Miscellany: Mulliga Runs a Marathon, Part 4 - The Inspiration

While there are plenty of books written about how to run long distances, this post features memoirs about why people run long distances. The value of these personal stories wasn't immediately obvious to me when I first started training, but when the miles on the road get tedious, or when life or injury interrupts a training plan, the experiences of others can push you over the hump:

Looks Like We're Running: An Amateur's Companion to Becoming a Marathoner

Dustin Riedesel is a fellow who has been through a lot - leukemia, alcohol addiction, and marriage and kids.  One day he decides to take up running, and commits to entering the Disney Marathon with his wife.  Looks Like We're Running is the humorous, conversational, and sometimes heartfelt story of Riedesel's marathon training.

This book is one of the most relatable accounts of marathon training I've ever read. While Riedesel was a former minor college basketball player, he is otherwise a total amateur in pursuit of an amateur's goal - run a sub 4-hour marathon.  He takes it seriously, though, giving the story some real stakes and a nailbiting finish - you feel like you are with him through every grueling mile.

How to Lose a Marathon: A Starter's Guide to Finishing in 26.2 Chapters

Joel Cohen's marathon memoir, How to Lose a Marathon, is a lot more flippant than most.  Cohen is a longtime writer for The Simpsons, and he brings the irreverent tone of that series (and rudimentary line drawings reminiscent of the Tracey Ullman years of the show) to the book.

It's not all jokes though.  There are some real training tips and motivational nuggets here, and Cohen certainly respects the thousands of runners who put themselves through the marathon grind. The book ends in suitably climactic fashion: Cohen races the New York City Marathon, and yes, he does lose - but he did finish.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author known for two things: surreal literary fiction and running.  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running compares the two pursuits, both solitary endeavors where sometimes there is no end in sight, and how one feeds into the other.  The title (a reference to Raymond Carver's story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) hints at the philosophical, introspective nature of the book.

Murakami is by far the most accomplished runner in this blog post (his marathon PR is 3:27, a great time for an amateur, and he's run ultramarathons), but the book is pretty silent about the nuts and bolts of his training and nutrition, and there's definitely no braggadocio here. It's more about what running long distances feels like to him, delivered in an engrossing monologue.