The Lure of Long Distances

Why We Run

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By Robin Harvie

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$16.99

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  1. ebook $16.99
  2. Hardcover $37.00

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around April 26, 2011. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Robin Harvie was a fairly ordinary runner. He ran his first marathon after a bet. Then he found that although he couldn’t run fast, he could run long distances — very long. A casual hobby turned into a 120-miles-a-week obsession, and a training route along the River Thames morphed into a promise to himself that he would tackle the oldest and toughest footrace on earth: the Spartathlon from Athens to Sparta. This race, a recreation of Pheidippides’s legendary journey, is 150 miles long, crosses two mountain ranges, and is the toughest race on the ultradistance runner’s calendar. It isn’t at all ordinary. Harvie’s experience — from the mundanity of daily training routes to the extreme tests of the desert’s scorching heat and the darkest hours of the night — reveals the profoundly intoxicating experience of running, and the ways in which every mile taken is both a step further into the unknown and a pace deeper into the self.
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On Sale
Apr 26, 2011
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9781610390224

Robin Harvie

About the Author

Robin Harvie ran his first marathon in 2000 after a bet. When he realized he couldn’t run 26.2 miles in under 3 hours 12 minutes, despite years of trying, he decided instead to see how far he could run before keeling over. In preparation for the toughest and oldest footrace on earth he ran 6,000 miles in one year, including the Round Rotherham 50 mile ultra, the Sri Chinmoy Transcendental 100 kilometer ultra marathon, in which he came fourth, and the 72 mile Bob Graham Round in the Lake District. He lives in London.

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