Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

September 6, 2021
In this stark debut, Thompson, a trauma psychologist and ultramarathoner, recounts his difficult path from severe depression and substance abuse to sobriety. After meeting his wife at the Burning Man Festival in 1999, the author emigrated from England to San Francisco to marry her. Struggling with the severe depression that he’d lived with since childhood and medicating his pain with a variety of drugs—including crystal meth and cocaine—Thompson checked in to a psychiatric ward in 2005. Later, while in recovery, he channeled his energy into ultra-long-distance running (running anywhere from 50 to 200 miles), opting to let his body’s endorphins lift his spirits and help him rebuild “a feeling of togetherness” with his family. “Ultrarunning can sound like insanity,” he writes. “But ultrarunners understand its mad logic: running for days and nights nonstop brings you right up to the edge of breakdown but also to the opportunity for breakthrough.” This “breakthrough” eventually led Thompson to seek a career in psychology and a career helping others work through the same shame, guilt, and fear that he details here with heart-wrenching clarity. This will beam a ray of hope to those dealing with addiction, as well as their loved ones. Agent: Bonnie Nadell, Hill Nadell Literary.

September 15, 2021
In his debut memoir, a clinical psychologist and ultrarunner looks back on an eventful life from the hard-won stability of middle age. What brings a person to where they are? Anyone can profitably ask this question at any time, but there's something about being on a 205-mile run that forces the issue. Thompson had completed numerous ultramarathons before attempting a four-day race around Lake Tahoe, his most challenging competition yet. The race presented the author with four days of increasing fatigue and disorientation during which deep self-reflection proved inescapable. "On the surface," he writes, "an ultramarathon is neither necessary nor reasonable. And yet men and women in the tens of thousands appear compelled to do such things....It follows from the unreasonable nature of an ultramarathon that the ultrarunner's motive must reside in a domain outside reason: the unconscious mind, the shadows of times forgotten, yet still felt." In this book, the unconscious becomes conscious, the forgotten is recalled, and feelings become thoughts. Thompson, a staff psychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is out to challenge the norm that "mental health professionals almost never tell their own stories" in what is much less a running book than a psychological self-interrogation. For Thompson, running is one method of treatment--along with therapy and Zen practice--that works for him in learning to face up to his childhood trauma, mental illness, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, and lifelong tendency to run away from difficult experiences. A therapist might grant that revisiting the minute details of childhood serves as a healing process, but readers may be less patient with Thompson's tireless self-examination, which sometimes crosses into self-indulgence. But if that is the price of the author's keen insight into the psyche and the profound observations of which he is capable, so be it. Like a long run, there are difficult stretches along the way, but in the end, they're worth the reward.

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September 15, 2021
The Tahoe 200 Endurance Run, with a course that goes around Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, ranks as one of the most scenic and toughest multiday footraces. In 2018, British-born Thompson, a clinical psychologist and Zen Buddhist, successfully completed the 200-mile challenge. He eloquently captures the beauty of communing with nature in details runners will soak up, but the focus of this memoir is about a man who had suffered terribly with depression since childhood, and, in later years, overcame drug and alcohol addiction, but not before attempting suicide, which landed him in a psychiatric hospital. As he shares, running nonstop for consecutive days and nights can make one break down but also can be an opportunity for "awakening and liberation." Although confusing at times, as Thompson jumps back and forth through past remembrances, this is a hopeful story of resilience by a man baring his vulnerability as a trauma survivor and who fought his demons, thanks in part to his experiences as an ultrarunner.

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