A Nike Coach’s New Book Shares Almost the Exact Title of Mary Cain’s Nike Memoir

Four months ago, Mary Cain published the memoir she had been carrying for a decade. She called it This Is Not About Running, and the title did a lot of work. The book was about weight targets and public weigh-ins, about a teenager cut off from her parents inside the Nike Oregon Project, about depression and disordered eating and the slow realization that the fastest girl in America had been broken by the system built to make her faster. Running was the backdrop. The harm was the story.

On September 1, Nike Running’s global head coach, Chris Bennett, will publish a book called This Is About Running. This Is Not About Running.

The overlap is hard to miss. Bennett’s title contains Cain’s title, word for word, and both books arrive from the same publishing house in the same calendar year. Cain’s memoir came out through Mariner Books. Bennett’s is being published by Dey Street. Both are imprints of HarperCollins.

That is where the resemblance ends, because the two books could not be more different in spirit.

Bennett is one of the most recognizable voices in recreational running. As the coaching voice behind the Nike Run Club app, he has talked millions of beginners through their first mile, their first 5K, and their first bad day back on the road. His book is being marketed as “deeply motivating, funny, and unexpectedly moving,” a reframe of running not as a test of speed or competition but as a practice in showing up for yourself. The subtitle promises “lessons for between and beyond the start and finish line.” It is, by every indication, a warm and well-meaning book.

And that is exactly what makes the timing awkward.

The phrase “This Is Not About Running” no longer belongs to the sport in a neutral way. Since April, within the running community, the phrase has become strongly associated with Cain’s memoir. For anyone who followed that reckoning, seeing a Nike figure attach the same words to an inspirational running book lands strangely, no matter how unrelated the content.

Why the words carry weight

Cain was 16 when Alberto Salazar recruited her to the Oregon Project, then the most powerful distance program in the country. She was 17 when she became the youngest American to make a track and field World Championships team. By the time she left, she was dealing with injuries, depression, and years of missed periods brought on by extreme calorie restriction.

She went public in 2019 with a New York Times video that traveled around the running world overnight. “I was the fastest girl in America,” she said, “until I joined Nike.” Other former Oregon Project athletes, including Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley, came forward with their own accounts.

The program shut down in 2019. Salazar received a lifetime ban from the U.S. Center for SafeSport in 2021 over separate allegations of sexual and emotional misconduct. Cain sued Salazar and Nike that same year and reached a confidential settlement in 2023. The memoir is Cain’s most comprehensive account of her experience, drawing on the diaries she kept as a teenager.

So when a book called This Is Not About Running appears on running shelves, most readers in the sport now have a specific association. It is not a coaching philosophy. It is a young woman explaining what happened to her at Nike.

An echo, most likely, not a message

There is no reason to think Bennett chose the phrase to reference Cain, and plenty of reasons to think he did not. Book titles are locked in with publishers well before release, and “this is not about running” is a natural line for any coach who wants to argue that the sport teaches you something bigger than pace. Bennett has built his whole public identity on that idea. The words fit him.

It is also worth separating the coach from the company. Bennett is a beloved figure who has spent years getting ordinary people out the door, and nothing about his work connects him to the Oregon Project or to Salazar. Judging his book by a title collision would be unfair to a book that has not even been released.

Still, titles do not exist in a vacuum, and neither does Nike. The company spent years as the central character in the Oregon Project story, and it has worked hard to move the conversation back toward joy, community, and the everyday runner. A HarperCollins imprint publishing an uplifting Nike-branded running book that shares its name with a Nike abuse memoir, in the same year, is the kind of coincidence a publicist would have wanted to catch.

Whether anyone did catch it, we do not yet know. As of this writing, neither HarperCollins nor either author appears to have publicly addressed the similarity in the titles.

For now, two books sit a few months and a few words apart. One is about what running can give you. The other is about what it can take. They will share a shelf, a publisher, and very nearly a name, and readers will have to keep them straight on their own.