My 10 Favourite Running Books (and 3 extras)

I love to read. My night table is piled with books and my house is a testament to my love of reading. Bookshelves are packed, sometimes sideways, and I have a hard time deciding which ones to give away if they get too crowded. My cafe is a reader's haven, and the main library in downtown Montreal is one of my favourite places. And along with the regular social media platforms that everyone lives on, one of my favourites is Goodreads (check out my 10 favourite running books!).

So, of course, I love to read about my other favourite activity: running. Although I would never want to mix them. I am not that person who runs on a treadmill with a book in front of her. No, my idea of reading involves sitting or lying down, preferably with a hot beverage or tasty carb.

Here are my ten favourite running books. Scroll or read down to find out what my all-time favourite is!

Number Ten

I am not a mathematician! And I don't organize my life too far ahead. Ok, I did a 26 week marathon training plan. But it was an easy one, and it was 26 weeks long precisely because it had space for life to happen. This book is well written, and very informative. It contains the "every running book" chapters on nutrition, injury, and has some strength training exercises and flexibility stretches included.

The running schedules are detailed and specific and include programs for beginners to advanced for halfs, marathons and BQs. But the complicated equations are just too much trouble for me to figure out. For example, I'm supposed to do this on the first run of week nine: "2x(6x400) (90sec RI); (2 min 30 sec RI between sets)". By week nine I am already juggling work, home and family and I can't be bothered to 1. figure out what it means and 2. spend fifteen minutes setting my watch. So, this book is great for running geeks but not for people with busy lives.

Number Nine

  

The Illegal, by Lawrence Hill (of The Book of Negroes fame), is not a running manual and has no clever tips for runners. It is a novel, set in a futuristic African country, about a runner who has to make life-and-death decisions that revolve around his running talents and how they are used. Tired after your long run? Laid up with an injury? Read this!

Number Eight

This entertaining book follows the author around the world as he explores what makes us run. He is a professor of English literature so the book is literate and fun. Slightly uppity at times, almost making you feel evilly happy when his marathon time ends up being five hours (he made a comment about middle-aged women runners at some point in the book). But a fun ride and worth reading if you get a chance.

Number Seven

This is a little gem of a book is a collection of essays by philosophers who run or runners who philosophize. "Long-Distance Running and the Will to Power" is the first essay. There are essays on pain; running and the existential conundrum; running and freedom; passion and marathons (and how a zombie could not run a marathon); and a philosopher's argument for running to music. If you think, run, and read then this book is for you!

Number Six

  

I picked this up in a little second hand bookstore, along with George Orwell's Brave New World. I was six weeks away from my first marathon and I was reading everything I could. This book is for the regular person who wants to run a marathon, and it's good: friendly, down-to-earth, and packed with some great tips. I found the training plans a little too cerebral (heart rate, intensity rate, percentages ... can't do 'em ... but someone less impatient than me would enjoy them!). It's a fun book to have around.

Number Five

 

I had read about this book and I really wanted to read it. So one day I was at our lovely huge library downtown, and I decided I would get it. The catalogue said it was available. It was winter; I was wearing my winter coat and boots and carrying a heavy backpack. I ran up the three flights of stairs to the stacks and looked for my book. I went and asked the librarian, who said it should be there. Went back and searched. She looked it up, came and searched. By now I was in a full-blown winter gear sweat and feeling stressed. Haha, no mindfulness there! A few days later, a customer brought a copy in to my cafe for me to read. Patience is a virtue! The book is a great read, and tells the author's story while speaking of Buddhist meditation, western business, and running marathons with a mindful approach.

Number Four

Runner's World published this book about ten years ago, but it is still relevant and super informative for us women runners. It has chapters on your regular runner's issues: training, FAQs, moving forward from a beginners to an intermediate runner, and racing. But the beauty of the book is its specific tips and insights into running as a woman: safety, balancing our busy lives, running during the childbearing year, the older woman, running and adolescence, body image, nutrition are all topics that we as women runners are interested in, and we can find answers in this great book. Every woman runner wants a running buddy like this one!

Number Three

I wanted this book. I wanted something that would light a fire under my lazy runner's block soul and get me out there again. I was feeling bad after my first marathon. Very bad. I was a grand total of 61 years old, I'd been running seriously for about five years, and I did my first marathon in 5:34 and I felt so disappointed in myself! BooHoo!! So I wanted to straighten myself out and I thought this book could help.

Yes, I can swear with the rest of them, in a couple of different languages even. But I don't like unnecessary cursing. They just put F*UCK on the cover to get people's attention, and I think that's stupid. So, I covered my copy with a pretty race bib:

Simon Marshall is a physician and professor of sports and exercise psychology. He is married to endurance athlete Lesley Paterson, and between the two of them they have produced an excellent book. Marshall explains how the athlete's brain works, during training, during racing and afterwards. He has filled the book with interactive exercises, tips, suggestions and hard-ass advice for us all, whether you are a runner with Imposter Syndrome, or a triathlon athlete who wants to get better at their game.

Did it light my fire? Yes! I am back on track. Most importantly, it helped me understand why I was feeling so down and what to do about it next time.

Number Two

An amazing story that traces our ability to run, and explores what makes humans different from all other animals: we are born to run! Read the book and find out how and why.

Number One

Everyone should read this book! It's written by a champion, but she doesn't talk down to us lowly back-of-the-packers. Her story, and her struggles, and her triumphs come alive on the page. Her attitude and her focus teach everyone about the advantages of keeping a positive attitude. This book can change your life!




So much more to read! Suggestions?

Volunteer Birth Companions

I am very happy my book is selling - by the way, people, it would be a very nice Christmas or Hanukah gift for any of your close friends or relatives who are expecting a baby in 2012.

Please visit Amazon to review or "like" my book.

I want to tell you about the Montreal Birth Companions. This is a group of very special women who accompany underprivileged women  during their labor and birth experiences. Most of our doulas are just starting out, but some of them have been working with us for years. They are all volunteers, working out of their own pockets and from the goodness of their hearts to help other women have a joyous birth experience.

One of "my"doulas has been volunteering for months, doing her own research, studying,doing courses with different organizations and waiting for her time to accompany a woman in labor. Finally, yesterday, I got a call from a nurse to tell me that one of their patients who is alone here in Montreal was in labor and wanted a companion.

Our doula rushed to the hospital, where she witnessed a beautiful natural birth and was able to provide comfort and companionship to a birthing woman. She is hoping to be accepted to midwifery school this year, and I hope she gets in. She is a natural!

Launch Success

The Birth Conspiracy is now available for sale either through Amazon or directly from the publisher. 

Support independent Canadian publishers by buying directly from Curioso Books, then if you have a few minutes, please go to Amazon and rate my book....every star counts!

 

I would like to thank everyone who made it out to the book  launch. It was a lot of fun, and I felt honored to have all of you there. It was a different type of book launch - a real family event, with lots of babies and kids, pregnant women, and of course with my own family fully involved (well, some of them anyway).

Pastries by Giacomo

Meet and Greet

Making Friends

Lovely Mother and Babe

Book!

My book is actually in print!
Only review copies are available now, so if you are a journalist and would like to review please contact me.
It looks good, and reads beautifully...the culmination of many months of work.

Why I Read Books

I had a wonderful experience yesterday. I was invited by a group of women to speak about natural birth, about women's health, and about attending birth. We spent two hours together and decided at the end that we would meet every week to read, study and learn together. Two of the women are expecting so we will be accompanying them through their pregnancies, and possibly their births as well.
We are reading books about birth, on health, breastfeeding, anatomy, VBACs, and of course we will be discussing our own experiences as well. We are getting together out of a sense of loyalty and friendship, dare I say love? We are a handful of women from different countries, cultures, and races. It is looking to be an exciting process.
So, the most amazing thing was, the place we had our meeting was the grand central library in downtown Montreal. It is a large, rather imposing building on a large street across from the main bus station.
The building, as you would expect, is full of books. It houses a exhibition room, many small meeting rooms, a huge children's library and all the arts, science, literature, documents, journals, and everything else that you could possibly want to read. It has study tables, movie desks, media booths, and armchairs absolutely everywhere. And the chairs are full! The library is full - people of all ages, colors, styles, languages - they are everywhere, reading, listening to music, borrowing basketfuls of books, looking things up...

When I was small my favorite spot was an armchair in the living room, where I would curl up and read for hours. As I grew older I migrated into my bedroom to read. But I have always read, and books have been some of my best friends. One year, when I was expecting my third child, and my husband was teaching English in the evenings, we lived in a tiny medieval village (in the tower in the center of the village - but that's another story), and I had no books except a collection of Rudyard Kipling. I read those books over and over, even the ones in that awful Pidgin. I love to go into that other world where books live, to make friends with characters, writers and ideas. I like knowing that there are people in the world who think, dream, and write.

I have just written a book. It is about birth, and about the choices a woman can make throughout her childbearing year. It is about attending women in birth, and about ways and means to assist a woman during pregnancy and childbirth. It took me the best part of three years and it is almost ready to be sent out into that same world. It will be available for sale by June 15, 2011.

A Peek into the Doula's Year

… you are assisting at someone else’s birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: “We did it ourselves.” Tao Te Ching

January 23 … I make myself comfortable on the couch in the living room … they have the lights on low and there is a sweaty, earthy smell in the air. The cat hovers around my ankles. I hear another contraction coming and going. Its 3 a.m. and I have been here for two hours. In the morning, we will go to the hospital, driving on the highway at dawn. The baby will be born by breakfast time. Everything is good.

March 16 … I am sitting in the Jacuzzi room, kneeling quietly next to the bath as I splash water on her back.

July 3 … She wants to dance during contractions, back and forth across the small room, keeping me moving as she holds my hands.

October 1 … I speak gently to the father-to-be, explaining that her pain is normal and his anxiety is perfectly natural.

December 23 … She calls me at home at 2 a.m. I awaken and answer the phone quietly. She says she is in labor and wants me to come to her. I hear from her voice that she is not ready so I speak to her for a while through a few contractions and suggest that she tries to sleep. She calls me at 7 a.m., after sleeping for four hours. She was woken by stronger contractions and she calls me to find out if it is time to go to the hospital. I reassure her that she is coping very well and I talk her through a couple of contractions over the phone. As she is still able to talk through them, I know that I will be able to start my day as planned. She calls me after lunch to say that she has lost a pinkish mucus plug and that she can no longer speak through contractions. I reassure her that everything is going well. At 9 p.m. her husband calls and I can hear her moaning in the background: they want me to meet them at the hospital. We arrive together and the doctor finds her cervix is seven centimeters dilated. She is given a room and she continues to labor well. Her back is hurting and I use St John’s Wort oil to relieve the pain. Her husband is by her side, letting her know that she is doing a great job. She turns to me and says that she needs pain relief. I tell her that this intensity of pain probably means that the baby is almost here. With her next contraction she starts to push. The nurse comes into the room and notices that she is pushing and calls the doctor. As the doctor arrives, it is clear that the lady is pushing and her baby will be born soon. The doctor greets her patient and as the nurse prepares everything on the delivery cart, there is silence and peace as the woman relaxes in between her contractions. As she gets ready to push again, her husband gently wipes her face as he murmurs words of encouragement. I know that with this contraction, the baby will be born. And he is. The doctor tells her patient to reach down to take her child; as she does, her husband bursts into tears. The nurse helps her to place the baby on her chest and covers them both with a warm blanket. I look at the doctor and we smile at each other, happy with the team effort.

Birth Conspiracy?

I remember seeing a medical student who was attending his first birth. It was a normal, natural hospital birth. The woman was on the bed, her husband was by her side, I was next to him, there was an intern helping with the delivery, a nurse, the physician in charge, and a young medical student. The baby came out, everyone was happy, the new parents were exhilarated and crying, and then the medical student exclaimed loudly: “Look! Look! Look at its little toes! Look! They’re like real toes. They’re just like real toes!”
The attending physician looked at him and whispered: “Philip, get a grip!”, but I was hoping that that simple amazement and wonder would stay with him throughout his career.
For some people, this story may be full of problems and issues. What do I mean by a “normal, natural hospital birth”? Can a woman have a natural birth in a hospital? I remember hearing from an obstetrician that among some women in our city a “natural” birth was when you didn’t wear much makeup when you gave birth. What is a normal birth? If a hospital has a 90% epidural rate, does that mean getting an epidural is normal?
And certainly, we can’t have trained professionals going gaga over newborn’s toes, can we?

We are living in an age when we are terribly concerned with our health, yet it is an age when human life expectancy is at its highest. We worry and fret endlessly about our children, but have difficulty finding time to spend with them. We are living a life that is far from nature, yet we yearn for the “natural” and the “green”. We are so divorced from our own bodies that a surprising number of pregnant women do not know where their cervix is or how a baby is supposed to come out.
In our world, human life has become so complicated that every simple activity has a huge structure built up around it. This structure is built upon a foundation of information supplied by an army of experts. Simple processes such as eating, healing, making love, giving birth, breastfeeding, caring for children, have all become complicated and institutionalized. When a woman decides she wants to have a child, one of the first things she will encounter is the structure we have built up around birth. She will be met with a mountain of information and much of it will be conflicting.
In the birth world everyone wants to have a little piece of the birth experience. The birth practitioner wants a piece of even the most physical and elemental. Here is an example: It is often very tempting to do a vaginal exam. Why? We want to know what’s going on; if the baby is moving down, if the cervix is opening, where the baby’s head is positioned. What most practitioners will not admit is that this intimate physical connection with a woman is important to them: it is an amazing thing, to feel a baby’s head coming down the birth canal! But how often is it really necessary? Does the laboring woman actually want to have so many exams? How many vaginal exams are done for the sake of the birthing woman, and how many are done for the attendant?
The birth practitioner, or any birth “expert”, also wants a little piece of the bigger picture: we want the woman to have a natural birth, with no epidural and no interventions. Or perhaps we want her to have an epidural so that she can be more comfortable. Or we are convinced that surgery will be less risky. Either way, we want to convince her that we know best. In fact, we do know best: we are more educated, we have seen more births, we have seen more pregnant women and we know what to do.
Or do we?
The Birth Conspiracy is this: It is an understanding, created by all of us, that we cannot function without experts. We cannot give birth without birth experts. We cannot labor without assistance, without classes and checklists. We cannot make our own decisions, or accept consequences for our own actions. It is a way we can avoid responsibility for our lives. Those of us who are experts want and need to control the process. It is very hard to sit on your hands and wait while a woman labors. It is much easier to interfere, to preach, to suggest, and to control.

Interested? You can order your copy of The Birth Conspiracy soon - watch this space!

The Writer's Life

Writing this book was the easy part - it was very satisfying to sit day after day and work on my knowledge and my words. I carefully filtered fact from fiction, and decanted my prose from other bits and pieces I had picked up along the way. I researched and searched, and came up with sometimes surprising conclusions. At times I was discouraged, when I felt the writing would never be done, then I would start a new chapter and feel renewed.

When I started writing, I was going through difficult changes in my life and writing the book was a way of anchoring myself. Then I spent a summer in Italy, at my safe summer hideout.

Every morning I would see to lunch and then settle in the kitchen, and write. When I looked up I could see "my" mountains. I could hear my family and volunteers building, or working down in the meadow, reclaiming it from forty years of neglect.

The book grew. Back in the wintry city, our new house provided me with a wood stove to feed, and endless cups of tea. I sit at the kitchen table, a window behind me and a window in front, and I write.

Of course, there were births to go to, volunteer organizations to run, and family to feed. But when I look back on that winter, I remember with pleasure my fingers moving over the keyboard, and my mind searching for the right word and the most accurate description

Writing kept me going through my winter blues, through the ups and downs of family life, and into the spring. Tickets were bought again for the summer and I found myself looking at my mountains again, with an almost completed manuscript on the screen.

But that summer, my laptop died, and no intensive care was available in the small neighboring town. I focused on other things and took a break from writing. In the fall, thanks to a friendly geek, I retrieved everything and started working again - and two years after I started, I had a finished book! I thought that was it! My work was over!

When you make a baby, your work is far from over when the child is born. Now I am raising the child - preparing it to send it out into the world. I hope it can stand on its own. I will accompany it, of course. I will let everyone know that I am responsible for any errors, omissions, miscalculations. Essentially, though, it will be independent of me. It will (hopefully!) be read by people who don't know or care who I am - they are not reading a book so that they can be my friend.

To help send it on its way, I have sent out my book to a few reviewers "in the field". I am wondering if anyone else is interested in giving it a look-over and providing me with comment and blurbs.

The Final Push!!!

I am feeling like I am almost there - the baby will be born soon - but worried about the shoulders.
My book is going to be on the shelves, speaking for itself, and I am proud but anxious. The new mother feels just that. For nine months or more, she has lived with another person inside her body, creating the bones, muscles and nerves with her own body. But the baby has its own, what? Some call it a soul, others an independent central nervous system.
Whatever it is, when the baby is born, he is definitely separated from the womb, even if his mother has a Lotus Birth, where the placenta is kept attached to the baby until it organically falls off.
And when that happens, the new mother feels proud, happy, and satisfied, but also anxious, worried, and not a little nervous - how will this tiny creature make his way in the world?
So, what this space! The Birth Conspiracy will be out soon!