Running has plenty of tomes: the indispensable cult classic Once a Runner by John Parker; The Perfect Mile, Neal Bascomb's bestselling book about the quest to break the 4-minute-mile barrier; the textbook-like Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger; the young women's staple The Complete Book of Running for Women by Claire Kowalchik; and the inspirational What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in which novelist Haruki Murakami abandons magical realism to describe the joys of his favorite sport. And those are just five. In short, who needs another book about running? This spring, three more runners from starkly different backgrounds answer that question, and prove that there is always something more to say about this odd and entrancing sport.
In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness
By Jim Axelrod
Hardcover, 304 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
List price: $26
The goal at the end of Jim Axelrod's touching memoir, In The Long Run, is a marathon, but in 304 pages he talks about running surprisingly little. His focus is the parts of his life that drive him to start running in the first place, particularly his demanding career as a CBS political correspondent. That Axelrod's emotional struggles, rather than his aerobic struggles, dominate the book tells us that for running to be a consistent presence in someone's life requires a person to acknowledge it and continually coax it forward. In Axelrod's case, he can't fully commit to his goal ? the 2009 New York City Marathon ? until he has hit rock bottom. Things are so bad that he is too distracted and defeated to see how much he has let himself go. At some point, the only way out of the forest is to run.
This is a relatable predicament: Negative circumstances threaten to crush this successful married father of three, plunging him into an endless stream of early flights, fast food, heavy drinking and terse phone conversations with his wife from the road. Instead, he lets his doldrums spur him to improve his lot. Much of the book finds Axelrod dancing between these two states, either too mentally exhausted to make the commitment to running, or so thrilled by his progress in the sport that he becomes fixated on it. (Neither state is ideal.) The carrot dangling in front of him is his late father, Bob, who at times was his son's biggest fan and at others treated everyone in his life as a nuisance. The elder Axelrod charms and torments his son from the grave; Jim's decision to run a marathon is largely a competitive one, but it becomes something far loftier by the time he crosses the finish line in Central Park.
The Lure of Long Distances: Why We Run
By Robin Harvie
Hardcover, 288 pages
PublicAffairs
List price: $24.99
In The Lure of Long Distances: Why We Run, a philosophical exploration of ultramarathoning, Robin Harvie, like Axelrod, acknowledges that ego plays an enormous part in running, not least because the feat of traveling many miles on foot is done without the help of machinery or maps, and usually without other people. "No matter what the distance covered or the time on the road," Harvie writes, running provides "the pleasure of empowerment."
Harvie's descriptions of running cut to the core of the sport's thrills: He calls it "the feeling of fresh air on the face miles from home." But this feeling isn't quite enough for him. He starts running marathons to impress his university friends, but fed up with trying to surpass his personal best of 3 hours, 12 minutes, he takes up ultramarathoning, his end goal being the Spartathlon, a taxing 150-mile run that traces Pheidippides' historic trip from Athens to Sparta. There is "a void" after one has accomplished the marathon, Harvie writes, rather bafflingly. So he plunges into longer races, peppering his journey with dozens of quotes from philosophers, poets and novelists. His own poetic words are a better fit. During a 50-mile race in Rotherham, England, for instance, he notes the fields "as gray and bleak as the sea, the familiar, toneless color of metal." Later, running to Sparta, he writes that the Mediterranean Sea "breathed quietly, like a sleeping dog."
To Be a Runner: How Racing Up Mountains, Running with the Bulls, or Just Taking On a 5-K Makes You a Better Person (and the World a Better Place)
By Martin Dugard
Hardcover, 256 pages
Rodale
List price: $24.99
The wisest of this bunch, as well as the funniest, is Martin Dugard, a coach with competitive experience and bylines in many familiar sports magazines. Coaching has likely helped Dugard achieve such a pleasant outlook. "If I can write every day, run every day ... and treat the people around me with love and courtesy," he writes in To Be a Runner, "then my attitude and outlook will be just that much more fantastic. If I don't do those things, there is a very good possibility I will lapse into decay or lethargy, or simply feel overwhelmed to the point of sputtering inertia." This recognition of balance ? tempering each of his favorite activities with the others ? staves off the more negative effects of running: solitude, obsession, dissatisfaction, defeat. After all, it's balance that many runners, including Axelrod and Harvie, struggle with the most.
All three speak at length about suffering, which can happen during a hard training run, during the last six miles of a marathon and during probably every mile of the Spartathlon. Indeed, suffering is central to distance running, yet it's quickly becoming one of the most popular sports in the world. To help numb the pain, Dugard offers the encouragement only a professional can, using lighthearted chapter titles like "First Steps" and "Weather Or Not" and covering key subjects like shoes, pacing and motivation, sharing his own adventures and missteps along the way. Harvie and Axelrod, meanwhile, let us peer into what happens if you are strong enough to get to the point where suffering begins. Beyond physical despair, they tell us, is great mental strength, euphoria and a deeper understanding of human life. And for those facing other kinds of despair, there is running.
In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness
By Jim Axelrod
Hardcover, 304 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
List price: $26
My BlackBerry started buzzing on my right hip just as the crowd got its first glimpse of Barack Obama. I'd put it on vibrate, since I knew I'd never hear the ringtone once Obama appeared on the floor of the Toyota Center in Houston. The roar was immediate as he glided into the arena from a corner tunnel, and grew louder still as each of his loping strides carried him into fuller view of the crowd. By the time he jogged gracefully up the stairs to take the stage, I couldn't hear a word of the instructions my camera an was yelling at me from four feet away.
I was standing on the media riser ? a plywood platform set six feet off the arena's concrete floor, atop rickety scaffolding concealed by rectangles of rough royal-blue fabric. A dozen TV reporters were crammed together, each provided with a four-foot-wide broadcasting space marked off by electrical tape.
As chief White House correspondent for CBS News, I'd been assigned to cover Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign. I'd loved getting the assignment, seeing it at the outset as just the kind of validation I'd been looking for from a new set of bosses. In the last year of his increasingly unpopular presidency, George W. Bush wasn't going to generate enough interest to get me on the evening News regularly. Lame ducks never did. So the White House was not the place to be.
When the assignments for the campaign had been doled out three months earlier, Obama was intriguing but still a long shot. Clinton was clearly the plum. Covering her positioned me not just for a short term supply of lead stories but also for another few years on the biggest beat in TV news if she went all the way.
But since then, Obama's strong performance had raised the possibility that I hadn't landed the plum after all. I'd grown eager to see him live on the campaign trail. The breathless descriptions I'd been reading of the raw emotion Obama generated in the crowds hadn't set any standards for journalistic objectivity, but the reporters who wrote them hadn't oversold.
Standing in front of the cam era making my last-minute preparation thirties hoist a boy onto his shoulders so the kid could get a better look. The man's face w as pulled tight in a severe smile, astonished to be sure but cautious as well, as if he wasn't quite sure he could trust what he was seeing. The expression on the face of the five-year-old was simpler: innocent, undiluted joy. Even if the boy didn't fully understand the meaning of the moment, he was on his daddy's shoulders. That alone was apparently reason enough for his ear-to-ear grin.
Houston might have seemed like an odd place for Obama to be on February 19, 2008, given that it w as primary day in Wisconsin, but he w as already looking ahead to the Texas primary in two weeks. I checked my watch, which I kept on New York time no matter where I was to stay synchronized with CBS headquarters in Manhattan. It was 9:15. A t the bottom of the hour, I would update my report with a live shot for the West Coast feed of the CBS Evening News.
If, as some grizzled cameraman once told me, TV news is "hours of boredom, = moments of terror," the live shot is the moment of terror. Not only can your whole day go to hell in an instant; your whole career can. There's a gazillion ways to screw up the shot ? technical screw ups, editorial screw ups, going blank just when you're supposed to speak to seven million people ? and every member of the live shot team spends the last fifteen minutes checking and rechecking potential trouble spots to prevent TV tragedy.
On the media riser in Houston, Rob the cameraman and Giovanni the sound tech checked cables and lights while Chloe the producer linked up with the control room in New York. Inside the TV truck parked just outside the Toyota Center, the satellite operator made sure we had a steady broadcasting signal. As the correspondent, my obsession, naturally, was with myself. In my fifteen-minute run-up to the live shot, I flitted from applying a new layer of powder on my forehead to checking my tie knot, from smoothing the wrinkles in my suit jacket to making sure my earpiece fit snugly. Then I took a moment out of tending to the cosmetic touches and barked at the ever-calm Chloe to double-check the facts of what I w as about to report.
Most of my two-minute story was a preproduced video spot running roughly a minute and a half and providing an overview of what was at stake in the Wisconsin race. That gave m e fifteen seconds to introduce the spot live and fifteen seconds on the back end to add a final thought. The whole idea was to provide a way for me to update my story if anything had changed from the 6:30 East Coast broadcast. Good thing, because a few minutes after 9:00, we received word that Obama had been declared the w inner in Wisconsin. Harry Smith, substituting for Katie Couric in New York, would handle that headline in his toss to me. My job was to seamlessly w eave a reaction to Obama's win into my live intro.
Blowing the live shot would ruin the rest of the night and most of the next day, until I had another chance at one. Forget a thick Rolodex of sources or a finely honed ability to bang out sharp, urgent copy under deadline pressure; network news reporters are judged first and foremost by their ability to flawlessly deliver a four-sentence live introduction to a pretaped story with an insouciant air of command to millions of viewers. In the minds of the executives who run the network news operations, a single "um" or "uh" can undermine a reporter's credibility. And God save the correspondent who actually breaks eye contact with the camera to look down at his notes.
Excerpted from In the Long Run by Jim Axelrod. Copyright 2011 by Jim Axelrod. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/19/136363720/running-memoirs-evoke-blisters-bliss?ft=1&f=1032
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