We Loved to Run Is The Running Novel You've Been Waiting For

Chatting with author Stephanie Reents about her cross country team novel, 80s running fashion, body image and more...

Before my sophmore year of college my rowing coach assigned us summer reading: Chris Lear’s Running with the Buffaloes As I remember it, our team needed a bit of a cultural reset and he thought the book, which chronicles the true story of the 1998 University of Colorado men’s cross country season, might help us get our priorities in order. It worked. For the next three years, our team was dominant.

Happy memories aside, Running with the Buffaloes is one of the few canonical running books in circulation. It often comes up in conversation alongside John L. Parker Jr.’s novel Once a Runner, as both capture the grit and glory of collegiate distance running, evoking the emotions of training and racing in ways that are rarely seen on the page. As with so many of the hallmarks of classic running, these are stories of skinny white dudes scampering along dusty roads in places like Boulder and Tallahassee.

I’ve often wondered when there’d be a Running with the Buffaloes or Once a Runner written about women. As a voracious reader who actively seeks out women’s sports stories, it’s rare to find a buzzy novel that centers the experience of female athletes. Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks captures the wonderfully weird magic of a girls’ field hockey team in Danvers, MA. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto is Back explores the messy emotions of a ruthlessly competitive tennis player. Layne Fargo’s The Favorites showcases the personal fallout from a skater’s maniacal pursuit of ice dancing glory. There’s been a host of great non-fiction books written about women’s running since Running with the Buffaloes, but I’ve yet to read one that explores team relationships with quite the same resonance.

Enter We Loved to Run, a novel by Stephanie Reents, which does all this and more. Set at a fictional western Massachusetts college in 1992, the book chronicles a cross country season from the perspective of a team as they seek to qualify for the national championship and grapple with events that challenge the foundations of their relationships.

I learned about the novel a few weeks ago from a review by Sam Robinson in his newsletter Footnotes.¹

We Loved to Run (and We Hated It)

If I’m being honest, I’d barely read the entire post before I googled Stephanie’s contact information and begged her to talk with me. She graciously sent me an advanced copy, which I devoured in a weekend (no small feat with a 14-month-old at home!). From the very first page, the novel’s narration welcomes you into the mind of the team.

“We hated a lot of things. A gradual hill in the second mile of a cross country race. Two hard workouts in a row. The little packets of Lorna Doones in our brown-bag lunches that Assistant Coach picked up from the college cafeteria: like vanilla chalk. Big toenails that were a tad too long. When our coach said ‘Here’s where you make your move.’ Inner thigh friction. Holes in our socks. Our mothers’ ‘Shouldn’t you take off one day a week?’

I do not often annotate books, but I underlined so many sentences that felt as if they’d been pulled from my own college training journals. I texted my sister quotes.

Reader, it should be clear by now that I’m in love with this novel. It comes out tomorrow. Buy it, devour it, share it with a teammate you miss.

As such, I was thrilled to get the chance to Zoom with Stephanie to discuss some of the book’s themes and am excited to share our conversation, lightly edited, with you below.

(Please be aware that at the very end of the discussion, we touch on sensitive subjects related to sexual assault. Feel free to skip if that’s not for you!)

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The Sweat Lookbook In Conversation with Stephanie Reents

How’s this for an impressive bio? Stephanie is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors' Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. We Loved to Run is her first novel.

LG: The first question I like to ask is about people's introductions to sports. Given the nature of the book, I'd love to hear about you started running and if you remember what you wore?

SR: I was introduced to running in elementary school. I think my gateway was the standing broad jump, which I think is only an event that elementary school children do. It's where you stand with your two feet together and see how far you can jump by catapulting yourself forward with your arms. I think from there, I do have a distinct memory. It's not unlike my character Kristen's in the novel, which was running around the block of my school for the Presidential Fitness Test.

I don't know how much I actually competed in running events in elementary school. But by the time I got to junior high, I joined the cross-country team, and I loved it. I also became a half-miler. I ran the 800.

I have a very distinct memory of breaking my leg playing soccer in seventh grade. I had to sit out, and there was some question about how I would do when I came back and ran track. I just remember my coach saying, “You're probably gonna be really slow.” But I ended up setting my PR. So junior high was when I got serious about distance running and really started to enjoy it.

In terms of what I wore. I mean, I'm old. I was born in 1970, so we're talking about the early 80s and late 70s, that's when I would have started being athletic. I think back then, we were all wearing nylon short shorts.

I certainly loved Nike's. I ran in Nikes, and probably just wore a cotton t-shirt on top. I don't even remember what those shirts were, but I'm sure they were, like fun run shirts. They were really totally collectible back then, so you would do a couple fun runs, and then those became the shirts that you ran in.

LG: It’s funny. Nowadays, we hype up the performance of the attire that we wear so much, and while it’s nice to have better-performing running apparel, you can run in a lot of the stuff from the 70s and 80s pretty comfortably. I'm sure you weren't annoyed, though maybe you would have appreciated a few more options...

SR: Exactly. There just weren't that many options back then or so it seemed to me in Boise, Idaho in the late 70s early 80s.

My dad was also a runner. He took up running when he was trying to quit smoking. And he became the kind of person who ran every day at lunch. He went to the YMCA that was near his office, and he had a group of friends who all ran together. And I think they all just ran in their nylon shorts and t-shirts, you know?

LG: I have another question specifically about clothing memories from the book, but I’ll wait to ask you about it. Let’s start with what inspired you to write We Love to Run. How long were you working on it?

SR: Well, the funny thing is that I wrote a version of a story about a group of cross-country runners quite a while ago. It would have been in the early 2000s when I was in graduate school. It was not a successful story, but it had the we voice in it. It was told from the perspective of the team, but it completely lacked a plot.

I loved that we voice. Occasionally, I came back to that story and thought, “Oh, is there something I can do with it?” In the twenty-tens, I did a bit more with that story, and I kept writing sections from the perspective of the team.

I started to work on the book in earnest in 2020, because I failed to sell another novel. I had the beginning, or the first 100 pages of another novel, and I had a completed story collection. I was trying to sell both to the publishing house that published my first story collection.

The editor said, “We don't like this novel, and we can't publish a story collection without a novel. Do you have something else?” And I said, “Well, I do have these chapters of this running novel.” So I pitched that to them, and that's when I started working on it seriously.

I didn't know exactly what the book was going to become when I started writing it. But I was really propelled by that we voice and by trying to get into the consciousness of a team. That seemed really fun. And it was kind of an exciting new writing challenge for me. I just felt like there was so much energy in that voice.

Running had been such a big part of my life for so long. I can still feel it in my body, the thrill of running. I knew I had a lot to say about that.

And then I think there's something so beautiful and complicated about women's friendships, and particularly about the friendships of women who are in competition with each other, but also in community with each other. I really wanted to explore that.

So those were the three things that motivated me to write the novel.

LG: I wanted to ask about comps, but based on the way you pitched the novel to your publisher, maybe you didn't have to give any. Is your PR or marketing team comping it to things like Once a Runner or Running with the Buffaloes with women?

SR: I have not read Once a Runner. Someone sent it to me recently. A friend of mine said, “It's horribly written, but you have to read it.”

LG: Ha! It's basically THE classic running novel, for better or worse.

SR: True. I don't know why I never knew about it. My brother said everyone on his college cross-country team read it, but I’d never even heard of it.

In terms of comps for the book, I was thinking about Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides for the We voice. And then I was thinking about the college baseball novel by Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding.

LG: It speaks to the fact that there isn't very much out there in terms of women’s sports in fiction. I love We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry, which came out while you were working on this book. And then there’s the sports romance genre. But this is not a space that's explored in fiction very often, let alone literary fiction.

SR: Right. There's the novel, The Knockout Queen, which is about a young woman who is into boxing, and I think then there is a more recent boxing novel, which I haven't read, that came out in the past year, but you're absolutely right there aren’t a lot of these kinds of books. I was thinking about the fact that women athletes are coming into their own in this country over the last ten years or so. We definitely need more novels about women athletes.

LG: That segues really nicely, because I felt like so many of my experiences in terms of being on a team and yet also being in competition with my teammates were there on the page. I'd love to talk more about the idea of how women compete and the nuances of that, because, like you said, we don’t see it written about very often.

SR: I think that women often have a more complicated relationship to competition than men. I played basketball for many years when I was growing up. I quit by the time I was in high school, but I was very serious about it. One of the reasons I didn't want to continue playing basketball was because I found it really difficult for my teammates and me to compete for the top five spots on the team, and then to leave that competition behind, and to be friends with each other when we left the court.

I don't want to overstate the differences between men and women, but it seems to me that men have an easier time leaving competition behind. There are probably a bunch of complicated reasons why that is the case.

I think women can feel really uncomfortable when they sense they're being competitive. You know, it's almost like… a bad word to admit that you're a competitive woman. When people ask me, “Are you competitive?” I never want to admit that I am competitive, but clearly I am. I just internalized something about it not being a good thing.

In a lot of areas in my life, not just in sports, I've seen the dance that women do to ensure that things are kind of equal between them.

I was trying to explore that idea when Danielle says, “Well, Kristen's the pretty one, and Chloe's the fast one. And I’m the one who really believes in the team, and Liv has a boyfriend, and Harriet is the feminist.” So, in Danielle's mind, each of them has a unique strength, and that’s what keeps things in balance on the team.

And so that once that comes under threat – Kristin is not only going to be the pretty one, she's also going to be the fastest one on the team – that’s going to cause everything to fall apart.

I've observed so many women go through those calculations in their minds. Right? You have X. I have Y. Therefore, we're equal.

It's so interesting, because … on one hand, it's competitive to compare yourself to someone else in that way.

But there's also something generous about it, too, acknowledging what someone else is good at or making sure they get to have their power in some particular way.

So, I wanted to explore that. I also wanted to write a book that was… I hesitate to use the word realistic because fiction is never exactly realistic.

But I wanted to write about a team of women who really do love each other. But are also real with each other. And also have their own weaknesses. And aren't always nice to each other.

But at the end of the day, they do love each other. They do really care about each other.

LG: Totally! I was looking back at some of the things I underlined. You call running “a truth serum.” I think that's one of the nice things about getting to be on a team when you’re younger is the way that the sport helps you be vulnerable. It helps expose things that might take more time if you didn't have this kind of traumatic bonding experience.

SR: You just spend so much time together, and you spend so much time running side by side with someone else. It’s such a wonderful opportunity to really get to know someone. I certainly felt that way about some of the friendships I developed with the women I ran with. There was such pleasure in spending that time with them.

LG: It creates intimacy, even if there's friction.

SR: I think that at some point, Kristen thinks about, like, the sense of fear, that someone's running behind you, and they're trying to catch you, but that fear is motivating. Right?

You know they're on your heels, and so you're going to push yourself even harder to keep them from catching you. There’s always a kind of double-edged sword, that you want to beat these people, but you're also becoming faster because you know they could beat you.

LG: It’s interesting because the idea of competition in terms of racing other teams isn't shown on the page that often. You deliberately leave it out in some places. It’s more about competition in this inter-team sense and less about the external. I’m curious about that choice.

SR: Yeah, that's funny that you say it's not on the page, because in an earlier version of the novel, my editor and agent said, “We want more running.” And I was like, “Are you kidding me?” I felt like I'd written so many running scenes.

There's so much about practicing or training for a sport like cross-country, where there's always an opportunity to turn a workout into a race and to really hammer people. So in some sense, it's not the case that every workout is a competition, but they can so easily become competitions. Right?

They can become an opportunity to kind of psych someone else out by beating them. And to somehow get yourself into a better position so that you are going into the next race in a stronger position.

LG: Switching gears a bit, what I’m interested in exploring in sports and fashion is this burden that women athletes have when it comes to presentation. I was re-reading things I had underlined in the book, and I love this section:

”But looks weren’t everything. Weren’t we, women at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country in the final decade of the twentieth century, supposed to know that, if we knew anything at all?”

I’m interested in talking a bit about how you wanted to examine issues of body image in the novel. You do so with a lot of nuance and realism, I think.

SR: Well, unfortunately, women are always being judged by their appearances. And women are judging themselves by their appearances. And then it becomes even more complicated when you're a woman athlete. Or maybe complicated in a different way when you're a woman athlete, because then there may be a whole set of expectations around what you think or what others think will suggest that you have a strong body and that you're going to excel at what you do.

I was really interested in the tyranny of the idea that this group of cross-country runners need to be really thin and strong. And the way they can step outside that expectation and say, “That it's fucked up!” But at the same time, they've completely internalized it.

I think that is something that a lot of women struggle with. I do remember there was a moment when I was a college, a first year in college. I can't remember if it was the track team or the cross-country team, but we were all weighed. And we were all told to lose five pounds. A number of people quit the team and and it seemed ludicrous. But at the same time, I think the me back then was like, “Okay, I'll try to lose five pounds.”

I don't remember if I did or not, but it was just something we were supposed to do. As a young woman, I made so many connections between being really thin and being really fast. Really screwed up things. Like, if I didn't get my period, that’s great, because that meant I was really fast. Or if I didn't have breasts, that’s great, because that meant I was really thin and I was going to be really fast.

I think you can be a really smart, self-aware woman, and still be susceptible to the kind of cultural messages we're receiving around our bodies.

LG: That's where the we voice is really effective. Because it's a team-wide contagion, not just an individual issue.

Building on this idea of presentation, I loved how you had Danielle pulling out lipstick and putting it on her teammates before races. You said that she performs “this girly magic.” You wove so many little specifics, which are very true to women’s sports, into the story. Why was that important to you to show?

SR: I think it's easy to be a little bit superstitious as an athlete. That superstition can lead to certain sorts of rituals that you think will lead to a good performance.

So I was thinking about the kind of small pleasures or small rituals that my characters might engage in like painting their nails before a race, or shaving your legs before a race, or Danielle putting lipstick on everyone before a race.

I think you’ll do anything to trick yourself into believing that everything is going to come together for you in that race.

So that’s what I was trying to get at with those small things. You think about swimmers, for instance, how they’ll practice in two swimsuits to make themselves feel heavy when they're practicing. And then they take that all off when it’s time to feel fast. Some of the stuff around clothing was certainly about covering up. I came of age in a time when baggy was really in: the “Pretty in Pink” era, where everyone was wearing oversized clothing and giant shoulder pads, and big shirts.

So you layer yourself in all these clothes before a race, and then you take everything off and suddenly you're sleek and fast. There’s something psychological about, say, letting your legs get really hairy, and then you shave them, and then you feel so fast.

You're right, it's interesting the way some of it completely plays into some kind of more traditional ideas around beauty. I think that there was also something about letting yourself be feminine. Again, for me, coming of age in the late 80s, early 90s, I definitely considered myself a feminist. And definitely thought that there were a lot of things that I shouldn't like because I was a feminist.

But then to say, “I am a feminist and I'm a runner and a powerful person” but I'm going to shave my legs, because I like the way it feels. Even though people were critiquing that as buying into the beauty standards of the day.

Some of it was this idea that you could embrace your feminine side and feel like that was a slightly rebellious act.

But that might have just been my own kind of quirky brand of feminism.

LG: I get that! I used to make our uniforms. I loved making them pink because it was fun feeling like strong, big women, while racing in this super girly color.

SR: Absolutely. I had fuchsia tights in high school. We just loved them. Every girl on our cross-country team had the same fuchsia tights, and we won states that year. It was definitely because of those lucky fuchsia tights.

LG: I was looking out for the ways clothing showed up in the book because we were going to have this conversation, but I was struck by the way you used clothing to kind of underscore some of the larger themes. Like this passage:

“We were supposed to wear gray tees courtesy of the athletic department, but they were too new and stiff with chokey collars. Plus they said Property of Frost. We were philosophically opposed to being anyone’s property.”

SR: We had so little control over our uniforms. I remember we had to start wearing diaper shorts to race in, those like tight little shorts. And I just hated them. I didn't want to wear them. I can't recall if we won that battle or had to suck it up, but we were really limited.

The other thing is that our mascot was Lord Jeffrey.

So we had this ridiculous mascot, and before every race, we had to cheer, “Go, Lady Jeffs!” I mean, how lame is that?

LG: I’d be remiss not to ask you about one of the other key themes in the book, which is the women grappling with fraught relationships with men and the aftermath of sexual assault. I’d love to talk about what you were looking to explore through these elements, which, unfortunately, are also very true to the experience of a lot of female athletes.

SR: One of the things I was interested in exploring was the intersection of trauma and the psychology of a competitive athlete. The women in my book have learned to be really, really strong, and have learned to, um, tolerate a lot of pain in their training. I was thinking about how that would necessarily or possibly make it more difficult for them to acknowledge emotional pain.

There's the mentality, you just get through it. You're strong. You're stronger than everyone else. You can overcome this thing just as you can overcome a difficult workout. The thing about trauma is that sometimes, just gritting your teeth doesn't make it go away. That seemed very potent and interesting to me.

I was also thinking about the fact that this is a moment where we're just getting the language to talk about things like date rape. Up until this point, most people, when they thought about rape they thought about a stranger attacking a woman in an alley.

But the most non-consensual sexual encounters happen between two people who know each other. I was thinking about the moment where you start to understand, or you start to have language to talk about things like date rape. The fact is that many of the characters are still coming to terms with what that means. And then finally, I was also thinking about the fact that, unfortunately, this still persists.

There’s been an enormous amount of work done around consent, particularly on college campuses. But it’s a complicated issue. I think that often men are socialized to be aggressors, and women are socialized to be passive. And that women will say no until they finally give up and say yes.

Those were the kind of things I wanted to explore.

LG: You do a really good job of illustrating the way women often blame themselves for what’s happened to them.

SR: Yes. Or thinking somehow you could have control over the situation.

As an athlete, you are conditioned to believe that you can control a lot. But that's not always the case. For me, as a runner, the moment I realized that I should trust my body, to understand that I couldn't think my way into a perfect performance, when I learned to step back and say, “Okay, you've done the training. Just let your body do what it knows how to do.” I was so much happier.

There’s so much magical thinking around competition. And magical thinking that women engage in when something bad happens to them. They think that they should blame themselves, or they think, if only they'd done something different, there would have been a different outcome.

LR: Being an athlete, you learn to think in a very specific way to essentially force yourself to do really hard things, and that gets you results, but it makes it very hard to be kind to yourself. How can you succeed without beating yourself up? It its even harder when you’re 20 and you don’t know any better.

SR: Exactly. There's something so masochistic about a lot of sports, you know?

You have to love the pain. To find pleasure in the pain.

LR: And now we’re full circle, because that’s how you start the book: This recitation of the ways we hate to run and yet we love it too. And the magic, if you can call it that, of this sport and life is that both things can be true at once.

You can buy We Loved to Run here. Learn more about Stephanie and check out her book tour schedule on her website.

1. Check out Sam’s video interview with Stephanie here.