Ever see a gazelle with shinsplints?

I can’t remem­ber the last time I enjoyed a book this much. I real­ly had trou­ble putting it down. Part mem­oir, part sport jour­nal­ism, and part inves­ti­ga­tion into human nature, *Born to Run* is well-paced, fun, and much more than I had expected.

McDougal­l’s writ­ing style is a lit­tle more infor­mal than I pre­fer, but he makes it work well. The sub­ject mat­ter is clear­ly very impor­tant to him and the per­son­al tone lends authen­tic­i­ty to his sto­ry­telling and his theorizing.

In an odd way, *Born to Run* remind­ed me of *Moby Dick*. The nar­ra­tive of Cap­tain Ahab and the White Whale is only about a half of Melville’s epic. The rest is filled with back­ground infor­ma­tion about whal­ing, and ships, and about whales. *Born to Run* like­wise had a cen­tral nar­ra­tive, but spent quite a lot of time with lessons in his­to­ry, biol­o­gy, kine­si­ol­o­gy, anato­my, mar­ket­ing, cul­ture, and even moral­i­ty. Each seem­ing diver­sion adds to the over­all pic­ture and brings depth, weight, and rel­e­vance to the story.

*Born to Run* chal­lenges the idea that run­ning is an evo­lu­tion­ary aber­ra­tion in humans and dis­pens­es with the notion that our feet and knees are too del­i­cate to run safe­ly. Instead, McDougall lays out a very con­vinc­ing case that the injuries that are far too com­mon in mod­ern run­ners are the result of well-mean­ing attempts to fix with tech­nol­o­gy what is not broken.

I’d seen some of these stud­ies the book described before, so I did­n’t think McDougall was com­ing out of left field, but he did a very good job of con­vinc­ing me that mod­ern run­ning shoes cause more prob­lems than they solve. Even Nike has bowed to this evi­dence by pro­duc­ing run­ning shoes with less padding and less fan­cy tech­nol­o­gy to insu­late the human foot from the road, in essence admit­ting that for the last few decades they have been sell­ing us shoes that injured the vast major­i­ty of runners.

In the face of this, I’m sud­den­ly very inter­est­ed in get­ting min­i­mal­ist shoes for run­ning. I’m not will­ing to try bare­foot­ing it in an urban envi­ron­ment full of bro­ken glass, nee­dles, and lord only knows what else. I’m not cer­tain either that I’m will­ing to go as far as to run in [Vibram Fivefingers](http://www.runblogger.com/2009/08/running-in-vibram-fivefingers-first.html) but I’m very inter­est­ed in switch­ing to a pair of [Nike Frees](http://www.runblogger.com/2009/05/nike-free-30-review-nikes-answer-to.html) as a first step at least.

I’m also not antic­i­pat­ing run­ning the dis­tances described in this book. 50 and 100 mile runs, if they ever will be in my range, won’t be in my range soon. I’m still work­ing my way up to a 10K run. A few years with­out run­ning has left me not so well equipped to run as I once was.

Nev­er­the­less, read­ing about ultra­en­durance ath­letes is very inspir­ing. Get­ting infor­ma­tion about how to become an injury-free endurance ath­lete along with the inspi­ra­tion, all the more so. Being well enter­tained along the way? That’s more than I could ask for, but *Born to Run* deliv­ered. High­ly recommended.