Book Review: Running on Empty by Marshall Ulrich
Happy Humpday!
What week it has been so far…
Perhaps most notably, my baby sister was struck by a car on her bike on Monday night and needed to be transported to the hospital in an ambulance. She is pretty cut up and is sporting a nice set of stiches on her chin, but we are so grateful that she is ok.
It is always hard to see someone who has gone through so much already confront even more problems, but the perseverance of people in the face of adversity is something that absolutely fascinates me.
I think that is why I was so taken by Running on Empty by Marshall Ulrich. It was an astounding story of his decision to run across the USA and all of the struggles and demons that he fought to complete such an incredible feat.
He begins the story by sharing how he lost his first wife to cancer and how he began running to deal with the pain. As he faced a string of failed marriages and life struggles, his runs became longer and longer until he had made a name for himself in the ultra running community. There is literally no feat this man was not ready to tackle, including scaling Mount Everest, returning to base camp and flying to complete an ultra marathon. MY kind of human.
Source: Runners World
What captured me most about the book was his persistence through pain. I love collecting little mental tricks to deal with pain in training and racing. A gold nugget I took from this book was a story about the Russian Climbing Team who were one of the best in the world. NAME saw the team head out from base camp only to see one of the fit young men return a number of hours later with a shell shocked look on his face. Upon asking why he returned to the camp, the young man replied:
“I said my fingers were cold.”
He had been climbing in subzero temperatures and his fingers were probably frozen. It didn’t matter. The lesson is, just because it hurts, doesn’t mean it needs to be voiced.
Source: The 508
Another exceptional piece of his story was watching his body break down over the many miles of running and how he managed to get up every morning and keep slogging through. He needed to cut out the back of his running shoes to deal with his Achilles tendonitis and eat an absurd amount of calories to even stay vertical, but his emotional and physical strength were absolutely incredible to me.
Source: KSL
This book was gritty. It spared no details in the pain, gore and triumphs of the run and all of the physical and emotional traumas that were involved. Marshall Ulrich is such an inspiration. I pride myself in being willing to do almost ANYTHING when it comes to racing. Go to the Badlands and run 100 Miles? YUP! Get invited to run a trail duathlon in the US? YUP! (Even though I had never mountain biked before and didn’t know the length of the race.) But this very well may be the first person I have encountered where I had the thought – I would never do that. That is crazy.
This man has my respect and this book is worth the read!
What books have you read lately?
