I hate running but it's all I've got.

You look about and see your life has become nothing but someone else’s dull roadside attraction.

Crawling over the jungle gym, your children are oblivious to the world’s dullness. They are beautiful, perfect, and smart. Near the kids is your wife, who is also beautiful, perfect, and smart. However, none of these qualities have ever brought you contentment.

Some impossible thing, small though it may be, is lacking from your life, Something others seem to have without trying.

But you…you have a hole in you where anything good goes to fall out.The longer you stare, the more dissapointing reality becomes, so you look away. You've gotten good at looking away. Life is dull and vapid so you turn to drink and to video games to find meaning, anything to dull the pain of reality.

But is it really that bad? No, it never was. In fact, it’s not quite bad enough. Everything is just easy enough to never excite you.

Then, just when you are most withdrawn from the world around you, it ends.

One fateful morning, asteroids fall from space and destroy society as you know it. You awaken to this apocalypse hung over, still inebriated, in fact, and clueless. Only the quick wits of your family enable you to get underground in time before being turned into ash like the rest of your town.

You're left wondering if you're more glad that it's ended or wishing you'd been able to savor it all more before it was over.

The moment you've longed for to prove yourself has come and gone. You've failed as a father, failed as a protector.

You didn't think that it could fall apart any more, but you've come back to an empty shelter.

Your wife and children have been rescued without you. Or so you're told. They've been taken to the coast, 400 miles away. You're sitting there wondering if you were ever a good father or husband to them, and whether someone else will do a better job. In the end that's not the question that matters so much as whether or not you want a second chance (or is it a third?)

You set out on the road.

Between you and your family is a broken nation, shattered by asteroids, torn apart by uncapped human violence and depravity.

Around you are your friends, what few you have left. United by your common goal of reaching the coast in just a few short days. The roads are broken, the land is shattered, the world has ended, and yet all that remains is your family. The only way to reach them in time is to run.

And god, you hate running.

This is “The End of The World Running Club.”

Yesterday, I was out running through the suburbian hellscape of my rented little corner of the world.

It was hot, muggy, and just hours before a storm that would end up knocking out power for half the city. I was squeezing a run in because I've got this goal to run 5 miles a week. It's a small goal. I never complete it though. Aways too busy or too tired for pounding the pavement. But that day for whatever reason I ripped off my shirt, strapped on my running shoes and hit the road.

"Ooga shocka ooga shocka ooga shocka"

This is the mantra I murmured to myself, thinking of how the characters in End of the World Running Club replaced the sound of their feet on the broken ground of a shattered world with onomotopeias.

Without airpods and spotify, what else is a runner to do at the end of the world?

For me though, I had the rythym of my feet, and I was already bored. Why did I leave my airpods at home just to endure this boring ass, painful 2 mile because I had just finished reading a book that made me want to get back into running?

Well, despite being shirtless with my gut clearing the way before me as I shuffled forward step by step I was feeling pretty good.

Until the kids drove by.

They went by in a minivan packed to the gills with high schoolers. One kid leaned out the window and yelled "keep running!" With his fist in the air.

I responded likewise, fist in the air (Rocky style, not reich.)

Feeling good and encouraged, I was caught off guard in an ankle breaking twist when they shouted the next half; "You're too fat to stop!"

This was unironically the most encouraging thing I've heard all year.

I ran the next mile in a determined kind of floppiness, waiting for the runner’s high that never came.

I have felt it before, that intoxicating second wind that sweeps you back onto your feet.

But not today, nope. Not for me. Due to high cholesterol or hangover I'm not sure. It just didn't come for me.

But I kept running.

End of the World Running Club is all about that second wind

It's got a really good opening, just like any marathon, then decomposes rapidly into the kind of slog that makes an avid reader shake his head in fatigue.

Look, I loved this book. I'm going to end up giving it a rating of 4.3 out of 5 --spoiler alert-- and I enjoyed every bit of it. But it DID feel like a run and I'd be lying if I said it was anything but.

Usually my recommendation is to make books shorter. Cut out the filler, the fat, the few pages that facilitate the publishers page count but never add any real juice to the story.

This time, I will actually say it's better the way it is. The repetitive plotting of this book actually makes it much more relatable.

Our main character is literally running across Scotland in an odyssey level venture that takes him through all manner of psychological trauma, harrowing danger, and near fatal injuries— An overdose of both codeine and runners high.

The book feels much the same; dreamlike and haunting while also being somewhat compelling.

Step by step, page by page. Sometimes reading is about perservering till you hit that reader's high. Till the motion carries itself. Until the body moves on its own accord.

I give End of the World Running Club a 4.3 out of 5 possible stars.

It's the penultimate male panic attack and fantasy bound together. On one hand, our main character is facing the end of the world and his family needs him, and on the other, he’s a flabby piece of shit.

It's about running of course, and being a dad— trying to be a good dad. But ultimately it is mostly about running.

And it inspired me to get out there and keep running.

I'm too fat to stop anyway.