Running Home

Summary:

For more than a decade, Katie Arnold chased adventure around the world, reporting on extreme athletes who performed outlandish feats—walking high lines a thousand feet off the ground without a harness, or running one hundred miles through the night. She wrote her stories by living them, until eventually life on the thin edge of risk began to seem normal. After she married, Katie and her husband vowed to raise their daughters to be adventurous, too, in the mountains and canyons of New Mexico. But when her father died of cancer, she was forced to confront her own mortality.

His death was cataclysmic, unleashing a perfect storm of grief and anxiety. She and her father, an enigmatic photographer for National Geographic, had always been kindred spirits. He introduced her to the outdoors and took her camping and on bicycle trips and down rivers, and taught her to find solace and courage in the natural world. And it was he who encouraged her to run her first race when she was seven years old.

Now nearly paralyzed by fear and terrified she was dying, too, she turned to the thing that had always made her feel most alive: running. Over the course of three tumultuous years, she ran alone through the wilderness, logging longer and longer distances, first a 50-kilometer ultramarathon, then 50 miles, then 100 kilometers. She ran to heal her grief, to outpace her worry that she wouldn’t live to raise her own daughters. She ran to find strength in her weakness. She ran to remember and to forget. She ran to live.

Ultrarunning tests the limits of human endurance over seemingly inhuman distances, and as she clocked miles across mesas and mountains, Katie learned to tolerate pain and discomfort, and face her fears of uncertainty, vulnerability, and even death itself. As she ran, she found herself peeling back the layers of her relationship with her father, discovering that much of what she thought she knew about him, and her own past, was wrong. (Summary and cover courtesy of goodreads.com)

Review:

This book was incredible and absolutely lyrical.  I could not put it down and adored getting the insights into Katie’s life growing up posed against her life as a new mom.  Her father was an fascinating human and the book is as much about him as it is about Katie and her sister.  The best part about Katie’s book is that she doesn’t sugarcoat it.  The hard times are hard, the crazy times might make you question her (your) sanity ,and sometimes you’re just not going to feel like adulting.  But through it all, Katie has an incredible spirit that I found both inspiring athletically and provoked a little internal reflection.

I am so glad that I picked this up during the COVID lockdown because it really meant uninterrupted reading where I could really focus and feel the memoir.  Biographies are not always my thing, but this one was so much more and truly resonated…highly recommended!

Warning: May cause spontaneous needs for a run.

Rating: 5 stars!

Who should read it? Sports fan and anyone who needs a little life inspiration.