Again to Carthage

Again To Carthage is the long-awaited sequel to the cult classic novel Once a Runner, by John L. Parker, Jr. Though its publication was pushed back from November 2004 to late 2007, it is now available as a hardback.

Plot Summary

After his second-place finish in the Olympic 1500m race, Quenton Cassidy returned to a more normal life free from the rigors of training. Several years later, bored and disillusioned, he finds himself caught up in several personal tragedies that make him remember what it was like, as he says, to be "in a constant process of ascending," as when he was a runner.

Though his close friend and coach, Olympic gold-medalist Bruce Denton, advises against it, Cassidy takes a sabbatical of several years to see if he can reclaim at least a portion of his past and make his second Olympic team, this time in the marathon. Both Bruce and Quenton see that his youth has not abandoned him, and to the astonishment of the top runners - real and fictitious - of the day, it appears that he might still have what it takes to ascend.

Excerpt

An excerpt can be found at http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-243-297--12213-0,00.html

Quotes

"But still, I miss the spiritual certainty in the direction of that arrow. And when recently I looked around and saw people in my life dying of natural and unnatural causes it occurred to me that I myself would not live forever and that I had long ago given up the certainty of that arrow before I had to. It also occurred to me that I had a little bit of time left to reclaim it. To be a runner again, to know precisely what it is I'm trying to accomplish every day. It won't be the same, I know. It can't be. But it can be something...That said, I miss you. I've always missed you." - Quenton Cassidy

“What I mean is that some see a race, and they think that’s what you do. They sort of know you had to train, but they weren’t watching then, so they don’t understand how incredibly much of it there is. But to us, it’s almost the whole thing. Racing is just this little tiny ritual we go through after everything else has been done. It’s a hood ornament.” – Bruce Denton

"It would always be the best of times, he thought. That's what we are condemned to know. And it's not just the youth. Everybody gets that. It's youth blazing along on some kind of spectacularly high octane. It's like having a benign fever all the time. It's like being in love...It's the fever you live in that's the thing. The hot pulse of it all. The rest is just knickknacks and souvenirs. What you miss is the dizzy crazy lactic-acid storm of training, racing. The ten-milers laughing the whole way with guys who are your brothers in ways beyond genetics. The thousand quarter-mile intervals in the hot sun, grabbing your knees for balance afterward and rasping for air. Consuming huge mounds of fried anything-at-all and laughing at each other because you know not a molecule of it can stick to your slippery bones. And knowing nothing in your life will ever be that wild and alive again. No quest ever again as honorable or as noble." - Bruce Denton

"'Oh,' she said and put her face next to his steamy neck and smelled again the leathery-horsey-herb-spice thing and thought that if you could die this way if your heart could explode from this if it were possible to expire from the joy-pain of holding on to something so quiveringly alive that you don't think you can make yourself let go then yes, she, Andrea Cleland, would be no more. She whispered, 'If you tell me anything now , I would believe it.'" - Andrea Cleland

"But just as he was beginning to do so, he looked up and felt sick at heart. Tony Sandoval, at long last, was running away from him. And this really is it, he thought, as he tried to pick up his pace at least a little, to give some semblance of a fight, some gesture of defiance. But it was completely, utterly, depressingly hopeless, and he knew it. He knew it because ever since the twenty-mile mark when he had first felt himself beginning to come apart at the seams, he had realized something so fundamental, so surprising, so profoundly simple, that he knew he would never be the same again. He had finally found the ultimate limits to himself, the final boundary of his being that he had never before come near enough to truly contemplate, despite a lifetime of trying." - Quenton Cassidy

"It was there he found it, just past the twenty-mile mark of this too-long race at the top of the hemisphere as he watched a far better runner easily disappear ahead into the cooling mists now drifting down over them from the massive falls. It was there that Quenton Cassidy finally relinquished the last of his dream and the last of his youth and the last of the road all runners come. It was there that he finally accepted his fate and the fate of his kind." - Quenton Cassidy

© John L. Parker, Jr.