Running from Zombies

This is, quite literally, Paula Radcliffe’s running career from age 4 onwards. While the athletics is the obvious focus of the book, and many races have been ommitted as uninteresting, inconsequental, or just to save space, it’s still nearly 400 pages long. The narrative attempts to culminate in the Athens Olympics in 2004 and, as I understand it, Paula started the book before then in the hope of finishing it off with an Olympic medal. Instead, there’s an extra 70-odd pages on what happened after and the half dozen races run in the following year. For me, this was too much, and the last handful of pages were skim-read.

My Story So Far

I found myself interested from the start. While I took part in sports at school it was nothing like this and the novelty of it kept me entertained. By the time the athletics meets are described in full my attention started to wane. Unless you’re familiar with middle distance running over the last 20 years the names won’t mean much to you.

The rest of the book is basically a list of races, the desire to win the Cross Country Championship, the 5,000, 10,000 and then the marathon, and the one personal touch of meeting her husband Gary. You really get the sense that running is her whole life, but I suppose it has to be to a certain extent – being a professional athlete straight from school.

While Paula states at the start of the book that she is not giving excuses and just wants a chance to tell her story, the whole thing comes across as defensive from the start. Every race is lead by a story of the injury leading up to it and, while there is very little talk of how she prepares to races, plenty of time is spent discussing injuries that may have slowed her down.

Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations. I found sections of it a bit boring, and the not-so-straight time line had me checking and double checking which year it was supposed to be. It was OK, but not the insight I was hoping for.