Hello, hey, how's it going?

Welcome to The Other People Show.

I am Brad Listy and I am in Los Angeles.

It's good to be with you.

Thanks for tuning in.

I hope you're okay out there.

I hope you had a decent Thanksgiving.

I have a great episode to share with you today.

My guest is Emily Pfeiffer, author of a new memoir called The Running Body.

Plato and Aristotle, they were always trying to think about the relationship between pain

and pleasure. And they were trying to work it out, and they would get into these arguments about whether

or not you could have any pleasure without pain.

And the example that sort of crystallized it for me is one of these men argued that the

reason that eating is pleasurable is because hunger is painful.

And so he was saying because of that, they're actually, you can't have pleasure without pain.

And I'm not saying that I think that that's true, but I think that is like the logic under which running and runners kind of

operate. All right, that was Emily Pfeiffer, author of the memoir entitled The Running Body,

available now from Autumn House Press. The running body won the 2021 Autumn House nonfiction prize.

It is what I would call a hybrid memoir, a combination of personal history.

It's a meditation on body dysphoria, competitive running, addiction, loss, healing, beauty standards.

And it also functions as a cultural analysis.

Emily Pfeiffer was a collegiate distance runner at the University of Ohio and in the running body, she

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