Charles B. Kastner

It is somewhat surprising to know that this was written by a long-distance runner and someone with a graduate degree in History, for it is not particularly good history, and, perhaps more importantly, it does not do a credible job of getting into the details of long-distance running. This is the author's personal enthusiasm made manifest by lots of details that he was able to track down in a less than thorough way. To limit comments to the most egregious faults, first, the author gets very repetitious about what he describes. True, the book is about several weeks of daily running, but the formula he follows is still lacking in variety and imagination. And, second, he fails miserably to mention the details of the runners daily grind, barely mentioning at the fact that the runners had support vehicles, and waiting until very near the end, to describe at all how the support vehicle actually provided any support. What happens when the shoes give out, when blisters developed, when falls occur, when, when, when... How often do they get water? Food? Do they wait around to eat and drink or do so while still running? Why were so many runners hit by cars? And on and on, with no detail, no answers, all of which would be interesting to a runner of even a lowly 5K race. Yet, his most worrisome trait is the way the author gives vivid "first-person witness" terms to events he couldn't have possibly seen himself. How could he know that a particular runner was "a sight to behold", if he wasn't alive yet to see him run and there were no videos available to document the past event? This book may be good at stimulating a middle school student to take up cross-country running, but it is decidedly not professional history, or particularly good literature.… (altro)