Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen by Christopher McDougall

This is a great book for someone who loves to run, because at the very center of it is the idea that running is something humans were built to do.

I sit here nursing a running injury as I write this (one that's mostly my fault for not listening to my body and trying to run through a little bit of pain until it became a lot of pain), and it's things like running injuries, or just simply the feeling that running is not fun, that convince a lot of people that humans were not meant to run, not like other animals (my dog bounding joyfully across the tennis courts comes to mind). The author, a sports writer by profession and an amateur, oft-injured runner felt the same way, and so went in search of a tribe of Indians in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico who are known for their mythic ability to run fast and far and practically barefoot.

The book is part the story of his search and the people it led him to and the race in the Sierra Madres that he helped organize as a result of his experience. It is also part a scientific treatise on why humans were built to run, and to run for a long time. As a runner, I found the book to be incredibly inspiring. Not in the sense that an underdogs-take-the-day sports story is inspiring, but in the sense that it presented all sorts of reasons that this pastime of mine is something I was built to do, and therefore I can do it even better and, more importantly, enjoy it to a greater extent than I already do. It was a good book to read at a time when I feel like my running has been at a bit of a low point.

Beyond that, it was also just fun to read. I had a hard time relating to the ultramarathoners he profiled on a personal level (these are, after all, people who run 50 to 100 miles on a regular basis). So I didn't read it as a character study, but that's not really what it was meant to be. It was a piece of journalism, with a really engaging story and angle, and as such I found it to be well written and interesting. I blew through it in about a week, partly because I borrowed it from my dad over the break and wanted to return it to him when I returned back west for my brother's wedding, partly because I had two cross-country flights in which to read it, but also partly because I just liked the book.