Summer Reading on the Run

Today I had a nice conversation with a woman at work and she mentioned her son, who is a high school distance runner. Apparently he’s a big Prefontaine fan so I recommended the PRE book. Of course this got me thinking about the other running books I’ve read in recent years so I thought I’d recommend some of them. The following titles are not books on training but literary, biographic, autobiographic, and the like.

PRE by Tom Jordan was one I read during my freshmen year of college. I couldn’t put it down. I’m also not sure I returned that copy to the coach (Sorry Charles!). Follow the life of Steve Prefontaine with this short but powerful book.

If you have been awake, or are old enough, you have noticed the distance running power house that is Kenya. In Train Hard, Win Easy the Kenyan Way Toby Tanser presents two books in one; a history of running in Kenya and profiles of the greats from that region. Fascinating.

Running with the Buffaloes is one of my all time favorite books. Chris Lear exhumed ten kinds of collage nostalgia as I read this fun and intense book. Reading about the training sessions and commitment from the U. of Colorado men’s cross country team was an intense and fun experience.

The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb is the story about the first sub 4:00 mile by Sir Roger Banister. This book gives insight into the global race to achieve this goal, a goal that was ultimately realized at Oxford University with the help of some friends and a break in the weather. This is a page turner.

Sub 4:00, another title by Chris Lear, is about Alan Webb, the 4^th American to break 4 minutes in high school and the first to do so in 33 years. The great congressman Jim Ryun writes the foreword of the book and plays the roll of the backdrop as he was the H.S. record holder for well over three decades.

I’ll post some other running books later.