Spring training: 10 inspiring books about running

Spring is in the air. Lace up, put your shorts on, and pound some pavement!

3. "Going Long: Inspirations, Oddballs, Sublime Athletes, and the Best Stories from Runner's World," by editors of Runner's World

Runner's World is a monthly magazine for runners. It's filled with diet, exercise and motivational advice. They also do one long-form piece every month highlighting an interesting individual, event, or group. This book is a collection of the best long-form stories they've done so far. It's full of stories about people like Matt Long, a New York firefighter who got hit by a bus, but built himself back up to run in the New York City Marathon. Or Zola Budd, the fabled 1980s South African runner. All in all, there are about 40 stories in the book. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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