If you’re a runner, you should be excited about all the great things you’ll have to read while you’re tapering for your spring marathon. In North America we have three well known US female runners who have recently released, or are about to release, their memoirs and if you're across the pond in the UK there is some exciting news there too.
On the North American book scene, Lauren Fleishman released her book titled Good for a Girl on January 10th 2023. Lauren is a retired track athlete and coach. In her book she tells the story of her experience in professional sport and aims to highlight how the environment if failing young female athletes.
Since we are on the topic of inside stories from pro athletes, Kara Goucher has been promoting her book release for several months and it was finally released on March 14th 2023! Having been a Kara fangirl since 2012 when Canada didn’t have any female marathoners at the Olympics, I’m both excited to read her story and sad that her career (and the sport I love) was tarnished with abuse. We previously read and reviewed Matt Hart’s book, Win at All Costs, about Nike Oregon Project’s toxic culture and Coach Alberto Salazar’s questionable methods, and I’m expecting to get a deeper understanding of the situation in Kara’s book.
To top off the list of US professional runners releasing books in 2023, Des Linden's memoir, Choosing to Run, is set to release on April 4th 2023 and is available for pre-order right now. Des was another marathoner who was on that 2012 US Olympic team the year I was looking for someone to root for, but she ended up not finishing due to a hip injury. She is till running at the top and finished 4th in the 2020 US Olympic Trials marathon! Her career mantra has always been “keep showing up” and in her memoire she talks about her journey and what keeps her showing up each day.
Now for some exciting news from across the pond! UK based author, Richard Askwith (who we had on the podcast to talk about his book Today We Die A Little), is out with a new book called The Race Against Time which was just released on January 12th 2023. In this book he explores running as we age; if it’s anything like the book we reviewed, it should be as captivating as it is enlightening. If you’ve listened to our podcast episode about Today We Die A Little, you’ll know that Richard really immerses himself in the topic that he is writing about and this new book will likely have a lot of insight regarding staying engaged and motivated to pursue running as you age.
Another well known UK based author, Adharanand Finn, hinted on Twitter earlier this year that he is working on a soon to be released book. The title has not yet been confirmed, and we don't know much about the book other than assuming it will be about running… or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part… Although no official information has been provided, I’m convinced this new book will be about running and that it will be a good read.
By the time you’re tapering for that spring marathon, you’ll have four great new 2023 book releases to choose from. As we’ve read in several books about marathon training, those last taper weeks tend to be anxiety producing (it even got the name “maranoia”). Instead of using that extra time end energy to stress about… well, everything… maybe using that extra time to read a running book will help get you through those final weeks.
Let us know if you enjoy reading more during marathon taper, and what books you currently have on your “want to read” list.
Liz
In case you want to listen (or re-listen) to some of our previous episodes (like the interview with Richard Askwith) you can find it in the list of episodes here: https://runningbookreviews.buzzsprout.com/