Book Review: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall

I love to run...er, I would love it, except that I always seem to get injured when I do it. Which is why I read this book. Because I'd had plantar fasciitis for six months and done absolutely everything doctors and everybody else recommended, including never going barefoot and buying orthotics and special shoes with extra arch support, and my heel pain kept getting worse. And then I heard something about a book called Born to Run and how some tribe in Mexico runs like 80 miles a day for fun with barely any shoes on at all.

So I bought the book, but my daughter snatched it, and then she lost it. Meanwhile, a guy at the shoe store was telling me that going barefoot might actually make a person's arches stronger, and my brother was telling me how he and my nephew had been running barefoot and how much more fun it is to run without shoes. So I walked my dog to the park one day on my miserable, screaming heels, took off my running shoes, and ran two miles barefoot in the grass.

It felt great. I did it again. And again. I was addicted. And my plantar fasciitis was gone in a month. I ran a triathlon, trying to mimic the barefoot technique as I ran in my shoes, and never had any heel pain at all. So weird.

And it dawned on me that when I used to love to run in elementary school, I did it in my little archless canvas Keds shoes, and I never had an injury of any kind until I convinced my mom to buy my first pair of Nikes and I read in a runner's magazine that proper running technique was to land heel first, something only possible in a highly-cushioned pair of shoes.

I finally found the book the other day, and had to read it almost in one sitting. After hearing and believing for so long that a person's body isn't made for running, I loved reading about an entire community of people, old and young, who run ultramarathons on a regular basis in nothing but strappy sandals, and they're all amazingly fast, which makes you think that maybe the human body was meant to run after all, and we moderns are just doing it wrong with our fancy cushioned shoes and lazy lifestyles and ultra-processed food.

Born to Run talks about technique, and shoes, and diet, and how running and caring about other people might sometimes have something to do with eachother, and it tells the story of a secret, amazing race between some of the most elite runners in America and members of this astonishing running tribe. It's also about finding joy in running and life and everything you do, and about a couple of scientists who discovered that the human body is actually designed to run, long and far. We aren't made to be walkers, we're made to be runners--long distance runners. If we can only remember how we used to do it. And remember to find the joy.

Although occasionally I got impatient with the sometimes too-long digressions about each participant in the race, and I didn't quite see what some of those details had to do with anything, overall I loved this book. I needed it. And reading had the interesting side-effect of making me want to run really far in the cold and eat a lot of chia seeds.

Well, and I stayed up reading until 3:00 am because I couldn't put it down.

I definitely recommend it (unless you're troubled by reading strong language, because it has some) if you're a runner, or want to be, or suffer from a million orthopedic injuries.

Deck Your Shelves...More Christmas Book Suggestions

It's book-buying time of year (we hope!) and at least a couple of other bloggers have great Christmas book suggestions:

check out Shannon Hale's (Goose Girl) recommendations and writer Matthew Kirby's.

And then, more book suggestions by me:

How could I have left Calvin and Hobbes off my list of boy books? The collected volumes of the comic strips by Bill Watterson (Something Under the Bed is Drooling, Sunday Pages 1985-1995, etc.) have been my ten-year-old's (and almost every one of his friends') standby for the last two years. Great vocabulary builder. You'll find kids will start asking you about things like Cubist art and sex-discrimination, so be prepared. Reluctant readers will happily wade through difficult words because they want to understand the joke, even if it seems too sophistacated for a kid that age. My 10 and 12-year-old quote from Calvin as much as from movies.

For the grown-ups (or serious teen-readers), how about a classic? Books I could re-read more times than I can squeeze in:

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Got me through the dark days of Junior High, along with Tolkien.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. I know you've seen the movie(s), but have you read the book--lately? Not just romance, it's hilarious, even makes fun of the traditional romantic novel. Sparkling prose, dialogue any writer could learn from. It's brilliant.

Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy. If you gave up on Hardy after Jude the Obscure, try again. Nobody tells a story like Hardy and this is my favorite of his.

Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner. For the serious reader. I loved the allegory of modern humanity as a crippled, searching old man.

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis. Stuns me every time.

Middlemarch, George Elliot. One of my all-time favorites. Love the BBC movie, as well.

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins. Gothic romance by a peer of Dickens, I read this as a spoof and can't help laughing out loud at random moments, more evidence that I'm more than a little crazy. It's also terrifying and I love the villain, Count Fosco. If you've seen the movie, don't toss out the baby with the bath. The book (as usual) is much better.


If you have your own recommendations for fabulous books, please feel free to add to my reading list with a comment. I love to hear what you think.