‘I’ve seldom read a better account of the exhilaration of running’
-evening standard
Adharanand Finn is the author of Running with the Kenyans (2012), The Way of the Runner (2014), and the Rise of the Ultra Runners (2019). Both Running with the Kenyans and The Rise of the Ultra Runners were shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, while Running with the Kenyans was named Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year. Adharanand won Best New Writer at the 2012 British Sports Book Awards. His books have been translated into 16 languages and published in over 30 countries.
After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, from the Olympics to big city marathons, Runner's World contributor Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up.
Packing up his family (and his running shoes), he moved from Devon to the small town of Iten, in Kenya, home to hundreds of the country's best athletes. Once there he laced up his shoes and ventured out onto the dirt tracks, running side by side with Olympic champions, young hopefuls and barefoot schoolchildren. He ate their food, slept in their training camps, interviewed their coaches, and his children went to their schools. And at the end of it all, there was his dream, to join the best of the Kenyan athletes in his first marathon, an epic race through lion country across the Kenyan plains.
Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.
Winner - Best New Writer category at the British Sports Book Awards.
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Welcome to Japan, the most running-obsessed nation on earth, where: a long-distance relay race is the country's biggest annual sporting event; companies sponsor their own running teams, paying the athletes like employees; and marathon monks run a thousand marathons in a thousand days to reach spiritual enlightenment.
Adharanand Finn - award-winning author of Running with the Kenyans - moved to Japan to discover more about this unique running culture and what it might teach us about the sport and about Japan. As an amateur runner about to turn forty, he also hoped find out whether the Japanese approach to training might help him keep improving. What he learned - about competition, about team work, about beating your personal bests, about form and about himself - will fascinate anyone who is keen to explore why we run, and how we might do it better.
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Marathons are no longer enough.
Pain is to be relished, not avoided.
Hallucinations are normal.
Ultra running defies conventional logic. Yet this most brutal and challenging sport is now one of the fastest-growing in the world. Why is this? Is it an antidote to modern life, or a symptom of a modern illness?
Adharanand Finn travelled to the heart of the sport to find out – and to see if he could become an ultra runner himself. His journey took him from the deserts of Oman to the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies, and on to his ultimate goal, the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.
The Rise of the Ultra Runners is the electrifying, inspirational account of what he learned along the way. Through encounters with the sport’s many colourful characters and his experiences of its soaring highs and crushing lows, Finn offers an unforgettable insight into what can be found at the boundaries of human endeavour.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.