I have been a runner for 50 years and a coach for 30 years. From 2001-2016 I was the coach of Team USA Minnesota Distance Training Center. During that time I coached 24 U.S. National Champions, including an Olympian & 2 USATF Running Circuit Champions, at 1500 meters, 3000 meters, and 10,000 meters on the track; the mile, 10k, 15k, 10 miles, half-marathon, 20k, 25k, and marathon on the road; 4k, 6k, 8k and 10k in cross country. Athletes I coached qualified for 30 U.S. national teams competing in IAAF World Championships in cross country, indoor track, outdoor track, and road, and achieved 73 top-three finishes in U.S. Championships.
At a low point in U.S. distance running, American Buddy Edelen travels overseas seeking to train with, and race, the best distance runners in the world. He discovers that their secret to success is not genetics but hard training. With the help of a top U.S. coach, he ramps up his training and discovers his ability to handle a large volume of intense training. The result is a world marathon record and stunning U.S. Olympic Trials win.
I am an author and adventure activist who believes passionately in the power of big and small adventures to change your life for the better when you’ve been through dark and difficult times. I have written three books, all of which I describe as ‘alternative adventure stories’ because they don’t look like the usual ‘Boy’s Own’ tales of danger and derring-do (although they do include some of that, too!). I’m drawn to the words of wonderful women warriors who give me strength in times of sadness. These books have inspired me to live big and bravely in what is often a challenging but (mainly) wonderful world.
A book I read fairly recently about a woman who started adventuring in her twenties, at a much younger age than me. Yet her story of running around the coast of Britain still gave me a great sense of solidarity, particularly because she wasn’t a very good runner when she started and couldn’t read a map. Thank you, Elise! Ditto!
Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2021
Running away from your problems doesn't solve anything - but sometimes it's more fun than dealing with them
Elise was spending a lot of time crying on buses. She had just graduated from university; she had a shiny new flat, her first proper job and a budding relationship - and they were all making her utterly miserable. Sitting at work one day, she hit upon the obvious solution:
Run 5,000 miles around the coast of Britain, carrying her kit on her back.
When I became a minimalist, I found that having less made my household chores so much easier. Before then, I thought I was a loser who lets dirty dishes and laundry pile up. But when my environment changed, what I had believed was my personality also shifted. Once my apartment was tidy, it became a habit to do the dishes right away and vacuum the floor before going out, and my life became consistently enjoyable. But other habits were harder nuts to crack, like quitting drinking or exercising regularly. In Hello, Habits I write about my journey of acquiring these habits through a process of trial and error.
What really fascinates me about Haruki Murakami is not his body of work per se, but the process through which he rose from anonymity and became a world-renowned author. Until he was 29, he’d never imagined he had the talent to write a novel. Before his rise to fame, novelists were known to live a wild and intemperate existence, drinking lots of alcohol into the wee hours and getting started on their manuscript past deadline. Murakami, however, broke this stereotype as someone who wakes up early, works out every day, and has run multiple full marathons. I have no doubt it was the power of his habits that made him a world-famous author. He even says his motto is to turn himself into “a creature of habits.”
A compelling mediation on the power of running and a fascinating insight into the life of this internationally bestselling writer. A perfect reading companion for runners.
In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing.
Equal parts travelogue, training log and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for…
I have been a runner for 50 years and a coach for 30 years. From 2001-2016 I was the coach of Team USA Minnesota Distance Training Center. During that time I coached 24 U.S. National Champions, including an Olympian & 2 USATF Running Circuit Champions, at 1500 meters, 3000 meters, and 10,000 meters on the track; the mile, 10k, 15k, 10 miles, half-marathon, 20k, 25k, and marathon on the road; 4k, 6k, 8k and 10k in cross country. Athletes I coached qualified for 30 U.S. national teams competing in IAAF World Championships in cross country, indoor track, outdoor track, and road, and achieved 73 top-three finishes in U.S. Championships.
Murphy writes about the early years of women’s distance running as women discover their desire and ability to run long, and push for acceptance to participate. It traces the experience of the first competitive female long-distance runners who laid the groundwork for the next generation of girls and women runners to begin to experience the benefits.
The Silence of Great Distance is the story of the developing world of women's athletics, focused on long-distance runnning. With significant chapters on Doris Brown Heritage, the women of the Soviet Union, and Mary Decker Slaney, the primary narrative is carried by Stephanie Herbst, a nine-time all-American who competed for the University of Wisconsin between 1984 and 1988.
An internationally recognized endurance athlete and New York Times bestselling author, Dean Karnazes has pushed his body and mind to inconceivable limits. Among his many accomplishments, he has run 350 continuous miles, foregoing sleep for three nights. He's run across Death Valley in 120-degree temperatures, and run a marathon to the South Pole in negative 40 degrees. On ten different occasions, he's run a 200-mile relay race solo, racing alongside teams of twelve. His long list of competitive achievements include winning the world's toughest footrace, the Badwater Ultramarathon, running 135 miles nonstop across Death Valley during the middle of summer. His most recent endeavor was running 50 marathons, in all 50 US states, in 50 consecutive days, finishing with the NYC Marathon, which he ran in three hours flat.
Deena Kastor is a phenom that holds American records in every distance from the 5K to the marathon. Let Your Mind Run is a fascinating peek into the mindset of an elite athlete.
Deena Kastor was a star youth runner with tremendous promise, yet her career almost ended after college, when her competitive method—run as hard as possible, for fear of losing—fostered a frustration and negativity and brought her to the brink of burnout. On the verge of quitting, she took a chance and moved to the high altitudes of Alamosa, Colorado, where legendary coach Joe Vigil had started the first professional distance-running team. There she encountered the idea that would transform her running career: the notion that changing her thinking—shaping her mind to…
Though I’ve coached endurance athletes to world championships, I’m an expert on not working out. It’s what you do when you’re not training that matters most! All the books on this list teach habits that help you relax about things that don’t matter while guiding you to define what does matter and explaining ways to most efficiently focus your energies there. This jibes with my work as a yoga teacher: we seek to find the right application of effort, and to layer in ease wherever possible. I don’t think it’s stretching too much to call each book on the list both a work of philosophy and also a deeply practical life manual.
I think Matt Fitzgerald is the GOAT in the space of nonfiction books for endurance athletes. He’s not only prolific, but he’s also in tune with exactly what people want and need to hear. This book is one of his best.
I love that it validates my urge to do less and to focus on quality over quantity. This applies not only in sports but in all aspects of life! This book gives me permission to go easy most of the time and, when I don’t, to focus on exactly why I am doing hard things.
This revolutionary training method has been embraced by elite runners - with extraordinary results - and now you can do it too.
Respected running and fitness expert Matt Fitzgerald explains how the 80/20 running program - in which you do 80 per cent of runs at a lower intensity and just 20 per cent at a higher intensity - is the best change runners of all abilities can make to improve their performance. With a thorough examination of the science and research behind this training method, 80/20 Running is a hands-on guide for runners of all levels with training programs…
I’ve been running for a quarter of a century now, ever since I got the irresistible urge in high school to quit the soccer team and make my way over to cross-country practice junior year. In that time, running has been a source of mental clarity and physical expression for me, a source of joy and even of meaning. Naturally, it has become one of the focuses of my writing life, too. I’ve written three books about running and now write the On the Run column forSport Literate. It is gratifying to write about a sport that has such a rich literature.
I might call Donald Porter’sInner Runninga forgotten classic if I could tell that it had ever been known. Running’s answer to Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, it emerges from the human-potential movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies, with the tube socks and tracksuits to prove it. Porter’s promotion of slow, meditative, and inward-focused style of running offers an antidote to the hyper-competitive, results-obsessed attitudes that tend to rule running. You’ll feel grounded just by reading it and especially if you put it into practice.
All runners can attest to the well known fact that running is beneficial to the heart, weight control, and general fitness. But many runners ignore a benefit that can not only add enjoyment to a run, but can actually change a runner's attitude about life itself. In Inner Running, author Donald Porter examines the psychological and spirtual aspects of running. He explains how the sport can server as a soothing mini-vacation from the pressures of modern life. Using Porter's inner methods the runner needn't push to complete a set time or distance. The inner runner glides easily and runs solely…
Writing the Olga book was a privilege in several senses. I got to hang out for five years with a remarkable human who kicked my butt (in the nicest possible way) and pulled me out of a midlife funk with the example of her indomitable spirit. Just as significantly, I got to delve deeply into the question of What makes some people almost … bulletproof? To what degree is healthy aging, well … a choice? This is really all a writer can ask for: to stumble on a subject that will never exhaust itself, that will just continue to open new angles. One way or another, I keep writing about Olga, and I suspect I always will.
An absolute denominator of life is resistance. Nietzsche had it right: adversity helps so long as it doesn’t do us in, and we make the biggest changes in our life when life pushes back. That applies to longevity too; the kites that stay longest in the air are pinned there by resistance. John Jerome gets this. This isn’t a book about longevity, it’s a book about running – slight but wise, with a kind of shopcraft-as-soulcraft turn of mind, if you think of your own body as the machine in the shop. Really, the book is a defense of stretching, in every sense of the word. You have to make periodic jaunts to “edge city,” where you eat the beans of just-manageable difficulty.
Takeaway sentence: “Heroism is endurance for one moment longer.”
All runners, from beginners to Olympians, will delight in this luminous compendium of wisdom wrought from many years of running. Applying his clear vision and wry wit to a smorgasbord of running-related topics, including stretching, dancing, bugs, falling, spaghetti, sweat, and the food police, John Jerome shares his contagious passion for the most basic of sports. Stripping the art of running down to its barest elements, he takes readers and runners with him on a joyous journey -- a run that revels in a profound affection and respect for the single sport that is as pure and simple as it…
When I was a journalist, writing about health and fitness for women’s magazines and national newspapers, I had a strong sense that much of the advice being doled out by personal trainers and other ‘experts’ was dubious, to say the least. I decided to see for myself, embarking on an Exercise and Sport Science degree and training as a running coach. Two decades on, with a handful of running books and a 13-year-strong column in Runner’s World to my name, I still like to delve into the science underpinning physical activity to see if it really stands up, and if so, for who, and under what circumstances?
This must be one of the most widely read running books. For good reason – it’s a great read – exciting story, quirky characters – by an excellent journalist.
But at the heart of it lies one question: ‘Why does my foot hurt?’ McDougall’s quest to find out, his deep dive into the evidence underpinning many accepted aspects of the ‘science’ of running, is what influenced me as a runner, and as a coach.
Why do runners wear built-up shoes? Why do runners only move their bodies in one plane of motion and expect to have all-round fitness? Why do so many people lose the joy in running? Why don’t we eat salad for breakfast? If you read this book, and change nothing about your running, I’ll be surprised.
At the heart of Born to Run lies a mysterious tribe of Mexican Indians, the Tarahumara, who live quietly in canyons and are reputed to be the best distance runners in the world; in 1993, one of them, aged 57, came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing a toga and sandals. A small group of the world's top ultra-runners (and the awe-inspiring author) make the treacherous journey into the canyons to try to learn the tribe's secrets and then take them on over a course 50 miles long.
With incredible energy and smart observation, McDougall tells this story while…
Writing the Olga book was a privilege in several senses. I got to hang out for five years with a remarkable human who kicked my butt (in the nicest possible way) and pulled me out of a midlife funk with the example of her indomitable spirit. Just as significantly, I got to delve deeply into the question of What makes some people almost … bulletproof? To what degree is healthy aging, well … a choice? This is really all a writer can ask for: to stumble on a subject that will never exhaust itself, that will just continue to open new angles. One way or another, I keep writing about Olga, and I suspect I always will.
Because the 21st century belongs to friendships. And camaraderie is the number 1 ingredient in the longevity recipe. We need each other. We need mutual assistance if we want to live not just longer but better. (What’s the saying? “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”) It’s easy to forget that in the tech age, which promotes ferocious independence (which ultimately isn’t much fun). Think of Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence”—which we missed big-time during Covid lockdown – and you’ll appreciate what Michael Austin, a philosopher from the University of Eastern Kentucky, is offering here. This is a philosophy with a healthy heart in every sense.
A unique anthology of essays exploring the philosophical wisdom runners contemplate when out for a run. It features writings from some of America's leading philosophers, including Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taliaferro, and J.P. Moreland.* A first-of-its-kind collection of essays exploring those gems of philosophical wisdom runners contemplate when out for a run* Topics considered include running and the philosophy of friendship; the freedom of the long distance runner; running as aesthetic experience, and "Could a Zombie Run a Marathon?"* Contributing essayists include philosophers with athletic experience at the collegiate level, philosophers whose pasttime is running, and one philosopher who began running…
