The Best Running Books, According to Runners and Coaches
New York Magazine
If you've ever heard of barefoot running or considered buying an energy bar with chia seeds, you can thank Christopher McDougall's book Born to ...
Barefoot TJ how do you send someone a personal message on here?
I don't believe in running books, I find the training programs in them tell people to over train. One training program that suits one person doesn't necessary suit another person. These running books talk from one size fits all.
That's like saying that you will get bored to enjoying occasionally few beers, you need to get faster, drink more and probably proceed to meth and heroin.
Yeah, there might be people that feel a bit differently.. But then it's pretty much statistically impossible that I would be only one thinking like this, so there most probably are lots of people like me and if they try running with that recommended running program-heart rate monitor-bullshit approach, they will find running pretty blah thing to do..
For many runners, though, the appeal is the book’s (Born to Run) portrayal of the love of running for its own sake. As Roll says “it helped inspire my imagination about what running could be outside of just signing up for a marathon.”
Frequently throughout the book you see references to great runners smiling with big grins while running. That's certainly the goal I work on the most: keep it enjoyable. If I'm not able to smile about my running I'm not doing it right.
One of the reasons for running barefoot is more feedback from the soles to listen to how our own body feels about the way we are running, and/or about how far, or fast, or hard we are running.
It's not a running book, but "Strength Training and Coordination" by Frans Bosch helped me improve my running form more than any running book I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. It's possible that it worked because I'd already tried the conventional barefoot wisdom and the usual cues with less than satisfactory results, ie maybe I was ready for it. Or it could be that it made sense because of how my brain works. Dunno. If anyone else reads it I'd love to know whether it helped you.