Bryan Berlin took up jogging ten years ago after overcoming a fear of failure as a 14-year-old that prevented him from running two miles in 16 minutes to make his American school football team.
He now competes regularly in the annual Brooklyn half-marathon but has a conflicted relationship with running and still questions why he does it.
His debut Edinburgh show is an engaging saunter down the past two decades in which he has grown from an unconfident teenager into a high school teacher of video and photography and a football coach.
En route, his ambition of becoming a TV sitcom writer has fallen by the wayside, as he found himself the leftover-jobs man on a reality TV show on the Travel Channel; but his exposure to the Oklahoma Warrior Dash, a 5km mud-rich obstacle course, which the programme’s director got him to film with a GoPro camera attached to him, while making him feel stupid helped to get him into running.
His amiable act draws on Haruki Murakami’s seminal book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” and broadens out to look at self-doubt, motivation and his love-hate relationship with jogging. Though Berlin, 34, does not run anywhere near as much as the 74-year-old Japanese author and has not yet progressed to marathons, it has not been an easy journey. At one point, he ended up in therapy after a relationship with an extrovert fellow-jogging girlfriend broke up.
Yet as a self-confessed introvert, he acknowledges running has taken him to a lot of great places and helped him to connect with a lot of great people. And as well as conquering some of his former fears, he’s come to realise he’s far from alone in worrying about being able to complete the course.
Bryan Berlin: Running Scared
Just the Tonic at The Mash House (Just the Snifter Room), until 13 August
