Running Book Reviews with Alan and Liz

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In this episode, Alan and Liz chat about Kara Goucher’s recently released book, The Longest Race. They’ll tell you what they learned, what they thought, and why they wanted to read the book in the first place.

Kara Goucher grew up with Olympic dreams. She excelled at running from a young age and was offered a Nike sponsorship deal when she graduated from college. Then in 2004, she was invited to join a secretive, lavishly funded new team, dubbed the Nike Oregon Project. Coached by distance running legend Alberto Salazar, it s...

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A Beautiful Work in Progress is Mirna’s memoir and the story of how she got into ultrarunning and subsequently finishing her first 100k race. Although the book starts with her running, she goes back to her childhood and talks about her family, how she grew up surrounded by cousins, and the time she spent outside with them. Mirna grew up in a body positive environment where all the women who surrounded her were curvy, and where she was never described as “fat” until much later in life. She also watched her mother lose b...

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 Run Faster Marathons is dedicated to providing advice that you can incorporate onto your marathon training, to make you faster. The information is divided into 3 sections:

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Run Your Best Marathon is a guide to training and racing the marathon distance. The marathon has many challenges if you are trying to run at your full potential; you need to run at a hard effort while managing fuel stores and try to stay focussed for several hours. This book uses science as a base, for concrete tips and recommendations for approaching everything from training, to race day execution and many other topics in between.
The book has 19 chapters which are divided into 6 sections:
Section 1: On Training
Section 2: The...

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The Villanova Track Story is the story of Villanova University’s dominance in the DMR, distance medley relay, at the Penn Relays from 1966 to 1981. The book features this piece of running history, the athletes involved, and the circumstances that brought it all together. The author, Jerry Bouma, was himself a scholarship athlete from 1970 to 1974, but he tells the story by piecing together information gathered from many people who were present during a more than 16-year span.

Jerry Bouma grew up on a family dairy farm in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada, and wa...

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Taking Life in Stride is Harvey’s memoire divided into short stories. The stories are divided into themes, and each theme section has an introduction story. There are 6 themes:
Racing
Moments
Fun on the run
Life’s Little Difficulties
People
Family
The stories can be read independently but some characters are featured in multiple stories throughout the book, like Harvey’s first dog Chachka.

Harvey Mitro is a husband and father who lives in Toronto. With a degree in Kinesiology, he has been working as a p...

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A Runner’s High; My Life in Motion is the story of Dean Karnazes’ return to Western States 100 in his 50’s, at a time when he is also wondering about the future of his running career. He is waitlisted, so doesn’t feel the motivation to train. As he gets to within only a few months of race day, Dean enters a 100k race to kick off his training. Throughout the book Dean reminisces about the past, talks about his family and how they have supported him throughout his life and his running career...

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Out and Back; A Runner’s Story of Survival Against All Odds is about Hillary Allen’s miraculous survival and recovery after she fell off a ridge in Tromso Norway during the 2017 Tromso Skyrace 57k. Hillary’s survival and recovery was not only due to her perseverance and desire to live, but also because she had the right help at exactly the right time. During the race there was another competitor, Manu, that was tracking Hillary less than 10 seconds behind her and he saw the fall. He immediately scrambled down to Hillary’s broken b...

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Fast 5k; 25 Crucial Keys and 4 Training Plans is about two-thirds reading and one-third training plans. The reading consists of 25 short chapters, each one about a key to running a fast 5k. There are 15 training keys, 5 lifestyle, diet and gear keys, 5 race day keys, and a bonus key for masters athletes with age-related adjustments and advice. There are various charts and tables throughout the book to demonstrate the principles visually.

Pete Magill is a masters runner, coach, and writer. In addition to Fast 5k, he is the lead author of the book...

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The Mock Olympian is the story of author Michael Long’s journey to run in every Olympic city, 23 in total, between the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games. Although he tried to combine trips if he was in a particular corner of the world, this goal required a lot of travel and even a month off once it was time to run in North America, which luckily, Michael’s employer approved. The book is divided into 25 short chapters. The first 2 chapters are general background about how the idea came about and a little about Michael. The 23 rema...

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What do you mean we have read another 10 books? Already?! Well then we are due for another reflection on the things we remember, and how all this reading helped us.
Here are the books we chat about in this episode:

Breakthrough Women’s Running, by Neely Spence Gracey and Cindy Kuzma
Running The Orient, by Gavin Boyter
Running Throughout Time, by Roger Robinson
Chase That Smile, by Harold Cabrera
Depression Hates a Moving Target, by Nita Sweeney
On Pace, by Matt Fitzgerald
Endure, by Al...

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How She Did It is a compilation of stories from 50 legendary female distance runners spanning 6 decades! The book starts with a short introductory section called “Part 1: The Experts”, that addresses some key factors you need to pay attention to if you want to perform to your full potential. These are physical health, hormonal health, sound nutrition and mental health. “Part 2: The Athletes”,  is where you find the 50 female athlete profiles . This section is divided into sub-sections:
The pioneers 1960s-1970s
The 1980s
The 1990s
The early 2000s-2010
2010-2020
The b...

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Running With The Kenyans is the story of how Adharanand moved his family to Kenya for 6 months so that he could explore why Kenyan runners are so dominant. Adharanand discovered a talent for running at a young age, but like many kids in sport, ended up getting distracted along the way and not realizing his potential. He continued to run in adulthood, but never really pushed his limits due to family obligations with 3 young kids. As the world was watching Kenyan athletes rise to the top and sweep the podiums of many major...

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Catch me if you can is the story of 1970’s running legend, Filbert Bayi’s, life. The book is divided into 3 parts: 

The book contai...

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Endure; Mind, body, and the curiously elastic limits of Human Performance explores all the science that has been done to find out what limits or endurance performance. The book has a total of 13 chapters divided into 3 parts:
Part I: Mind and muscle
Part II: Limits
Part III: Limit breaker

Alex Hutchinson holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge and has worked as a researcher for the U.S. National Security Agency. He is a columnist for Outside magazine and was a long-time columnist for...

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On Pace is Matt Fitzgerald’s most recent book where he delves into pacing.  He talks about the importance of pacing to get the most out of yourself, how good the pros are at pacing, why the rest of us are not so good at pacing, and how we can get better.

There are 8 chapters about pacing:
1. Why Pacing matters
2. The science of pacing
3. Why you suck at pacing
4. Pacing as self-regulation
5. The mind of a pacing master
6. Pacing in training
7. Pacing in competition Duration: 01:26:16

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Depression Hates A Moving Target is about author Nita Sweeney’s experience with crippling anxiety and depression and how she got into running despite often not being able to get out of bed before taking up the sport. Nita was inspired by some posts from her Facebook friend who got into “jogging” by following a run-walk plan, and one day took the kitchen timer and her dog Morgan out to try it out for herself. Nita’s mind was not her only challenge to overcome, she also had an ankle that would swell when she...

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Chase That Smile is Harold Cabrera’s autobiography and account of how he managed to train for 3 big endurance events in the year he turned 40: The Paris marathon, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro (this one was with his wife Tania), and completing an Ironman Triathlon. The book has 3 sections that correspond to the 3 challenges. Each section is sub-divided with dates in chronological order like a journal, but the journal entries talk about more than just what happened that day. Harold has a full-time job and two young children so training for these big goals proves to...

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Running Through Time aims to tell key stories about the history and evolution of running. A comprehensive book of every story that makes up running history would be massive, so this book tries to pick stories that were not told as often or not told correctly. It starts with the story of the marathon and how it became the 42.2km distance we know today, and ends with Alison Roe from New Zealand and her inspiring but short professional running career. All the stories chosen in this book have influenced how we experience our...

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Running the Orient is the story of Gavin Boyter’s 2300 mile run across Europe with his girlfriend Aradhna who follows him in their camper-van Roxy. The Orient Express was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883. It started in Paris and end in Istanbul, and along the way stopped in Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest. Gavin’s goal was to run the same route and stop at each of the station locations in the corresponding cities. Along the way Gavin and Aradhna don’t just have navigation challenges, but also endless chores that c...

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In this episode we start with some general run chatter before reflecting on everything we learned and thought about related to books 41 to 50. 

Here is a list of the books we talk about:
One Last Mile, by Roger Saltsman
Run Like a Pro, by Matt Fitzgerald and Ben Rosario
Race Across America, by Charles Kastner
Could Have Happened at Parkrun, by Simon C. Jones
Runner’s World Meals on the Run, Edited by Joanna Sayago Golub
Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide, by Hal Higdon
Dan...

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Breakthrough Women’s Running is a guide written by Neely Spence Gracey and Cindy Kuzma to help get female runners to their next breakthrough in running, regardless of their running ability. The book is divided into 4 parts and covers everything from goal setting to training plans you can follow for the 5k through marathon distances. In between it covers female specific challenges like training at different times during your menstrual cycle, running through pregnancy, and coming back to running post-partum and while breastfeeding. The book also covers a lot of the basics like re...

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Running with Purpose is Jim Weber’s story of how he developed his leadership qualities and was able to elevate Brooks to the power house running brand it is today. As a child Jim loved hockey and hoped to play professionally one day, which never happened despite his dedication to the sport. Luckily he discovered running and became just as passionate about helping runners through the development of quality technical running gear.

The book is divided into 2 parts:

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Finding Gobi is both Dion’s memoire and the story of how a little dog from the Gobi desert ended up finding his way to a family in the UK. Dion talks about some difficult moments in his life like when his father died of an asthma attack when he was only 9 years old, and then how his mom told him that his dad was never really his dad. Despite a difficult start, Dion made a good life for himself and found the love of his life, Lucja.

Although neither Dion no...

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26.2 Miles to Happiness is Paul Tonkinson’s memoire and an account of his sub-3 hour marathon. Paul lost his mother when he was very young, and he had a rocky relationship with his step-mom between the ages of 6 and 13. He explains some of the scars that this relationship left him with well into adulthood, and how running helped him overcome them. As a young boy Paul would wake up before anyone else in the household to sneak off for a run in an old pair of boots. As an adult, Paul spent some ti...

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Daniels’ Running Formula is a training guide based on principles that coach and exercise physiology PhD, Jack Daniels, has been using to train his athletes for decades.

The book is divided into two parts:
Part I: Understanding the formula for training
Part II: Applying the Formula to Competitive Events

The first part describes the fundamentals of what goes into good running performance, types of training intensities, the VDOT system, and other topics like treadmill and fitness training, as well as taking breaks. The second section contains plans th...

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Marathon, The Ultimate Training Guide is in it’s 5 edition and the original version came out in 1993. This book is solely dedicated to training and preparing to run the half-marathon or marathon distance. The book covers the entire marathon journey from the very beginning stages where someone is starting to run and maybe not even sure they will love the sport, to tapering and race day logistics. In between Hal covers a lot of topics that runners might have questions about like: Building mileage, diet, speedwork, cross training, heart rate training, qualifying for Bo...

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Meals on the Run is a compilation of recipes from different authors and edited by Joanna Sayago Golub.  The recipes come from various sources including several registered dieticians and elite Athletes; Kara Goucher has contributed a recipe along with the Forward to the book.

The book is broken up into 9 chapters, with each chapter being a category of foods:

At the end of the book, the editor also included a “special recipe lists” secti...

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Could Have Happened at Parkrun is a book of short stories written during Covid lockdown when parkruns... like many other activities… were cancelled. The uniting theme in all 12 stories is that they all play out at the Wycombe Rye parkrun in the UK. Each story is around a realistic scenario but is not a true story, and they come with some fun titles. Before each story there is a description of the origin of the story that sets the stage before you get into the story itself.

The stories are:
Ru...

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In this episode we start by chatting about our sub-3 hour attempt in October 2021 and our plans for 2022 before reflecting on everything we learned in books 31 to 40. 

Here is a list of the books we talk about:
Today We Die A Little, by Richard Askwith
The Running Drug, by Tim Beynon
When Running Made History, by Roger Robinson
Running the World, by Nick Butter
Mental Training for Ultrarunning, by Addie Bracy
Running Against The Odds ,by Desmond Dunham
The Ultra Mile, by Tim Wills Duration: 01:04:42

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Race Across America takes place in the late 1920’s. In those years a decent living wage for a family was $2500 per year so when Charles Pyle announced that he was organizing a trans-American stage race with a first-place prize of $25 000 it’s no surprise that people signed up. Winning this first place prize would mean that your family was set for life. In the 1920’s running competitions were mostly for amateurs, and a race with prize money brought back the professionalization of the sport which had been present at the end of the 1800’s, but s...