WHAT MAD PURSUIT

Competitive runners face triumphs, defeats, bitter rivalries and unlikely affections in these well-crafted short stories.

Elliott, a former Kansas University runner and author of The Competitive Edge: Mental Preparation for Distance Running(1984), zeroes in on the subculture of high school, collegiate, and professional runners to probe the human psyche under stress. A teen track phenom is found to have two hearts that prompt her toward light or darkness; a University of Oregon runner remembers his deceased teammate, the legendary real-life star Steve Prefontaine, as a narcissistic jerk rather than the sports martyr he became after a fatal car crash; an aching college runner gets an excruciatingly painful massage from a witchy physical therapist; a punked-out professional marathoner fights a duel of head games and physical assaults against her seemingly picture-perfect opponent, “the Bitch”; a 10-year-old enters a transcontinental race that shows her a panorama of America both beautiful and corrupt; a head coach boosts his assistants’ morale during a losing season by playing Russian roulette with a nail gun; a middle-aged accountant ponders the path his life might have taken had he run the mile 1.2 seconds faster. Elliott’s yarns feature piquant characters and lively, twisty plots that go down to the wire; they paint vivid portraits of the runner’s life, with its grueling training regimens, mystical coaching mantras—“Let your plans be dark...and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt”—and Machiavellian ploys (“I watch her right foot coming back, her back-kick, and I time it so that my left foot nicks her right, pushing her foot inward so it tangles with her left foot, causing her to trip….It always looks like an accident”). Elliott’s supple prose registers the beauty of athleticism—“He had a stride that was crafted by angels….Like those cheetahs on TV—from a trot to a blur in one second”—amid gritty, sharply observed settings (“I see interesting stuff on the roads…a dead rattlesnake smashed flat, a red bike missing a wheel, a roll of dollar bills, a stuffed crocodile, a large pink bra, a box of bullets, some puke that crows were eating, a license plate from Alaska, and a bracelet that said Briana on it”). The result is a finely wrought, resonant fictive world.

An engrossing collection of tales about grace—and disgrace—under pressure.