Born to Run... Yahoo!

I come from a family of great readers and athletes.   People in my family are runners, cyclists, surfers, etc.  Also, my parents read, my grandparents read. Everyone reads. Best of all, my brother, sister, her husband and I all  have a loosey-goosey tradition of reading and passing around various books. And at the moment, we are all also in a running/swimming/biking kick. It's really fun.

 In the past, we have all read David Copperfield, East of Eden, The Caine Mutiny, Life of Pi and a few others I can't think of right now. I like to think of it as a very exclusive book club.Usually one of us reads a book then pressures a sibling to read it.  Then the other sibling catches wind that the other two (three, including my brother-in-law) have read something and picks it up to see what all the fuss is about.  Sometimes this is a process that takes a few years, for instance, my sister has yet to read War and Peace.  

Our current hot book is Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall.  This book now holds a special place in my sister's heart because she is the one who "discovered" it, gave it to my brother for Christmas and then he loved it and passed it to me.  I had heard both of them talk about it but frankly ignored them.

Honestly, I kind of thought they were bonkers.  I run, and  I even just read another really good book about running (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by  Haruki Murakami )  But I didn't immediately pick this one up.  My brother brought the book over on a recent Sunday and then asked me every day whether I had read it yet. 

I had finished up Emma, and didn't have anything else particularly pressing on my nightstand, and I was already in bed, so kind of by default, and with an eye roll, I picked up Born to Run.  It immediately hooks you with an account of a search for a sort of mystical/crazy runner living in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico, moves through McDougall's own quest to figure out why he had so many running injuries, and skips along from there. It is well paced, informative,  and interesting enough to keep me up all night.

At the same time as he changed his own life by becoming a long distance runner, McDougall produced a well woven narrative about the build-up, planning and execution of a 50 mile footrace in crazy mountain terrain with personal stories, training advice, running history and philosophy,  as well as anthropology and finishes up with a book that could quite literally change your life.  

If you are inclined to be saved by exercise, back to the earth eating and running barefoot, that is.  

Suffice it to say, I stayed up reading this damn book until two in the morning, ran a few barefoot laps around my local park and ate a baked potato for dinner tonight.