First off is Hal Higdon's Smart Running. Hal is known to many as one of the first "Virtual Trainers" and many of his "V-Team" met online and became fast friends long before they ever met in person. In addition, Hal has penned over 30 books on running and for a long time wrote the "Ask the Expert" column in Runner's world Magazine.
Smart Running is an extension of that column and if I am not mistaken is basically just a collection of Q&A taken from the column. Nice way to recycle already answered questions to make a buck, that is for sure! I am not criticising. There are really only so many questions that can be asked without getting into very specifics (e.g., "Hi I am a 37 year old woman from Poughkeepsie with 3 children who works the lunch shift at the diner but can only run on Mondays and Fridays. How can I increase my VO2 max?") and this book answers many of them. Without a doubt it is geared more towards the beginning runner but any person can glean new and useful facts from the Q&A. We can never stop learning, that is for sure.
The book covers a wide range of topics and would be a great pickup for the novice runner.
The other review is of a magazine but really is like a book. The magazine is called Marathon & Beyond and with its Paperback bounde editions coming every other month and totaling nearly 200 pages each time, it is much more a book than just a plain magazine.
I first picked up a copy of M&B during Fiddy2 and immediately became a subscriber. Every time I meet publisher Jan Seeley at an Expo I buy 5 or 6 more of the back issues. It is just a fantastic read chock full of stories and anecdotes from real runners like you and me. There are no "Get Better Abs!" diet plans or scores of advertisements.
Just really solid writing.
If you would like to subscribe to M&B, click HERE. And if you mention that I was the one that got you to sign up, I get a free issue tacked onto the end of my subscription. I just did some math: with an average of about 100 readers a day to my blog I could possibly never pay for M&B again! :)
Who knows, maybe someday I will be published in there as well!
Maybe you should be a book reviewer!
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