BOOKCLUB: BORN TO RUN

This book is a work of art, crafted by a talented journalist who found a story and tells it in a spellbinding manner. It starts with an almost mythical tribe of "Natural Born Runners", the Tarahumara of Mexico. It explains how ultraraces began, and gives you a sense of why men and women keep turning up, with these fantastic stories of running distances when the marathon just wasn't long enough.

There are so many aspects that I want to repeat to you, but I want you to read this book in the same enraptured way I have read it. This is nonfiction, as inspiring as you would imagine, and as page turning as a great suspense novel. If you never run, it is still a great story. But if you run, prepare to never run the same again.

This is a sample of the observations made during a crazy mountain race called Leadville, in the mountains of Colorado, in one of the most riveting races I have ever read. The sense of the competition needs your investment, but this epiphany is worth sharing.

"How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors' backyards . Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you'd ever be hassled for going too fast.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it was like to love running. They  remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.  And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightening bolts through the bottom and middle -- behold, the Running Man."