running

If you’ve only skimmed headlines about Spanish mountain athlete Kilian Jornet, you probably think he’s obsessed with speed. After all, the two-time National Geographic Adventurer of the Year holds the fastest known time for climbing and descending the Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro, Mont Blanc, Denali, and Everest. He also set a record for skiing nearly eighty thousand feet uphill in twenty-four hours. So, yeah, there’s good reason to think Jornet is single-minded in his pursuits. Yet in his new memoir, Above the Clouds, which revolves around a year on Everest, Jornet says, “I ran fast to live a slow lifestyle.” And, more important than the stoke of setting records, “it is about how a runner or climber sees the mountains.” Endurance athletes will like the book’s insight into training and nutrition, but it’s Jornet’s honest ruminations on the “why” of adventure and the siren song of nature that make this a must-read for any mountain lover.

Like most runners, journalist Christopher McDougall found himself plagued by a parade of injuries. Unlike most runners, he decided to seek a cure—and test his own limits—deep within the folds of Mexico’s Copper Canyon region. What he learned, both from scientists and from the expert (and injury-free) long-haul runners of the canyon’s indigenous Tarahumara tribe, sparked the minimalist running revolution—and eventually, the maximalist whiplash that followed.

In 1991, wearing racing flats and little more than his signature lion’s mane of red-gold hair, with neither a GPS watch nor a trainer to set pace, Canadian Al Howie blazed two world records back to back: one for a 1,300-mile race, finishing in sixteen days, nineteen hours, and one for a 4,533-mile cross-Canada race, averaging sixty-three miles a day for over two months. Yes, two months. Ultra, shmultra—and now we think a fifty-miler is tough. In this moving biography of an obscure legend, screenwriter Jared Beasley sketches a soulful portrait of an embattled figure who, fueled by fish n’ chips and beer and instinct, won dozens of mega-distance races in the 1980s and ’90s, inspiring many with his working-class heroism and singular devotion to mileage. In Search of Al Howie will leave you yearning for a recent yet distant unplugged era in human-powered adventure, when a free spirit kindled righteous pursuits of endurance as a way of life.

Bill McKibben spent a year training for cross-country ski racing and thinking about what physical effort means in a sedentary culture. The skiing is the frame; the questions about embodiment and endurance are the point.

On the Run is yet another hardcover, stitch-bound delight from Berlin-based publisher Gestalten, a book that feels as good to hold as it is to read, though no one’s judging if you just want to look at the photos. Inside are runners from a wide range of backgrounds and abilities, including profiles of Mimi Anderson, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of three who holds world records in endurance running; Justin Gallegos, the first professional athlete with cerebral palsy; and Brazil’s Ghetto Run Crew, an urban club taking back Rio de Janeiro’s dangerous streets one step at a time. Adding to the stoke are daydream-worthy descriptions of twenty-five marathons and trail runs, from Greece’s Athens Authentic Marathon to California’s Badwater 135 in Death Valley. Spanning the individual and universal in radiant images and stories, On the Run is two-hundred-and-fifty-some pages of runner’s sweet, sweet high, a celebration of how much putting one foot in front of the other can do for the human spirit.

Running as a way of processing grief, motherhood, and wildness — trails in New Mexico, ultramarathons, and the discovery that forward motion is its own form of prayer.

Working beside his mother at an apple plant in Yakima, Washington, teenage Noé Álvarez dreamed of a life different from that of his Mexican immigrant parents. He became a first-generation college student, but struggled until he discovered Peace and Dignity Journeys, a grassroots, months-long marathon that takes indigenous participants from Canada to Guatemala. Scraped together by volunteers and little funding, PDJ connects runners to the land and native communities along the way. Sporting neon yellow shoes, one change of clothes, a journal, and a sixteen-hundred-page dictionary—“that, I argued to myself when I packed, contained all the books in the world”—Álvarez struck south from British Columbia with an eclectic band of Dené, Gitxsan, Tohono O’odham, Purépecha, Maya, and Apache runners. Read this soul-searching memoir for a deeper look at the capacity to suffer and transcend through movement, and for a range of real-life characters whose stories will stay with you long after the running ends.

A study of endurance athletes — ultra-runners, thru-hikers, long-distance swimmers — and the psychology of pushing past what the body says is possible.