BOOK: Mastering the Marathon

Slowly, slowly I have been building my running up. I hope to run my first marathon in November. So, as you can imagine, I am reading many books about running, marathons and everything in between. Here's one book:

Mastering the Marathon:
Time-Efficient Training Secrets for the 40-plus Athlete
by Don Fink

The ideal resource for athletes age forty and older who seek faster times and fewer injuries

More than half a million Americans, and millions more worldwide, attempt a marathon every year. Around half are forty years old or older—athletes whose passion increasingly turns to frustration as they mature, with slower finishing times and more injuries. And yet, until now, there has been no book written specifically for them. In Mastering the Marathon, champion forty-plus endurance athlete and trainer Don Fink sets forth programs for anyone over forty—including those who enter the sport after turning forty—to prove that the challenge of a marathon is not too difficult, that the dream is not impossible.

Starting with the premise that the training methods that work for younger athletes no longer work for athletes in their forties, fifties, and sixties, Fink presents exciting new training methods and step-by-step action plans that result in faster times, fewer injuries, and more enjoyment for the forty-plus marathoner. Including photos and profiles of successful older athletes, Mastering the Marathon also provides an illustrated exercise program for core and functional strength, ways to avoid common training and racing mistakes, recovery methods unique to forty-plus athletes, secrets to staying injury-free, and much more.

BOOK: Eat & Run

Scott Jurek is known as one of greatest ultrarunner (races longer than a marathon, such as 50 & 100 miles) and is a vegetarian. Just had to find out his story.

For nearly two decades, Scott Jurek has been a dominant force — and darling — in the grueling and growing sport of ultrarunning. In 1999, as a complete unknown, he took the lead of the Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile traverse over the old Gold Rush trails of the California Sierra Nevada. He won that race 7 years in a row, setting a course record along the way. Twice he won the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile "jaunt" from the bottom of Death Valley to the shoulders of Mount Whitney. He triumphed in the 153-mile Spartathlon in Greece three times. Recently, he set a new American record by running 165.7 miles in 24 hours—6.5 marathons in one day. And he was one of the elite runners who traveled to Mexico to run with the Tarahumara Indians, as profiled in the runaway bestseller Born to Run. His accomplishments are nothing short of extraordinary, but that he has achieved all of this on a plant-based diet makes his story all the more.

In Eat & Run, Scott Jurek opens up about his life and career — as an elite athlete and a vegan — and inspires runners at every level. From his Midwestern childhood of hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family, to his early beginnings in running (he hated it), to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, to his incredible, world-spanning, record-breaking races — Scott’s story shows the power of an iron will and the importance of thinking of our food as our fuel.

Chock full of incredible, on-the-brink stories of endurance and competition, as well as fascinating science and accessible practical advice — including his own favorite plant based recipes, Eat & Run will motivate everyone to "go the distance" whether that means getting out for that first run, expanding your food horizons, or simply exploring the limits of your own potential.

"Anyone can be an ultrarunner," says Jurek. His remarkable story is a reminder that, no matter how far you go, every day’s run is a journey of discovery and the chance to explore what’s possible in sport — and in life.

More information at Scott Jurek's website