The first thing I noticed about Matt Inman, as he got out of his Tesla electric car in the parking lot of Seattle's Discovery Park, is that he is not, in fact, a horrifying figure with a shrunken chest and monstrous thighs twice the width of his hips. I could be forgiven for being surprised, as that's how he's depicted himself in his popular online comic, The Oatmeal.
I don't read many online comics, especially ones named after bland foodstuffs, but sometime in mid-2013, approximately everybody in the world sent me a link to Matt's long-form comic "The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances." It came to me through Twitter and e-mails and texts, maybe even a telegram–"HAVE U SEEN THIS STOP AMAZING STOP." What was amazing was that most of the people who sent me the comic weren't runners. Some were, certainly, but many were people who had never run, or who wanted to run, or who wondered why anybody would ever run. They were all sending me the comic because Matt managed to accomplish what so many (including me) have tried to do and failed: explain the runner's mind to the nonrunner. So when I went to Seattle in the fall, I called him up and invited him for a run.
"When I first got into running about 10 years ago, I could barely run a mile," Matt said, as we loped through the park. "I would always find a waypoint–the next tree, or corner–and I said to myself, I am being chased by this unhappy depressed fat man. And if I don't reach that point before he does, he will catch me, and I will become him."
The man, he admits readily, was him, or at least the fat, slovenly kid he says he was. Running away from him led him to lose weight and to run countless half-marathons (with a PR of 1:30), three marathons, and finally, two 50-mile ultras. Today, at 32, Matt is good-looking with a slender runner's build (his legs are strong but perfectly normal) and, let's face it, none of the pasty vampiric pallor you associate with either Web designers or cartoonists, both of which Matt has been. No wonder he has to draw himself like a complete freak; otherwise, people might hate him. As it is, he's become a hero.
That's because soon after the first ultra (because Matt is a cartoonist), he started to give that pursuing demon a shape, and (because Matt is a pretty goofy cartoonist whose specialty is not, to put it delicately, classical realism) that shape turned out to be. . .the Blerch.
The Blerch is a horrible anthropomorphized white blob, a monster made of mayonnaise and hatred, who represents "all forms of gluttony, apathy, and indifference that plague my life." He follows Matt around on tiny wings, whispering blandishments and temptations, constantly urging Matt to gorge on Nutella and "get the cake," a lovely floating platonic slice that comes to represent everything Matt is resisting and running away from.
But it turns out Matt's personal demon wasn't as personal as he thought.
"I've heard from all kinds of people who do all kinds of things," he says, as we run a hilly route that he does so often he calls it "my treadmill." "Mixed martial arts. Sailing."
"Sailing?"
"Anything that requires a lot of sustained effort and concentration," he said. "A lot people have their own Blerches, I guess."
Matt's own Blerch seems, at least to me, to have been roundly defeated. Five years ago, Matt began posting his illustrated satirical lists ("6 Reasons Bacon Is Better than True Love") and comics and quizzes ("How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor?") on a site he called The Oatmeal. It's quickly become a small Web-comic empire, with seven employees devoted to shipping out T-shirts and other merchandise. (His mother runs the operation out of her house.) He's had two collections of his cartoons on the New York Times Bestseller list, and a third, a paperback version of his running cartoon, made the list this fall. Oh, and along the way, he also managed to save Nikola Tesla's original laboratory from destruction, and start a foundation to create a museum there–with a million dollars he personally wheedled from Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors. (Matt's own Tesla Model S retails for $80,000. Parents, encourage your kids to grow up to be cartoonists.)
And then, just two days after our casual run in September, 4,000 perfect strangers from the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the country and all over the world descended on a town east of Seattle for the From Runners World for New Balance. It had been planned as a single-day event that grew into two when the first day's races (a 10K, half marathon, and marathon) sold out almost instantaneously. Matt got the permits, designed the T-shirts, hired race directors, corralled volunteers, and enlisted fast runners to dress as Blerches to actually chase the paid entrants through the evergreen woods. He himself ran the half-marathon distance both days–the second time, in a full-body, air-conditioned Blerch suit. He told me, in a phone conversation after the race, that he loved passing people as the Blerch and listening to them shout profanities.
"It's hard to explain how I felt about the weekend," he said. "Seeing the fat little monster I drew turn into 4,000 people, people who have started running, who feel better, who are now hanging around after the race gorging themselves on cake and Nutella, was amazing."
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But for a man who said just the right thing to get so many people running, Matt hasn't actually said that much about running. He encourages people to be disciplined, to be patient as they start, and to wait for the improvement that will inevitably come. And he condemns treadmills (which he hates as much as I do) in favor of going outside. That's about it. He pointedly makes no promises of great health benefits or good looks.
What he presents, instead, is a visualization of doubt, self-hatred, bad habits, the weight of one's own sorry past–and then he offers a way to escape it. The success of the Blerch as a resonant symbol for so many people is almost sad–this successful young man gave shape to his own doubts and fears, and the world recognized that shape and said, "Yeah, me too." But then they all got up and started running, or kept running, the thousands and tens of thousands. Or sailed their boats or finished their reps or maybe even finished their novels or called their estranged friends. The demon with the funny name Matt Inman drew has a lot of other shapes, but Matt, in a way that resonated with everyone, was able to tell us the one way to escape it: Outrun the bastard.
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Peter Sagal is a 3:09 marathoner and the host of NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! For more, click here.
