Runners fill New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at the start of the city’s 2005 marathon

Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen
By Christopher McDougall
Profile £16.99, 287 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
By Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
Vintage £7.99, 181 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Once a Runner
By John L. Parker, Jr
Scribner $24, 273 pages

Blade Runner
By Oscar Pistorius
Virgin £12.99, 186 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

A Race Like No Other: 26.2 Miles Through the Streets of New York
By Liz Robbins
Harper £14.99, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.59

In the 1970s large numbers of people began running for the first time. John L Parker, himself a former champion runner, wrote a novel about the habit in 1978. But no publisher wanted Once A Runner, so Parker self-published it.

He sold copies at races out of the boot of his car, and a cult developed around the book. In 2007, search engine BookFinder rated it the most sought after out-of-print book in the US. This spring, the book was republished – this time by Scribner, a commercial publisher in the US.

Now, a bunch of books on running has arrived at once. One of them, by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, even achieved a rare honour for a translated memoir of being advertised on posters on the London Underground. All these books tackle the great question that a Parisian reclining on a park bench once shouted at me as I lumbered into the woods: “Why?”.

So why do we run?

Running long distances used to be considered beyond most humans, like visiting the moon. Phidippides, who is credited with running the first marathon in 490BC, supposedly died on the spot straight afterwards. As late as the 1960s it was considered unacceptable to run around your neighbourhood in sweaty clothes. The New York City marathon is now the biggest race on earth; when it was first held in 1970, there were only 126 male participants and one woman. The winners received unused bowling trophies.

Many things were changing at that time. The social revolutions of 1968 inaugurated the era of “informalisation”, the spread of permissive behaviour. It became acceptable to run around town in the new sports kit that Nike and others were making. Even old women were now allowed to play sport in public. Many old people found running congenial. Born To Run, Christopher McDougall’s book on people who run vast distances, even unearths a 96-year-old ultra-runner. McDougall, a magazine journalist and runner, also reports that 64-year-olds average the same pace in marathons as 19-year-olds.

Today “distance running is the world’s number one participation sport”, says McDougall. Indeed, judging by these books, many people now identify themselves above all else as runners. No wonder they want to read about running.

It’s no coincidence that the running craze also took off at the same time as the obesity epidemic. People worried more about their health, and sought solitary sports that they didn’t have to do in the old social units. “You don’t need anybody else to do it,” gloats Murakami, explaining why he began running in 1982. Political scientist Robert Putnam has written of a social trend towards “bowling alone” – people taking their leisure alone rather than in groups. Running, too, was a sport for an atomised society.

Runners divide into two distinct tribes. The first consists of casual runners: those of us who trudge a couple of painful miles to lose weight and perhaps live a bit longer.

One reason people run – and read running books – is that casual running often confers status. Jogging is considered an outward marker of achievement. It helps draw the American class divide between the thin and the fat. For example, a daily group jog in Central Park, starting at 5.30am, features “many of New York’s top executives, lawyers and traders”. One author, Liz Robbins, calls it a “power breakfast”.

Casual runners are rational actors – we understand what they get out of it. More baffling are serious runners: the smaller tribe that runs ever longer distances.

These books draw a cumulative psychological profile of the serious runner. Many of them have abandoned marathons for double marathons and worse. There is always a next step, such as the six-day, 151-mile Marathon des Sables, or Marathon of the Sands, across the Sahara.

Serious runners don’t do it for their health – they massacre their joints. But their motives aren’t easily captured in words. It’s as hard for them to explain why they do it as it is for an astronaut to describe walking on the moon. We will never go there.

That may be why none of these books entirely satisfies – and also why many serious runners appear to be hermits. Parker’s hero, for example, is a miler named Cassidy. He’s suspended from his Florida college during a 1970s controversy over the length of athletes’ hair, and ends up a hermit living in a cabin.

Murakami, too, takes up running after moving to the Japanese countryside. And McDougall’s book climaxes in a 50-mile race “in a sniper-patrolled corner of the Mexican outback”, home to the isolated Tarahumara Indians, famed long-distance runners.

Running, it seems, offers an escape from the world, with all its chores, noise and complications. We casual runners sometimes imagine that serious runners get time to think. Rather, according to Murakami and Parker, part of the pleasure is entering a trance in which you don’t think. You can run away.

In explaining why people run, McDougall returns to human origins. Drawing on scientific research, he argues that we were, literally, “born to run”. After man first stood erect, he probably survived by running animals to death. Humans were slower than antelopes and many other mammals, but could keep going longer. We hunted in packs, and after a couple of hours our prey would generally collapse.

The Bushmen of the Kalahari desert – Africa’s last hunter-gatherers – have remained excellent long-distance runners, he notes. Indeed, some time in the 1960s, a South-West African policeman, in a spirit of scientific inquiry, chased a Bushman in his Land Rover over sandy, bush terrain, and the little runner kept going for almost a whole day. Nowadays most of us hate long runs because we don’t have to do them; our brain urges us to relax. But some capacity remains.

Serious runners don’t seem concerned with pleasure. These books seldom dwell on the “runner’s high” – the famous release of endorphins. Instead, Parker’s novel has some gruesome descriptions of racing. Here’s Cassidy winning the biggest mile race of his life: “… it hurts but go all the way through do not stop until you are past it you cannot afford to give the son of a bitch anything … so holdit holdit holdit Jesus Christ hold it holditholdit HOLDITHOLDITHOLD IT …”

In different ways these books tell us that serious runners welcome pain. Indeed, that may even be the point of running. “If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon,” asks Murakami. “It’s precisely because we want to overcome that pain that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it.”

Serious runners push through pain to touch their human limits. Murakami writes: “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well.”

For Parker, this touching of limits is what distinguishes serious runners from the rest of us: “Fleeing from an armed killer or deadly animal, a layman will soon find the frightening limits that even stark terror will not overcome. The runner knows such boundaries like he knows the sidewalks of his own neighbourhood.”

At our human limits, we apparently feel not joy but a sense of achievement. And that is another reason why running took off after 1968. In the age of meritocracy, achievement became a dominant value. Running is an achievement that almost everyone can have.

This becomes apparent in A Race Like No Other, a mercilessly positive account of the New York City marathon by Liz Robbins, a New York Times reporter. Practically every runner in the book is a confident yet humble hero who triumphs against the odds. “The will to live and the will to win carry 38,676 today to the limit and beyond,” Robbins tells us. However, another of her numbers gives the game away: only 1,129 runners fail to finish the race. This is a Herculean task that you don’t need to be Hercules to complete. Even Oprah Winfrey has run a marathon.

The South African Oscar Pistorius, author of Blade Runner, exemplifies the runner as an unlikely achiever. He was born without fibula bones, and as a baby had both his legs amputated. But he became a winner nonetheless. Injured in a rugby match, he turned sprinter by accident. In his first race he unknowingly smashed a world record for runners with his disability. Soon he was fast enough to compete against the best runners with legs. Pistorius has become a symbol of achievement, or as he puts it, “a superhero for disabled people worldwide”.

Some of these books will struggle to appeal beyond the runners’ ghetto. Parker nicely conveys the horrors of running, but the book’s cult status among serious runners remains a mystery to me. Murakami’s memoir is a gentle read but the incessant banalities are reminiscent of Adrian Mole’s diary. Here’s the great author on the aftermath of a knee twinge: “The next morning, after I woke up, washed my face, and drank a cup of coffee, I tried walking down the stairs in our apartment building.” Lo, the twinge has gone.

Pistorius is a simple Christian with no literary pretensions. Blade Runner is an extraordinary story but an ordinary book.

Robbins would make a great researcher: excellent legwork, shame about the tin ear. No detail is too insignificant for her to record, and she helps purvey fantasies about noble savages: “Lel [a Kenyan runner] believes that more than anything about growing up in the Rift Valley – the starchy diet or the altitude of 5,000 to 10,000ft above sea level or the long runs to school – the Kalenjin warrior heritage is what makes Kenyan runners so successful.” Devoutly as I admire Kalenjin heritage, I suspect that their diet, altitude and daily long-distance running help them rather more.

Robbins’s book suffers from its overwritten opening. McDougall’s does too – the overwritten opening is a staple of contemporary American non-fiction. But Born To Run later recovers. McDougall eventually slows down, breathes out, and reaches the state of bliss that runners, or so we are told, very occasionally experience in the midst of an endless run.

All these books may prove relics of our time, however. A report, “Sport Participation in the European Union”, published in 2005 by a Dutch centre for research on sports in society, says the growth of running has stagnated since the 1990s. “Diverse fitness sports” have taken off instead. Activities such as Pilates, yoga and treadmills are good for the heart and waistline but they don’t destroy the knees. Future generations may wonder how we ever hit upon such a painful and unprofitable craze.

Simon Kuper is an FT writer based in Paris