Chicken Soup for the Soul: Runners

I'm glad I read Born to Run already, because if this was the first running book I'd read I would quit altogether. Maybe I'd quit running too. This book wasn't inspirational. I know that people can write more inspirational stories about running, every issue of Runner's World Magazine has something honestly inspirational in it.


Going into this you know that its going to be hit or miss. There are 31 stories, 31 individual contributors, and at least one of them is going to just downright suck. It just wish there was at least one great one.

Some of the short stories were memorable. One was about this guy that started running because he started seeing an obese neighbor running past his house twice every single day. He starts running because he is fat-shamed into thinking he is less fit than an obese person. After his marathon, he talks to her and finds that she had just been running to Mcdonalds to read the paper every morning. That one made me laugh out loud. Then there was this other one about a girl that proclaims that she used to be fat and unhappy. Now that she runs every single day and spends hours at the gym and never eats, she, at 18 years old, is the happiest she has ever been. I laughed out loud at that one too.

It just didn't feel like they dug very deep. Sure runners are supposed to be healthier, thinner, happier, more beautiful people that statistically will make more money in thier lives, but geez, it seemed like the only thing they ever talked about was how thin and happy they were.

Over-the-top Ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes' story was billed to be the biggest draw. He is on the cover and the same photo is used inbetween sections. That's a dozen instances of Dean Karnazes. His story wasn't particularly moving is the thing. His story was about how his daughter wanted to do a street race with him and showed a particular amount of courage by pushing through the pain. His contribution wasn't about him, it was about his daughter. I understand how that could be one of the most memorable moments of his life, but it just wasn't particularly moving since the whole world doesn't idolize his daughter. We wanted to read about Dean Karnazes for goodness sake. I wanted to know why he ran that first time, why he ever ran a single mile over a marathon, and why he chose this to be his whole life, his lasting contribution. Certainly it wasn't so once he was known the world over for running, he can see his daughter show a precocious amount of grit on race day. Sure its nice to have a story by Dean Karnazes in this book, but I don't know if his contribution was worth a cover.

Then there were the cancer survivor stories. Cancer survivor stories are intrinsically motivational. No one can fathom just how painful that brush with mortality is until it actually happens. Too bad that the tales of cancer survival played out like lifetime original movies. Most of the stories were also written by friends of cancer survivors, which had almost no depth at all. It makes me wonder if there was a stack of cancer survivor stories that they rejected because they were too real.

The triathlon stories were neither here nor there. And they were all the same. There I said it.

Would I recommend this book? Hell no. Take your $11.99 and go buy Born to Run.