I met Jamik Ligon some five years ago at the gifted-education school in New Jersey where his son and mine were students. He stood out as an athletic-looking black guy with a scar on his head, none of which was common among the parents. It soon came up he’d run more than 30 marathons. Also, he was working for Nike as a manager, or “coach,” focused on footwear sales at the company’s Manhattan store. He asked what sports I follow, and I expressed an interest in the Olympics, meaning I’d some willingness to watch them. He mentioned some athletes of the then-upcoming Games, none of whom I’d heard of.
The idea arose, at my instigation possibly, that we go for a run. Running’s not something I do often, nor with impressive speed or stamina, but it’s an appealing way to supplement my exercise regimen that’s mostly centered on martial arts. Also, I was eager to get some insider advice on what running shoes to buy, preferably with an employee discount involved. We went for a run at a public-school track in our area, with more laps on his part than mine. I never got shoes or a discount, as Covid shut things down.
Jamik expressed an interest in writing. Soon after our run, I encouraged him to review a book on running, which he did for Splice Today while recovering from the virus. We stayed in occasional touch; he moved elsewhere in New Jersey, and our kids were no longer in school together. He said he wanted to write a memoir about running; when he texted that he was 20,000 words in, I realized this wasn’t just a notion. Later, he told me he was at 60,000 words and almost done. He never asked me to edit the manuscript or give feedback, and I didn’t offer, not wanting more work. It’s just as well I didn’t have a hand in it, as such polishing might’ve obscured idiosyncrasies that help make Every Runner, Every Day as engaging as it is. The book’s passionate and personal, a paean to running from the perspective of someone whose background’s highly uncommon among runners.
Ligon grew up in the Brownsville, Brooklyn, which he introduces as “a really rotten place, where rotten things happened in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and probably five minutes ago.” It’s long been one of New York City’s most crime- and poverty-ridden areas. “Never ran, never will,” is a local slogan, a boast about unwillingness to flee a fight. Jamik’s scar was from someone trying to bash in his head, an incident he describes in his book. His mother was 16 when she had him. “My father may or may not have been in jail that day,” he writes.
Jamik would beat the odds facing boys in the neighborhood, though. His grandmother, a cleaning lady, played a central role in his life, supporting relatives as long as they were working or in school. He got into Brooklyn Tech, a specialized high school, and moved to Bedford Stuyvesant, which was safer than Brownsville. He’d eventually write a college application essay about “rough and tumble Brownsville, Brooklyn,” a phrase he believes got him into Columbia University, from which he received a degree at age 35. His wife, a physician, laughingly asks what the hell “rough and tumble” even means.
The African-American percentage of the running population is variously estimated somewhere in single digits, compared to over 12 percent of the general population. One study put black marathon finishers at below one percent. Such low participation’s obscured, Ligon notes, by the presence of well-known black runners at elite levels. Jamik had no experience with running until he joined the Marines. He didn’t graduate boot camp, a failure that haunts him (and is left murky), but he felt an ongoing affinity for the Corps, not least because they introduced him to running. Marine Corps Marathons would be among the many marathons he’d complete over the years. He’d also do ultra-marathons as long as 100 miles.
Jamik writes about rising before dawn and other exigencies of the runner’s life, and about various locales that he’s lived and run in. He writes of vacationing in rural Georgia, running not far from where Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in 2020. His description of going to Oregon has the feel of a pilgrimage, with Nike’s headquarters just a small part of the state’s centrality to running, alongside the Hood to Coast race, and the legacy of Steve Prefontaine, or Pre, avatar of the 1970s running boom, who died in a car crash at 24. Jamik traces Pre’s steps with the veneration duly accorded to a saint.
For Jamik, who’s started a coaching business, running’s a religion (though he’s also a convert to Islam). For one such as myself, who’s the runner equivalent of a Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer, Every Runner, Every Day offers a better understanding of the devotion of hard-core runners. It will also serve as a proselytizing tool, making readers want to give running a try or step up their game. Running helped take Jamik Ligon far from the world he grew up in, and he gives a vivid sense of how it can uplift a life.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky