This is a book written by Ryan Hall, Olympic athlete and American record holder for the half marathon (59.43). It’s a book about his running career and tells the story of how he started out and how his career ended. He describes his obsession with racing which also lead to over training and under performance at times and what he learned along the way. He talks about how his focus on winning the race meant he lost sight of the other pleasures of running such as helping and being with others and it’s interesting to hear his journey of discovering this.
He talks about finding your purpose and focus so to reach your goals. There’s some helpful insights about belief and how to deal with disappointments and set backs and I did genuinely find lots of useful things in the book.
However, if we weren’t reading it for the YouCanCoaching book group I probably wouldn’t have ploughed through it to the end. When I chose the book I hadn’t read the second line of the title “Finding God in Every Step”. I’m not a spiritual or religious person so if I’d seen that I probably wouldn’t have picked it up!
But I do have an open mind which I tried to deploy while reading. Especially because I’ve heard several interviews with Ryan Hall which I really enjoyed and were super interesting. Despite not being religious myself he did make some connections that I could relate to and at least understand, in particular about having belief and purpose. But there were a lot of quotes from the bible that I didn’t understand and I thought lots of the religious connections were often tenuous and the others in the book group did tend to agree. It would make a great book for a runner with a strong Christian faith.
Having said that, I always enjoy reading about other people’s sporting journey’s especially successful athletes as it does often make you realise they’re only human and they go through a lot of the same shit as the rest of us. Plus it’s good to broaden my horizons and read stuff I wouldn’t otherwise read.
Let me know what you think if you read it, or any other book recommendations you have.