THE GOOD WORD

In an era when more and more people get their information from the electronic media, marathoners and ultrarunners are among the few people left who read for pleasure and for information. And they do it well; just check their demographics. Sure, marathoners and ultrarunners surf the Web for race information; but long before most people were comfortable with using the Web to do business, our readers were registering for races and buying books from Amazon.com over the Internet.

We bump into a lot of runners/readers at marathon expos, where besides signing up new subscribers to this magazine we also sell a selection of books of interest to marathoners and ultrarunners.

The running-book market goes through ups and downs like any other market.

Back in the 1970s, Runner’s World published loads of running books. In fact, it was just about the only game in town. It published books by Joe Henderson, Tom Osler, George Sheehan, and Joan Ullyot; books on foot care; and training books by Ernst van Aaken, Arthur Lydiard, and others.

Then, in 1977 Random House published Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running, which streaked to the top of the nonfiction bestseller list. To counter that, Simon & Schuster published George Sheehan’s Running & Being; the running-book battle was on.

Suddenly the floodgates were open. Every publisher in the country brought out running books and the market quickly became saturated. Just as suddenly, running books were being returned to the publishers by bookstores that could no longer sell them.

Gradually, a vacuum was created that running books had at one point filled. Jeff Galloway stepped into that vacuum with his Galloway’s Book of Running, which was first self-published in 1983 and later picked up by Shelter Publications, a division of Random House.

We’ve gone through various waves and troughs as far as running books go since then.

We’re currently riding another wave, and this time through, the selection of books is more varied and interesting than ever.

Gordon Bakoulis, former Running Times editor and one of America’s longest-running elite marathoners, has a new book out called Getting Real About Running. It’s a basic how-to-put-together-a-running-program book whose timing is right on because so many new runners have so many basic questions and aren’t finding good information in a market where many of the best basic training books are out of print.

Frank Murphy’s The Silence of Great Distance is a marvelous history of the women’s running movement. Besides being extremely well written and well researched, it is a must-read for young women getting into the sport, who would benefit from the perspectives of the women who have come before them.

We carried part of Kirk Johnson’s To the Edge last year. Kirk went to Death Valley to cover the annual July race for The New York Times. As it does for many, Death Valley lured him back to give it a try himself.

Our friend Ed Sears just came out with a marvelous masterwork titled Running Through the Ages, which chronicles running from prehistoric times to today. We have an excerpt planned for a future issue.

Sally Pont’s Finding Their Stride is a wonderful book that follows one year of a cross-country team at Moravian Academy, a 247-student independent school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Nick Tsiotos and Andy Dabilis have a stirring biography of Stylianos Kyriakides. Kyriakides was a Greek who wanted to call attention to the plight of his people after the devastation of World War II when he came to the Boston Marathon to win it for his country. The book is called Running With Pheidippides.

Bernd Heinrich’s book Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life has received a great deal of attention, as it should. Heinrich, a biologist and champion ultrarunner, examines how and why we are the great running animals into which we have evolved.

Then there’s our friend Dick Beardsley’s truly inspiring Staying the Course: A Runner’s Toughest Race. The book reads as excitingly as Dick speaks when he addresses running audiences.

We’ve also enjoyed Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas’s Advanced Marathoning.

The pile of excellent running books from recent years is several feet thick and growing. The variety is stunning. It’s nothing like the predictable titles that flowed freely in the early 1980s. The new breed of running author has taken the sport and lifestyle and spiced the whole enterprise with a variety not seen before.

At this time of year we like to add to the torrent with our annual Summer Reading Gold Mine issue, which is heavy on long long-distance stuff that’s easier to read about than to do but serves as an inducement to take your long-distance running one or two steps farther.

We have once again tapped the talents of that grizzled marine Paul Reese, who has written three books about his running road-trip adventures and who in this issue reviews books about transcontinental runs. He also investigates what may have been a bogus transcon walk/run and then details the slowest-ever transcon “run.”

We had such a positive response last year to Chuck Kastner’s tale of Ed “The Sheik” Gardner and his adventures at the 1928 C.C. Pyle Bunion Derby that we invited Chuck back to fill us in on what happened in the second and last Bunion Derby in 1929.

Clay Shaw and Karen Mitchell take us to North Africa for the unique Sahara Marathon. Our buddy Joe Prusaitis from Austin takes us through the Rocky Raccoon, and young Ian Torrence reports from Hong Kong on the Trailwalker 100K championships.

Roger Robinson’s fourth installment of “Running in Literature” brings us up to the modern era and sets the stage for next issue’s pick of the best dozen running novels of all time.

Oh, yes. We should also point out that this is the largest issue of M&B ever published. It’s a PR for which we can thank our dedicated readers and advertisers.

It just goes on and on. We are being spoiled by a cornucopia of good things to read about running.

It dawns on me that I should stop babbling about all the fun-to-read things in this issue and let you get on with it.

There comes a time when it is wise to just hush and let an issue speak for itself. That time is now.

—Rich Benyo