Reading on the run: Hitting the road to the cadence of great audio books makes the miles fly by

BY ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
During last week’s spell of unseasonable warmth, I ran a loop around Prospect Park with Vladimir Nabokov. Back in October, I took George Eliot across the Brooklyn Bridge for a ten-mile jog along the East Side. Evelyn Waugh, not known for his athleticism, kept good pace as we ran four brisk miles along the Hudson; Shakespeare has been spotted in his New Balance sneakers all around town.

Not to brag, but I think I didn’t do too poorly in my choice of running partners. And all it took was an iPhone and an Audible.com account.

It’s an alluring prospect, facilitated by modern technology: Run your miles and read your books at the same time. Like many of my fellow New Yorkers, I used to listen to music while exercising, but there is only so much Aerosmith one man can take. Tired of playlists that bisected my running workouts into four-minute parcels of blaring sound, I sought a richer diversion for my daily runs of four to five miles (with modestly more intensive runs on the weekends - to borrow from T.S. Eliot, I am not a marathoner, nor was meant to be).

That’s when I discovered Audible.com, an offshoot of Amazon (though once an independent company) that makes it incredibly easy to download and listen to books, from bestsellers like Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” to classics like the epic poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In the two years I have been using Audible, my wife (a more serious runner) and I have listened to more than 100 books, nearly all of them while running (though I have been told one can listen to audiobooks while sitting or even reclining). I have caught up on books I love but haven’t opened in some time, given the usual demands on time, like Nabokov’s “Lolita”and Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”

Meanwhile, my wife, who is a historian, has listened to weighty volumes like Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” I don’t know how she was able absorb 18^th-century history while doing her daily eight-mile workouts, but considering she easily bested my time in the Staten Island Half-Marathon last fall, I am not going to further comment on the matter.

There is something perfect about the union of reading and running, your feet and breath beating out a regular rhythm that serves as gentle background to the reader’s voice. After two or three miles, the workday fades away (I usually run in the evenings) and my brain is washed over by a second wave of concentration, allowing it to drift along on the spoken word. Forty minutes later, I find myself running across the Manhattan Bridge, listening to “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

I’ve heard the objection that audiobooks aren’t “really reading,” but I find myself far less distracted while listening on a run than I do while reading on my Kindle or iPhone, both of which provide far too many diversions if they are connected to the Internet (and who has ever disabled an Internet connection on such a device?). With my iPhone nestled inside my running gear, I have nothing to think about other than Jeremy Irons (who has done a few excellent audiobooks) eerily intoning, “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” And as John Schwartz noted recently in a New York Times essay, it is entirely possible that some minds are more able to concentrate on audiobooks than others.

I am not arrogantly putting myself in that category, but I love nothing more than to listen to a book about New York while running through those very same New York streets - “Bonfire of the Vanities” as I skirt the edges of the upper East Side filled with Social X-Rays and Masters of the Universe, “Bright Lights, Big City” on the cobblestoned streets of TriBeCa, where Jay McInerney’s nameless sybarite once roamed. Each step brings you closer to those authors’ unrecoverable past.

Purists will say that neither books nor music are appropriate for running, that one must concentrate on breathing and technique during a workout. Well, I am not a purist. Like most people, I like, maybe even need, a diversion when I run. And if I have my pick, I will confidently take Lady Chatterley over Lady Gaga.

Alexander Nazaryan is the New York Daily News Deputy Op-Ed Editor and an editor for the NYDailyNews.com books blog Page Views.