The training program begins with walks in the first week and gradually adds running into the mix as the weeks progress. Before you know it, you are no longer using the walk/run approach (walk 4 minutes, run 1 minute) but running much more than you walk. By the end of the program, which is twelve weeks long, you will be running a total of 30 minutes straight with a short warmup and cooldown walk. You are reminded that if you are not comfortable moving up to the next week’s schedule it is okay to repeat a week, or two, or three. The training program is gentle enough for anyone to start, with a doctor’s blessing of course, and the combination of nutrition tips and information helps create a complete health & fitness routine.

Using proven nutrition strategies such as making good food choices and developing proper eating habits, budding runners learn that food and exercise go hand in hand. Running does not give you a license to eat uncontrollably, or to eat whatever you want. Runners must be as mindful about what they put into their body as they are about their training regimens. Readers are encouraged to keep a food log to track their eating habits, even if for only a day or two. Doing so will help them get a better idea of what their current eating habits really look like.

Sarah keeps it real. Reading this book is just like sitting down and having a normal conversation with the author in her home. She shares her own issues with running such as etching out a place for it in her busy life, as well as finding motivation from time to time. As she states early on in the book, not all runners are fast, skinny people. Runners come in all shapes and sizes, and run for a variety of reasons.

Scattered throughout the book are photos and stories of actual runners who used the program outlined in the book to start running. The test panel results are nothing short of motivational: confidence gained, weight and/or inches lost, and goals achieved. They share their struggles, their triumphs and tips on how they held themselves accountable.

Even though I am not a beginning runner I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and felt that it very much resembled the way I started running using the run/walk method and tracking my food. One great feature in the book are the Asides scattered throughout with tips and advice from Leslie Bonci, sports nutritionist and registered dietitian, and Budd Coates, exercise physiologist and senior director of the health and fitness center at Rodale, Inc. I also thought that the running and food logs in the appendix were a great touch and perfect tool for beginning runners to keep track of their progress.

You can purchase Run Your Butt Off! through Rodale, Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

Check out the RYBO Facebook page, too!

Imagine, if you will, riding your bike one morning. It’s a great day and your feeling good. Damn good. You’ve been on top of your game lately. In fact, you recently ran a marathon and finished with a time which qualifies you to run Boston, a marathoner’s dream. Things are good.

In one split second your life is propelled in a different direction, forever. In that split second you never saw it coming. In one split second a twenty ton bus smashes you like a bug, rips a hole through your body and chances are good that you will not survive. That’s all it takes, one split second. Have you ever given any thought to how your life could be different if tragedy struck? If you couldn’t walk again? If you had to rely on others to make it through a single day?

This story is not made up, it is not a “what if” scenario. This is precisely what happened to Matt Long on a crisp December morning in New York City as he biked to a morning workout to meet his training buddies. As he laid there, pinned beneath a bus, gored by the seat post which completely ripped out the entire mid-section of his body, his friends waited and wondered what was keeping him so late. They joked about how they would tease him later if he missed this workout. They didn’t see it coming either.

I’ll spare you the gory particulars though Matt will put it to you in blunt detail, and he should. This is a story which needs to be told, and one that needs to be read. This is a story about survival. Period. It is also a story about love, friendship, family, willpower, determination, athleticism and the strength to endure and overcome.

Matt was given a 1% chance of survival in the hours and days immediately following the accident. He underwent a series of 40 surgeries with more looming in the future. Not only did he survive this near fatal accident, three years later he crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon again. This time the triumph of completing those 26.2 miles meant so much more to him, with his family and friends by his side. Matt has gone on to complete the Ironman Lake Placid, all 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and 26.2 miles of running. Can you say inspirational?

Matt has also started the I Will Foundation, a non-profit organization that was established to help people overcome adversity and the challenges caused by life altering illnesses or traumatic injury.

From the moment you open the book to page one and read the title, The Chase Is On, you very easily get wrapped up in the story which begins on warm November morning at the starting line of the New York City Marathon. Though I’ve never met Matt Long, I can almost hear him narrating this story to me in his New York accent. Later, when I found a video of him on the Runners World website and heard him speaking he sounded exactly as I had imagined. This story is in his own voice and is very open and honest.

The Long Run goes on sale tomorrow, October 16th.

Coming Up:

Book Signing – Matt Long and Charlie Butler will be at Cedar Crest College this coming Friday for the Women’s 5k Classic expo. You can find them at the Aardvark Sports Shop table from 4:00-6:30 pm. You should definitely stop by to meet Matt and purchase his book. I promise, you will not be disappointed.

Look for an interview with Matt and Charlie here on LV Running Scene later in the week.

PHOTO BY James Cooper

I have met plenty of people who have taken to this whole barefoot revolution wholeheartedly. Some had suffered endless years from shin pains which magically disappeared once they bought their VFF’s (Vibram Five Fingers.) Others think that running shoeless makes sense and thought they’d give it a try. Still others like the concept, walk around in their VFF’s but just haven’t summoned up the courage or desire to take them puppies out for an actual run.

I’ll continue on with my shod running. The book did not convert me to the “other side” so to speak. But, that’s okay. There is plenty of room for all of us to run the way we like and who’s to say one way is better than the other. Recently, I found myself running a trail race side by side with a barefoot runner. As we ran together we talked about how he started running barefoot (and when I refer to “barefoot running” here I am actually referring to running in VFF’s) and how it’s changed his running. He claimed that going barefoot cured his shin splints and he was suddenly able to run longer distances. Hmmm … Well, I watched him run, curious as to how he would tackle the decline we were about to run down. He ran it much the same was as I did, perhaps a bit more tenderly than I. By the way, he had never read Chris’s book so not everyone who turns to barefoot running is converted through Born To Run.

I digress. I actually wanted to talk about Born To Run. From the first page I was enthralled. I had a hard time putting the book down. Each time I was called back to reality to tend to some life chores it was with reluctance that I did so. Chris starts off his book with this line:

“For days, I’d been searching Mexico’s Sierra Madre for the phantom known as Caballo Blanco – the White Horse.”

From page one it’s easy to get wrapped up in Chris’s gift for storytelling, I was literally on the edge of my seat at times, yearning to find out more about what would play out next in his story.

The basic gist of the tale is this – an endurance race between America’s top ultra runner, Scott Jurek, and the Tarahumara, a group of people residing in small villages in Mexico’s Copper Canyon who travel only on foot and are known for being excellent runners. You couldn’t assemble a better cast of characters if you tried. The crew seems almost unreal but rest assured, they are very real. I’ve always felt that the most interesting characters lived on the fringe of society and this book proves this theory. In a quest to search out this mythical running tribe, the Tarahumara, to answer his own questions about running, Chris soon finds himself in the middle of Caballo’s quest to pit the Running People against Scott Jurek. For those of you who have not read this book, I am going to keep you in suspense. Trust me, it is well worth the read.

Chris weaves into this tale a little bit of history, some anthropology and science to support the reasoning behind barefoot running and uses the Tarahumara as a prime example of how well it can work. It is important to point out that Chris, himself, was not a barefoot or minimalist runner at this point, but it was Barefoot Ted who sparked the whole idea which has taken off since this book was published. Barefoot Ted showed up for the epic race wearing his Vibram Five Fingers and caused quite a stir in doing so. While I loved all of the science tangents for the information that they provided, I felt like they broke the continuity of the book. Just when I was getting to a really good part of the story my attention was broken by a science tangent. I don’t think Chris could have written the book any differently or it just wouldn’t have worked. Take out the science and it’s only a story. Keep the information in and he gets his point across. And I did find the scientific information interesting, especially since I have a degree in Anthropology. I am always interested to read the science mumbo jumbo and use it to reach my own conclusions.

As with any good book, I was sad when I read the final page. I wanted the story to keep going but all good tales must come to an end. There are books that sit on my shelf that have been thumbed through once and then set aside, and others that have tattered and ear-marked pages and scruffy covers. This book will become one of the latter.

Streaking has caught my attention over the years not because I care to start my own running streak but because of the addiction associated with it. I mean, you have to be seriously addicted to consciously decide to run every single day with no days off, right? Running is both an easy and healthy fix for the addictive personality. The endorphins become as necessary as your morning coffee, sometimes they even replace coffee if you can believe that.

I came across Marc David’s book, The Addicted Runner, courtesy of a friend who, while vacationing in Arizona, met Marc at a race in Phoenix. I soon got in touch with Marc, a native Allentonian, via Facebook and learned he would be in town for this past weekend’s half marathon. In fact, he had a table set up at the Expo on Saturday. I do hope you had a chance to stop and talk with him and buy his book. It’s well worth the read, even if you aren’t a streaker.

Marc hasn’t always been a runner but he got hooked – in a big way. He hasn’t missed a single day of running in over 27 years. This is the whole premise of his book: the mindset of an addicted runner. Marc’s writing is both humorous and honest as he reveals his running habit, something which is difficult to keep hidden for very long. I mean, what kind of crazy person would head outside for a run on a day when an entire city is shut down due to snow and the only place to run is in the tracks of a National Guard Hum-V? Or run on sheets of ice? Or how about doing speedwork in 105° temperatures, just because. You’ve got to hand it to the guy, not many people can run like he can. I’m not sure I could run every single day. The longest I’ve gone is about 16 days and that is completely fine with me.

On some level I can completely connect with this guy. He can’t sit still for very long having spent many of his years going from assignment to assignment, job to job. After a couple of years it’s time for a new adventure. I spoke briefly with Marc about this wanderlust because I, too, have experienced this, only I couldn’t sit still in one place for more than six months at a time, at best. Ask me about it someday. I definitely think there is a strong connection between Marc’s wanderlust and his running addiction. It’s almost as if you can never really quench that desire, that need for more, for something bigger and better. You keep going and going, sort of like the energizer bunny. While some might view Marc’s running streak as preposterous or neurotic, I think that running is that one constant in his life that helps keep him grounded.

If you are a native of the Lehigh Valley or have lived here for some length of time then will probably recognize many of the names that are dropped in the book, the places and the events. Marc mentions Ron Horn’s infamous and sadistic sense of humor and devotes an entire chapter to Horn’s crazy races. The book’s chapters are quick reads, between 2-4 pages long. Marc references local friends and running legends such as Mark Will-Weber, Budd Coates, Bart Yasso, Randy Haas, Laurie Gordon and Fran Gough just to name a few. He also talks about the Lehigh Valley Road Runners club and their annual New Year’s Day 5 mile run each year. This is a run that I look forward to every year, a noon-time run up and down the mountain from Emmaus to Zionsville and back. A perfect start to my new year!

You can find a copy of The Addicted Runner at Aardvark Sports Shop, The Finish Line Running Store and on Amazon.com. You should also check out Marc’s website, theaddictedrunner.com. Do yourself a favor and give this book a read, you’ll be glad you did.