Talk Test

The many modes of on-the-run conversation.

The story goes that Thelonious Monk and a fellow jazz musician sat next to each other in silence for the entirety of a long train ride. Upon arrival, Monk turned to his companion and said, “Nice talking with you!”

I thought of my 11th-grade girlfriend when I read about this (potentially apocryphal) incident. One night we’d been silently sitting next to each other in her living room for quite a while when she suddenly said, “When you’re really comfortable with someone, you don’t have to say anything.”

The uncanny part about her observation was that earlier that day Chris Chattin and I had done the standard 11-mile loop from my house. The route had a busy road crossing about seven miles in. When we got to it, Chris checked the traffic and said, “It’s okay,” and we scurried across. Those were the only words spoken during the 75-minute outing.

That one-two comfort-in-silence enlightenment from the spring of 1981 obviously made an impression. Few things bring more contentment than the air of ease between my wife and me on a dialogue-free dog walk or an evening spent reading in adjacent furniture.

But the run with Chris was also notable because it was an exception. When I read in magazines back then about how you should be able to hold a conversation on most runs, I thought, “Well, duh. What else do you do when you run with others?” Chris and our friend Steve and I talked nearly every minute of the many hours we ran together each week, with topics ranging from the jobs we hoped to avoid in adulthood and the relative merits of the first two B-52s albums to whether we could get kicked out of an all-you-can-eat joint and whether getting drunk before racing would make us impervious to pain. (In order: Avoid pretty much all jobs; first album better but second has “Give Me Back My Man”; yes; and no.) I sometimes wonder if we ran 70-mile weeks to give us more time to talk rather than talking so much because we were running a lot.

So it was jarring when I got to college and encountered a different conversational dynamic. Run chatter there was more typically guyish—competitive, sexually tinged, coarse, superficial. The main reason I kicked myself off the team first semester of freshman year was that I was so much slower than everyone and wasn’t enjoying my running. But the decision was made easier knowing I wasn’t missing much socially. When I rejoined my junior year I mostly ran with one or two others who also seemed uninterested in 12 miles of frat chat.

I sometimes wonder if we ran 70+-mile weeks to give us more time to talk rather than talking so much because we were running a lot.

If that makes me sound snobbish, so be it. Enjoyable conversation is my main motivation to run with others; that preference is probably why most of my running partners the past 15 years have been women. I love how within just a few steps it seems like we’re 1.3 drinks into happy hour, even though many of the people I run with are, like me, less discursive in civilian life. The feel-good brain chemicals associated with medium-pace running are part of the reason. There’s also running therapist Sepideh Saremi’s insight that running side by side or single file leads to more openness because of the lack of eye contact. People who have run with me maybe five times might know me better than do some of my siblings.

This was a happy chatty run, despite my companions’ irritatingly good form.

There are exceptions. During interval workouts and tempo runs, silence is mostly golden. Any talk while jogging between repeats should be about the workout itself—how it’s going, who’s leading the next one, etc. What happened at work yesterday or what’s for dinner tonight can wait for the cooldown. And although on a tempo run I can speak in brief sentences, I generally don’t want to. I want to concentrate on the task at hand rather than follow a chain of events or formulate follow-up questions. This is also why I tend to clam up toward the end of a long run that’s not going well or when I’m significantly dehydrated. Nothing personal!

I encountered an extreme version of this taciturn take when I spent a month in Iten, Kenya. The norm was no talking on even the easiest of runs. I’m pretty sure this happened not just because the locals I’d invite myself to run with had nothing to say to me. Silence was standard on large group runs I’d observe from the rear, even though happy chatting preceded and followed the runs.

The answer I got was that running was considered work and should be taken seriously. As someone who treasures quiet when in professional mode, I appreciate that.

Once, however, I couldn’t help myself. After a silent hour on red clay roads, I turned to the morning’s training partners, channeled my inner Monk, and said, “Nice talking with you!”