Description

Book Synopsis
An unlikely marathoner finds her way through grief and into the untold history of women and running.

Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike defined herself in many ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents' deaths a decade earlier, orphan. Runner was nowhere near the list. Yet when she began training for a half marathon on a whim, she found herself an instant convert. Soon she realized that running, a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory, was helping her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she had been, for ten messy years, running away from.      
     As Catriona excavates her own past, she also grows curious about other women drawn to running. What she finds is a history of repression and denial—running was thought to endanger childbearing, and as late as 1967 the organizer of the Boston Marathon tried to drag a woman off the course, telling her to get the hell out of my race—but also of incredible courage and achievement. As she brings to life the stories of pioneering athletes and analyzes the figure of the woman runner in pop culture, literature, and myth, she comes to the heart of why she's running, and why any of us do.

The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion

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    A Hardback by Catriona Menzies-Pike

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      Book details

      Publisher Random House USA Inc
      Published 23 May 2017
      ISBN-13 9781524759445
      978-1524759445
      ISBN-10 1524759449
      Also in:
      Published diaries, letters and journals Running and jogging

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      An unlikely marathoner finds her way through grief and into the untold history of women and running.

      Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike defined herself in many ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents' deaths a decade earlier, orphan. Runner was nowhere near the list. Yet when she began training for a half marathon on a whim, she found herself an instant convert. Soon she realized that running, a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory, was helping her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she had been, for ten messy years, running away from.      
           As Catriona excavates her own past, she also grows curious about other women drawn to running. What she finds is a history of repression and denial—running was thought to endanger childbearing, and as late as 1967 the organizer of the Boston Marathon tried to drag a woman off the course, telling her to get the hell out of my race—but also of incredible courage and achievement. As she brings to life the stories of pioneering athletes and analyzes the figure of the woman runner in pop culture, literature, and myth, she comes to the heart of why she's running, and why any of us do.

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