Running Book Reviews with Alan and Liz

Running Through; my journey through moments of flight, is Steven’s journey into Running via a series of tiny moments of flight. This book is divided into short stories describing some of the moments in his personal running journey and how they ended up influencing his life. Some stories are funny anecdotes and others are not funny at all and deeply personal. The common thread is that Steven is running through them all. 

Who is SB St...

If you've been following our social media accounts (mainly FB and Instagram... we're not as good about posting to X or Threads...) then you'll have seen that Alan went to Boston this year. Before the Boston Marathon, we reviewed The Boston Marathon Handbook buy Marc Pollina, and it turned out that Alan and Marc ran very similar finish times. That's why we invited him on for this bonus episode! 

Marc and...

All In Stride is the story of two Kenyan born athletes who have competed at the highest levels in running, and one US athlete and Olympian in the modern pentathlon. The bond that the three characters share is that they have all been in the Army’s world class athlete program (WCAP).
The book is divided into two parts:
Part 1: Kenya – which is about Elvin and Shadrak’s upbringing in Kenya and their journey into running.
P...

The Boston Marathon Handbook is part of the Falcon Guides series, which cover the entire spectrum of outdoor activities. This book covers everything about Boston from what makes Boston so special, to getting in and training, and even what to do after the race and more!
There are 12 chapters that make up the book:
Chapter 1 - Why Is The Boston Marathon Special?
Chapter 2 - There's Only One Boston
Chapter 3 - Ge...

In The Spell Of The Barkley tells the story of the Barkley race in Tennessee with its history and traditions, how the author discovered it and became determined to finish the “fun run”, and explores the reasons why participants keep coming back despite being almost guaranteed to fail. The book is a mix of the authors experience and stories of the people he met in the ultrarunning world. A few people he talks about in the book are:

There Is No Wall is ultrarunner Allie Bailey’s brutally honest and sometimes shocking account of alcoholism, depression and severe mental breakdowns which almost cost her her life. Told with disarming vulnerability, heartbreaking depth of feeling and dark humour, this isn’t a story about how running saved her – she was already running and at the height of her struggles sometimes even winning 100-mile-plus races. But somewhere betwe...

Becoming a Sustainable Runner is a guide written by two environmental advocates, Tina Muir and Zoe Rom, who love running. This book teaches us about the impact running has on the environment, but also how to be a lifelong runner and how to contribute to the running community in a way that is positive and inclusive.
The book has 3 parts:
Sustain Your Runners Mind and Body
Sustain Your Running Community
Sustain Your P...

In this episode we get to chat with author, Ryan Whited, about his book (co-authored with Matt Fitzgerald) Pain + Performance.

Pain + Performance  is a book that aims to explain how pain is a normal human experience and not something that we need to try and get rid of… at least not completely. Pain also doesn’t always mean tissue damage as we are mostly taught to believe. Author Ryan Whited has been helping athletes at hi...

The Psychology of Running is part of The Psychology of Everything series which also includes:
The Psychology of Art
The Psychology of Wellness
The Psychology of Comedy
The Psychology of Democracy
The Psychology of Counselling
The Psychology of Travel
The Psychology of Attachment

This book dives into the science of running to answer six questions that make up the 6 chapters of the book:

1. Why do...

In this bonus episode, Liz interviews Alan about his recent attempt at a Quebec age group record on the indoor track. 

Alan has never worn spikes or raced on an indoor track. This should be interesting!

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Running Away from Cancer is the story of the author, Greg Schnoor's, journey to becoming an ultramarathoner after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. The thing is, he wasn’t even a runner before his diagnosis and started running while receiving maintenance chemotherapy once a month. Greg first started running because two of his kids had joined a cross country running team at school and he wanted to spend time with them as much...

This bonus was recorded after we just finished chatting with Matt Fitzgerald and Layla Porteous about 80/20 Endurance High Performance Coaching Course and companion book. It took us months to complete the course so obviously there were a lot of questions that we couldn't get to with our guests. We chatted about coaching principles and the nuance of calculating training intensity, but we didn't get to other things like:

This episode is a little different because Matt Fitzgerald's book, 80/20 Eandurance, is a companion to a new coaching course created by Leyla Porteous, Director of Training and Operations at 80/20 Endurance. We refer to the course a lot, but all the information is also in the book. The book is divided into 12 chapters which cover the 12 topics in the coaching course:
1 - Principles of Endurance Training
2 - Training In...

We love these episodes because it means we get to reminisce about the books we've read over the last 5-6 months. Since we're on a strict reading schedule of one book every 2 weeks, we don't get to wallow in that after-good-book feeling you get after finishing a book, so these recaps are the next best thing.

In this episode we reflected back on this list of books (with links to the episodes in case you haven&...

In this episode we had the pleasure of chatting with Claire Maxted (a.k.a. Wild Ginger Runner) about her book, The Ultimate Trail Running Handbook, and also found out that she is currently writing her second book which will be specifically for ultra trail runners!

The Ultimate Trail Running Handbook is not called “ultimate” for no reason. It goes through many topics in a beginner friendly way with lots of lists and picture...

For those of you who have been following the podcast, you know that we were gearing up to run a sub-3 hour marathon at the Petit Train du Nord Marathon on October 1st, 2023.

You've likely seen our social media posts and know that neither of us achieved the goal on race day (and if you didn't see those posts then stop right here and click on the links at the bottom to follow us on FB and Instagram!) but some of ou...

Just Finish is author Sean Kachmarski’s story of going from watching The Great North Run on TV every year and telling his wife “I’m going to run that next year”, to actually running it! Sean played football while he was in school but never described himself as athletic. By the time he decided to start running he had 2 kids, a full time job and was overweight, so he wasn’t even sure if he could do it. It all started with a health sc...

We had a great chat with Andrew Snow about his book, Run Elite. It was so great in fact, that it ended up being one of our longest episodes because Andrew is so knowledgeable and passionate about running. As we were wrapping up the podcast we discovered another topic that he is passionate about; nutrition!

Andrew touches on nutrition in his book but knows that it can be a controversial topic. In this little bonus chat he s...

In this episode we chat with author Andrew Snow about his book Run Elite. Andrew is very passionate about helping runners improve their performance and it shows in the podcast.

Run Elite covers all aspects of high-level marathon training. Although the reference is mostly to marathon running throughout the book, the information provided is applicable to longer and shorter distances also. The book consists of 22 chapter divi...