Harry Potter and the Trial of Miles

[ Originally written for publication in the January 2009 issue of the Fleet Foot, the newsletter of the Gulf Winds Track Club. ]


Last year J. K. Rowling released her seventh and final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It set all sorts of publishing records; according to Fortune magazine, Rowling is now wealthier than even Michael Jordan, and without the benefit of a shoe contract. So this year Rowling’s publication of The Tales of Beedle the Bard is accompanied by a great deal of excitement. I’m afraid I’m not going to join in, though. Rowling lost me when she stopped writing about running.


I was never a big fan of Harry Potter, and only read the first book to see what all the fuss was about. I wasn’t that impressed, so I’m not sure why I picked up a copy of the second book. While I was reading, though, I ran across Rowling’s first reference to distance running:

"...someone was patting him on the back as though he'd just won a marathon..." (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, p.84)

Not as if he had scored a winning soccer goal, or as if he'd caught the snitch in the Quidditch World Cup, nor even as if he had won a general sort of race, but as though he had won a very specific sort of distance run. Was Rowling a distance runner? Was she an athletics fan? Did she happen to be writing when the London Marathon figured prominently in the sports news? I would have forgotten this one simile, but as I read further into the series, there were more.

"...he sank into a chair, feeling as exhausted as if he'd just run a mile, and felt his legs shaking." (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, p. 242)
(Thirteen-year-old Harry Potter is apparently not in good enough shape to handle long distances yet.)

"Harry lay flat on his back, breathing hard as though he had been running." (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, p. 16)
(At fourteen, Harry has yet to learn the merits of doing a proper jog-down.)

"'Nothing, Arthur,' said Sirius, who was breathing heavily as though he had just run a long distance." (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 521)
(Apparently the run was not at a conversational pace. Perhaps it was a tempo run?)

"Professor Umbridge was still breathing as though she had just run a race when she strode into their Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson that afternoon." (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 666)
(Dolores Umbridge isn’t in this just for the fitness; she’s also a competitor!)


There are other running references. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry’s uncle describes a noise as “a racket like a starting pistol” rather than like a more generic firearm. In the same book Lucius Malfoy tells Harry, “Potter, your race is run.” Okay, that one is a cliché, but it’s a running cliché. And by the end of the book we’re reading that Harry “wanted to run, he wanted to keep running....”


With so much metaphor devoted to running in four of the first five books, I was certain that in the sixth book Harry Potter would be forming a cross-country team at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the seventh novel would feature a climactic showdown where Harry and Lord Voldemort enter the London-to-Brighton Road Race. Therefore, soon after the seventh novel was released I ordered copies of both the sixth and seventh books, hoping to finish reading before someone told me who won the final race.


There was nothing. In all 1,411 pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Rowling fails to mention competitive distance running even once. After four volumes of using distance running as a metaphor for fatigue and glory, she seems to have moved on to other images.


So I’m not that enthused about The Tales of Beedle the Bard. I still wonder, though, why so much running crept into Rowling’s work from 1998 to 2003.

Herb Wills

Postscript: Some time after I wrote this, I discovered this passage on page 304 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

"He strode up and down the tent, feeling that he could have run a mile..."

So there are running references in five of the seven Harry Potter books. It's still not enough to make me to rush out and get a copy of Beedle the Bard, but I'm still wondering if there's any real connection between J. K. Rowling and running.