Finished: April 10, 2022
pp: 256
Author: Paul Tonkinson
Other books: N/A
Rating: Pretty good
Some thoughts:
I’ve been going through running books as my nighttime reading. They go down smooth and work well when you’ve got an e-reader in one hand and a toddler in the other. This year, I’ve also been running more, and the more time I spend running, the more interested I am in hearing about other people’s running experiences.
Believe me, I’m as surprised as anyone that these have become a comfort. People yammering on about their running habits is, without a doubt, the worst, but there’s something about running and the impact it has on you that’s really difficult to understand. You can feel it, but as soon as you start to describe it, you start to fall back on cliches and talking about the runner’s high. Again, not the kind of thing you want to be assaulted with at a dinner party, but I think that the more you can read other people tackling that stuff, the closer you get to understanding it yourself. Importantly for night-time reading, the kind of self-discovery you’re going to get almost certainly won’t have the sort of gloom that’ll mess up your bedtime routine. That being said, the range of quality among these books is vast. There are some great examples that end up on virtually any list of great running books (What I talk about, Leslie Jamison’s essay on the Barkley Marathons). And there are some real stinkers (probably more than there are good ones). This one I think falls pretty squarely in the middle. Its about an attempt to run a sub-three-hour London marathon: an arbitrary but entirely impressive physical achievement.
Structurally, the book alternates between a sort of mile-by-mile account of the race, and flashbacks to the months of training leading up to it. That choice saps the book of a lot of juice. There’s something so propulsive about the race chapters. The ticking clock pulls you forward and creates a really natural tension. The flashback sections just don’t have the same juice for me. The comedy misses me in places. I think part of that is not having the same base of references. Part of that is also probably cultural. I watch a decent amount of British television and like a lot of it, but there are some parts of it that are just way too British for me. Whole series about canal boat tours. I assume that a lifetime of those television shows in the background give you the ability to understand jokes about Austria in a way that I never will.