As some of you may know, reading is more than just a hobby to me, it's a passion. I love finding new books to read, to connect with characters and to share with friends and family members. I was given the opportunity to review the book Run The World and share my thoughts about it with you all!
Summary From GoodReads:Fresh off a successful collegiate running career—with multiple NCAA All-American honors and two Olympic Trials qualifying marks to her name—Becky Wade was no stranger to international competition. But after years spent safely sticking to the training methods she knew, Becky was curious about how her counterparts in other countries approached the sport to which she’d dedicated over half of her life. So in 2012, as a recipient of the Watson Fellowship, she packed four pairs of running shoes, cleared her schedule for the year, and took off on a journey to infiltrate diverse running communities around the world. What she encountered far exceeded her expectations and changed her outlook into the sport she loved.
Over the next 12 months—visiting 9 countries with unique and storied running histories, logging over 3,500 miles running over trails, tracks, sidewalks, and dirt roads—Becky explored the varied approaches of runners across the globe. Whether riding shotgun around the streets of London with Olympic champion sprinter Usain Bolt, climbing for an hour at daybreak to the top of Ethiopia’s Mount Entoto just to start her daily run, or getting lost jogging through the bustling streets of Tokyo, Becky’s unexpected adventures, keen insights, and landscape descriptions take the reader into the heartbeat of distance running around the world.
Upon her return to the United States, she incorporated elements of the training styles she’d sampled into her own program, and her competitive career skyrocketed. When she made her marathon debut in 2013, winning the race in a blazing 2:30, she became the third-fastest woman marathoner under the age of 25 in U.S. history, qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Trials and landing a professional sponsorship from Asics.
From the feel-based approach to running that she learned from the Kenyans, to the grueling uphill workouts she adopted from the Swiss, to the injury-recovery methods she learned from the Japanese, Becky shares the secrets to success from runners and coaches around the world. The story of one athlete’s fascinating journey, Run the World is also a call to change the way we approach the world’s most natural and inclusive sport.
My Review:Let me just scare you all for the time being and say I am not a runner. So why on earth would I read about a running novel? Well, just because it's not a personal passion of my own, I love hearing why it is for other people. I'm motivated by their motivation and my initial draw to the novel was someone who was courageous in striving for her dreams and making them a reality. Don't we all want that out of life?
What's my huge connection to the book? Traveling. Becky wants to travel the world and view how other's share her passion in other parts. How they train. How they compete. What makes them run faster, harder and longer? I was fascinated going on her year long journey of meeting new people, experiencing new things and finding a new found ways to incorporate how running affects her mind, body, soul and emotion. Runner who want to learn from others will become as fascinated as I was ( and again I'm not a runner ) by all who Becky connects with ( plus some yummy recipes and great insight to countries such as Japan, Niagara, Switzerland and more! )
Becky Wade is a professional long-distance runner who competes for Asics. At Rice University she was a four-time All-American and the winner of the Joyce Pounds Hardy Award, Rice’s highest athletic honor, and the Conference USA honoree for the NCAA Woman of the Year award. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Rice with a triple major in history, psychology, and sociology, Becky traveled the world on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and visited 22 countries to explore long-distance running cultures.
In her 26.2-mile debut in December 2013, Becky won the California International Marathon, qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Trials. Currently, she is fulfilling her dream of running professionally and chasing Olympic aspirations, while coaching and working part-time at a shelter for homeless youth.Connect with Becky on Instagram and Twitter
Be sure to check out our little book tour with other bloggers and their review here!
