Having a certain amount of time to kill with some rainy summer holiday days and an increasingly tidy house, I’ve got through three recently published and purchased running books over the past week.<\/p>\n
The first, Running for My Life<\/em> by Ray Zahab (published 2007), is a simple autobiographical account of one man’s journey from smoking and drinking youth to accomplished ultra runner, and makes a pleasant day’s read in a more humble Ultramarathon Man<\/em> sort of way. Since finishing it, I’ve also watched a TV interview with Ray Zahab on the web and have to say that he comes across as a nice, unpretentious guy with laudable zeal to bring meaningful adventure to young people.<\/p>\n The second, Born to Run<\/em> by Christopher McDougall (published 2009), is a gripping blend of natural history (humans evolving ‘to go running’?) and building action story (long distance racing with the Tarahumara) that’s closer to what’s possibly been my favourite running book of all (the hitherto incomparable Why We Run<\/em> by Bernd Heinrich) than anything else I’ve read. So, despite the odd statement leaping out at me as needing checking (Peters ‘ten minutes under his own world-record pace’ after ten miles of the 1952 Olympic marathon?), I’d have to rate this alongside the Heinrich as fascinating, revelatory and uncommonly absorbing.<\/p>\n The third book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running<\/em> by Haruki Murakami (published in Japanese in 2007 and English in 2008), is another personal memoir, but (as you’d expect of a celebrated novelist) given a more poetic twist than the Ray Zahab book. Which is not to say that it’s ‘better’, but just that Murakami’s writing not surprisingly comes across as more accomplished and polished.<\/p>\n Regardless of literary merit, however, where all three books ultimately work together is in stressing what a natural thing it is to run and making me just want to get out and run. Which has to be a good thing. :-)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having a certain amount of time to kill with some rainy summer holiday days and an increasingly tidy house, I’ve got through three recently published and purchased running books over the past week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12006,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/12006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}