While I don’t do book review every month anymore, Born to Run deserves a special mention.
Many of you may have read this before but this is a staggeringly insightful book with a counter intuitive view on running but with a wonderful story at its heart.
The point of the book is to follow the history of a tribe called The Tarahumara who reside in the Copper Canyons in the North of Mexico and are very reclusive. In essence they are born runners; a a tribe of people who will run 50 – 100 miles in races and run every single day of their lives.
They are an extraordinary group of people but that’s not really the point. The main proposition of the book is that we were all born to be runners and that our evolutionary make up is that of runners and this is probably why so many people run marathons.
It’s written though as a story and follows the path of a journalist all the way through, researching the Tarahumara and races that they had in the US in the mainstream together with other ultra runners who raced with and against them. It culminates in the most fantastic description of a race within the Copper Canyons, witnessed only by a few people, which they report at the greatest race in the world.
Throughout this though, it links to things like the story of evidence based sports medicine and other extraordinary philosophies to go with running.
If the best thing that the book does it to make you put on a pair of trainers and go out running first thing in the morning then it’s worth the read but I would suggest it does much more than that and it’s really worth looking at.
Blog Post Number: 908
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