Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the… (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 2009; vuoden 2011 painos)

Oh, goodness, another full-length non-fiction book by a journalist, my favorite genre. Born to run, however, may be the best-written one of the three I've read this year, though I'm not exactly sure how the audiobook format may have affected that comparison. I read - or listened to - Born to Run several months removed from my Western-style exercise routine (and half-marathon training), and this book didn't exactly inspire me to get and go out to renew it. What it did do, as I listened from the vegetable garden and rice fields of my Nepali host family in Chitwan, was cause me appreciate the seemingly "backwards" culture I've been immersed in - in particular their tendency to work and play and do many daily tasks with bare feet. A sizeable portion of the book contrasted the details of the primitive Taura Umara's (right, so audiobooks don't give you proper spellings and Nepali internet makes research challenging) lifestyle with the supposed advantages of the USA's running culture. In researching and then helping plan an ultra (long-distance0 race between a handful of elite American runners and several members of the native tribe in some obscure, ultra-dangerous corner of rural Mexico, McDougall finds experts and enthusiasts on topics like Nike, barefoot running, injuries, sports psychology, and the anthropology of human running form. His basic conclusion - that each and every one of us is really and truly genetically programmed to run long distances - never directly addresses the injuries that he introduces at the book's start. Obviously, it's not a coaching book, but his glorification of the Taura Umara runners yields vague instructions about altering form and strides and such. I enjoyed his discussions about their "backwardness" and the Western world's misgivings about progress the most. ( )

Great book about running. ( )

This is a good book. My review might not sound like I enjoyed but I did. The book just had so much more potential that if fell short when you measure it on that scale. I also have some personal bias for writing that makes me think less of this book. Besides my own personal issues I think this book could have flowed a little better. It seemed like he went around talking to so many amazing researchers, scientists, and runners that I would have enjoyed hearing a lot more about them and their knowledge instead details about certain characters. Also, I would have loved more historical information about the Tarahumara and other running tribes or even the ultra races around the country. Who cares about how Jenn and Billy met and proceeded to become the most lewd runners when you could have spent the chapter on more evolutionary biology or running techniques. Anyway, the informative chapters don't really begin until ch. 25 and for me it was a little choppy the way the information was presented.

Now for my personal problems. Why write about an amazing culture, cutting edge research, history of marketing in a free economy, the evolution of mankind and make it sound like it came out of a white trash trailer park. I guess the best way to explain it is that it sounds like a long magazine article written by someone who has to put out articles everyday. McDougall did an huge amount of work, research, training and interviewing to get ready for this experience and yet conveys very little of the knowledge he gained. I really think if he had a taken a slightly different approach he could have had a book that people would be referring to for years and set a high standard. Instead we got the magazine version of running books.


( )

Truly incredible tale. Made even *me* want to run. ( )

Even if you’re not a runner, the narrative leading up to this 50-mile race in the Mexican wilderness will make you interested, and the relevant scientific research will help you see why that interest might be deeply embedded in our brains. We appear to have evolved as the only land animal specialized for long distance running, an advantage that helped us outlast the Neanderthals. Our running instinct also spawned a biological drive for efficiency, which in the modern world and resulted in laziness and the atrophy of the daily activities that prevent obesity, disease and injuries. The continual attempt to cushion our running through bulky shoes has only weakened our running mechanics and our running minds. For Americans, our competitive achiever mentality has also replaced the social bonding and personal enjoyment that running provided our ancestors. We were born to run. We age faster when we don’t. ( )