Vybarr Cregan-Reid's Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human presents a meditation on running, nature, and the pursuit of freedom in the modern world.
Running is not just a sport. It reconnects us to our bodies and the places in which we live, breaking down our increasingly structured and demanding lives. It allows us to feel the world beneath our feet, lifts the spirit, lets our minds out to play, and helps us to slip away from the demands of the modern world.
When Vybarr Cregan-Reid set out to discover why running means so much to so many, he began a journey which would take him out to tread London’s cobbled streets, the boulevards of Paris, and down the crumbling alleyways of Ruskin’s Venice. Footnotes transports you to the deserted shorelines of Seattle, the giant redwood forests of California, and to the world’s most advanced running laboratories and research centers. Using debates in literature, philosophy, neuroscience, and biology, this book explores that simple human desire to run.
Liberating and inspiring, Footnotes reminds us why feeling the earth beneath our feet is a necessary and healing part of our lives.
VYBARR CREGAN-REID is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Kent. He has written on running for the Guardian, Telegraph, Literary Review, and Radio 4. The author of Footnotes: How Running Makes us Human, he has also written numerous articles and essays for academic journals and a book on Victorian culture, Discovering Gilgamesh.