementary school and I think we probably just did laps around the building. And I can remember it feeling both terribly hard and somewhat humiliating. I was, as I said, not an athletic kid. I was not a popular kid. Quite the opposite, especially in elementary school. Things were fine by high school, but I was not a popular kid in my elementary school. And even my very loyal best friend, who was the whole reason to show up at school every day – she was shy and introverted and no one would have pegged her for an athlete, but she came from a pretty athletic family – she just took off and ran her mile. Given my memory of my first run, it’s incredible I ever returned to the sport.

AR: What's your most memorable run?

KS: It's been the great good fortune of my life that I've traveled a lot. And so I've had the wonderful experience of running in all kinds of places and it feels really tricky to pick one. I can certainly vividly remember a non-run I took. I once spent three or four weeks covering the Iraqi refugee crisis. And so I was in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. And I stayed on for a while afterward. This must have taken place in Lebanon because we were by the water. And you're very conscientious as a Westerner – especially when you're reporting and talking to people – about how you dress and what you're doing with yourself. And I remember looking at the water and it’s a zillion degrees and there's a roadway along it. And there were, in fact, all of these men – and a very small number of women – running. And I thought, “Man, I wish that were me.” 

AR: What’s your favorite kind of run?

KS: My favorite kind of run is a beautiful alpine trail run that includes rivers or lakes and culminates in some spectacular view and is pretty hard.

AR: What’s the run you're most looking forward to?

KS: Well, you know, I hope someday I go out for a run and I'm lacing up my running shoes and my little daughter, who so far can not even yet walk, looks up at me and says, “Mommy, I want to come.”

AR: In a recent interview you spoke about humility, and you said, “a little humbling here and there is good for the soul and healthy.” Do you think running might be a small daily humility, a kind of a regular inoculation against complacency, comfort or overconfidence?

KS: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think in one kind of earthly way and in one existential way. The earthly way is, if you are me, which is to say a completely average runner, you are always mindful of your physical limitations. You know on a trail that you are one buried rock or a bad step away from turning your ankle. You know that the reward of pushing uphill is going downhill, but the peril of going downhill is actually considerably greater. You know you're slower than you used to be; or you know you're fine, but you’re having an off day. Sometimes you literally have to stop. Who knows why? Maybe you’re at an elevation you're not used to or you didn't sleep well the night before or one of the other infinite mysteries of human physiology. But it’s just not working that day. [And the existential way is]: I do run to get out of my head and into the world. And I believe it is the appropriate role of the world to both awe us and humble us. And that is, in fact, what I am seeking when I run. And so yes, I absolutely think it's a tiny exercise in humility. I think some people look at running and think the opposite, right? That it's a way to be skinny or fit or they think they can stop getting older. And for me, it’s the opposite: running cuts us down to size in the face of the universe in a really wonderful way.

AR: One of the earliest mentions – and one of the very few mentions – of running in Lost & Found is when you write that, “running was the one thing I kept doing during those long doldrums after my father died. I knew enough about its role in my life as body maintainer, mind clearer and mood regulator that I didn't dare stop.” I love that framing of running as an antidote to impotence, entropy or boredom. It's an action. It’s an act of discipline. So what muscles – not cardiac or skeletal, but intellectual and spiritual muscles – do you think you're flexing when you're running?

KS: I can think of two offhand. Back when I first started running, a friend who was a long-standing runner said to me that she had this mantra when she ran, which was “Who cares?” Meaning: my knee hurts. Who cares? I have a cramp on my side. Who cares? Just let go of whatever it is you think is afflicting you. Many of the messages the body can send you can be overwritten. I'm hot. Who cares? Or I have this enormous deadline looming. Who cares, right? I'll waste my time in worse ways than being out on a run. So one of them is the exercise of putting these thoughts in their place. And I guess the other muscle – and it's funny to think of it as a muscle because it's an act of relaxing, not clenching – is the “how to get out of my mind” mode. I don't want to be hopelessly trite and say that running is my meditation. But at its absolute best, there is a kind of translucency of mind you achieve while running, and things just flow past the way the ground is flowing past. In much the same way that what I'm chasing when I write is the pleasure of something that feels like a perfect sentence, when I run I'm chasing that translucency of mind.

AR: You write about experiencing a pervasive grief in Lost & Found; and you're a new parent; and we’re enduring a pandemic. All of these factors can make time feel slippery. Is there any way that running has helped you mark the days in a world in which time has gone sideways on us?

KS: It’s a really interesting question, but I don't think that's the role that running plays in my life. I once read and wrote about this very beautiful book called Poverty Creek Journal. And that was an instance where in a very specific way – daily, hourly, seasonally – running is a kind of timepiece. I know that to be, in some sort of material way, true in my life: I run a certain number of times, I run for a certain amount of time, I run through different seasons. The world carries on in its course. And yet, no, I don't think of it as somehow gluing me a little more tightly to the mechanisms of timekeeping in the cosmos. In fact, if anything, it’s kind of the opposite. I think of it, rightly or wrongly, as sort of liberating me from them.

AR: Do you feel more or feel less when you run?

KS: Ultimately, and mostly, I feel a lot. I have certainly had many, many runs that fill me with actual bliss and profound gratitude. Also, many runs in which I feel many things, like pain and exhaustion – or my own pulse in places I didn't know I could feel my pulse. So one feels a lot when running. But of course it can liberate you from certain kinds of feelings and help you set them aside for a while. So I guess both.

AR: What makes you a good writer?

KS: I think probably the same general subsets of things make all writers good writers – or at least make them love writing. The things that make people good writers are, in my case first and foremost, a love of language. I love sentences. I’m in it for the sentences. But you also have to love the world and storytelling: noticing stories in the world and feeling like it would be exciting to get to share them, or noticing ideas in the world and wanting to think them through. Those are the kind of inescapable basics that make a writer.

AR: I've heard you say that you're drawn to writing as a way of managing or grappling with abstract categories of meaning. Does it ever feel like running is a counterweight to that, a physical ballast to the intellectual work you're doing on a regular basis?

KS: I suppose. I think many things play that role in my life. It’s infinitely gratifying as a writer to have almost any other job to do. Because you do it and it's done, right? Like, “Oh, I’ve got to clean the kitchen” or anything that feels like it's got component parts and a To Do list and you can just check them off and be done. That to me is the chief counterweight of writing and my interest in abstractions. But I suppose running does have the virtue of being that thing you can always just go do. And writing, theoretically, you can always just go do, too. But a lot of what that looks like is sitting down and really trying to get yourself to stop avoiding your work, or thinking but having absolutely nothing to put on the page. So yes, in that sense, running is a counterweight to that.

AR: You've written about Haruki Murakami, a writer who runs. Malcolm Gladwell and Joyce Carol Oates are writers and runners. And you. Why do you think so many great writers run?

KS: Well, I certainly wouldn't venture to guess that they do so at a rate statistically different from the rest of the population. Although if I'm wrong about that, I would be very interested to learn. I'm guessing that among writers, many of them are seeking what I'm seeking, which is that beautiful kind of blankness in the mind into which sentences sometimes float, ideas sometimes float, problems solve themselves.

AR: What have you lost as a result of running?

KS: I have probably, first and foremost, lost a sense of myself as a disembodied bookworm, as someone who had no kind of claim to enjoy her body in those ways and enjoy the world in those ways. It was a very positive loss. It was a wonderful thing.

AR: And what have you found?

KS: Oh, incredible things. I have found the capacity to push myself. I have found beautiful physical places in the world. I have found the true pleasure of being on my own in some entirely new location, just me and my running shoes. I guess in that sense, I have found a little bit of – I don't want to say fearlessness, which sounds braver than I am – but I have found a kind of autonomy that's very precious.

AR: Is there an “&” of running for you? Is there a way in which running yokes together ideas in your life or otherwise plays that conjunctive role?

KS: Well, it's always “&”, right? I mean, it’s always: “This feels amazing and everything hurts.” Or here's the classic one: "That was awful and I'm so glad I did it.” 

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This interview first appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of METER magazine and has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.