I don’t really do running clubs. I run as I dream—alone. But if I did join a club, it would certainly be to run through a post-apocalyptic wasteland with some new found mates, trying to reach my family before they shipped off forever. This is part of the scenario in the book, “The End of the World Running Club," a novel by Adrian Walker. The novel is a wonderful, harrowing, epic, witty, and emotional story of the apocalypse and one man’s attempt to be the father he wanted to be after the world ends.
I almost cried at the end of this book. Well, I did cry, but nobody saw. If a tear falls in the forest….
The main character, Edgar, is a more than a tad lazy, not a terrible man, but on a scale of 1 to 10 his parenting efforts stop at a 6. One morning after a bit too much to drink, the apocalypse starts to rain down, and he is forced to rise to the occasion. It’s time to bunker down. Throughout his adventures, he encounters others who are doing their best to survive, and of course many who have turned savage. Sometimes there is a great notion in the moral decay, but often there are hidden and deadly motives. I couldn’t help but imagine the cast of The Walking Dead in comparison journeying through this land. In other ways, this is a UK version of “The Road." It is told with a dry wit, more stoic, almost darkly comedic at times. The philosophical interludes of the main character reflecting on the human condition were told with such unique insight I could have listened all day.
This book is probably 75 percent apocalyptic story, and 25% running tale, but there is endurance and perseverance inherent in every move. You’ll spend time trapped in a cellar gasping for air and water and smelling the stink of your own body. You’ll spend time in ravaged cities with scavengers and in military bases trying to salvage something out of the wreckage. But you’ll also find great passages of running, most of which focused on the mental aspect of running. You’ll want to meet Jesus, you’ll want to holler at the rising sun, and you may highlight a ton of passages on your kindle, like I did. Take this one for example:
“That other beast inside you, the one your rarely see? You have it tethered tight. It watches and waits while you mess up your life, fill your body with poison and muddy your mind with worry. For some it takes just one call to free it. For others it takes five hundred miles of agony. But mine was free now, for the first time since I was a boy, running with a grin like a wolf through moonlit bracken. Pain ran alongside me, kindred and beautiful and grinning my grin. I’ll always be here, it said. Always, but now we’re friends.”
Any club that helps a runner make a friend of the pain and sets their beast free is right on.
When I wrote On the Lips of Children and The Jade Rabbit, I was trying to depict running a marathon as more than just running, but as a harrowing adventure of endurance and proving your strength for that which you love. It’s a good thing I hadn’t read this book first, for I would have found that the story I wanted already had been written. I stumbled upon it by accident as part of the incredible Kindle Unlimited program and am glad I did.
Check it out on amazon, only $2.99 for kindle.