Four classic running books

Now that the holidays are over and you’ve tested out the new running gear Santa left you under the tree, it is also time to redeem those gift cards for some of the running books you didn’t get.

Running book lists appear fairly often, and there are plenty out there about what the best books of 2014 might be, but it is also good to go back to the classics, or as the case may be, discover them for the first time. You might have to dig through the shelves at a used book store or scour the internet to find these, though.

Here are four all-time must-read running books.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

By Alan Sillitoe

A short-story about a kid in juvenile detention in Essex in the 1950s, this classic is less about running and more about independence. The boy, Smith, is sent to a borstal for robbing a bakery. There, he is tasked with representing the school in cross-country because he “was long and skinny.” The trouble with sports stories of any kind is that when the plot turns around a competition, the outcome is usually pretty easy to predict. In this one, however, running gives Smith power he would not otherwise have had over the prison school administrators.

Running to the Top

By Arthur Lydiard and Garth Gilmour

This is the classic Lydiard training book. It may be that more recent books (Matt Fitzgerald’s work comes to mind) are better written, organized and have more up to date information, but when almost all of the “big” running coaches and authors acknowledge the philosophy of one man, it is good to read the primary source. One of the misunderstandings about Lydiard is that he advocated strict schedules of extremely high mileage. In his own words, from a chapter called “The Path to Full Potential” here is a more accurate encapsulation of his philosophy: “Cleaving strictly to a given schedule is not the way to progress. If your schedule says you are to run ten miles, but you don’t feel like running even one, don’t. It’s no good losing sleep if you were to do twenty 400m reps an did only nineteen.”

Running

By Jean Echenoz

You may not have heard of this book. It is a relatively recent publication (2008 in the original French), but the subject matter is classic: the life of Emil Zatopek. Zatopek won three gold medals at the 1952 Olympics for Czechoslovakia. If you do the math, you can see that a Czech runner in the early 50s would be living under the Soviet regime. This book weaves the runner’s struggles and the country’s.

Unbroken

By Laura Hillenbrand

As the jacket copy says: now a major motion picture. You should be able to pick this one up almost anywhere these days. The story of Louis Zamperini is part Forrest Gump, part Life of Pi: a runner who seems to be at all the important parts of history, then later is lost on the Pacific ocean. Even if you are not one of those people who need to read the book before you see the movie, you should pick this up. It’s a great example of how the mental strength we gain from running can apply to other areas. Hopefully POW camps are not applicable to any runners we know. After reading this book, I felt bad complaining about anything: it could not possibly be as bad as this guy had it, and he lived!