Last month, I received a copy of a book called Run for Your Life: A Book for Beginning Women Runners by Deborah Reber. As a male runner, I was unsure how adequately I would be able to review this book, as I am not of the group it is addressed at; however, as I moved through each chapter, I found the book to be entertaining and a good resource.
The author, Deborah Reber, is the perfect “expert” for a book on beginning running. Although she ran in high school and college, she is not an advanced runner by any means. (High school and college competitions tend to be 5K or less in any case.) She has completed 4 marathons and the fastest in a mere 4-1/2 hours. If you were to compare her, say, to my sister, who ran in high school and college, but has 30 marathons under her belt, a medical degree, and a best time of 2:50, you don’t know how you could have anything in common with her, whereas Ms. Reber seems like the common woman.
The book is divided up into chapters, starting with motivation for running, gear, stretching, proper eating habits, safety, and finishing with staying motivated and racing, but primarily tells the story of how she got into running, interspersed with anecdotes from women of varying abilities and ages, and hints in the best of each subject.
What made the book interesting for me was that her experience mirrored my own nearly exactly, by working up to running, running varied lengths of races, and then running her first marathon around 5 hours. If you are a beginning runner, this could be your experience as well.
Another aspect that made the book appeal to me was a chapter on finding shoes and clothing. Finding the right clothing for female runners is often difficult because there aren’t that many. Mostly, it involves buying SMALL men’s clothing. In my experience, there isn’t any clothing for different sized men, either. Of course, her list of clothing resources will not be a particular help to me (then again, the book isn’t written for me).
My favorite anecdote was the story of woman who wanted to get the right kind of running shoes. The shoe guy in the store asks her how much does she run each week. She replies that it’s a couple of miles a couple of days a week (but doesn’t mention that she intends to increase that amount), and he tells her just to get regular tennis shoes. My experience is often that I should buy the latest (and most expensive) shoes in the store. Ms. Reber recommends that you find a store that lets you take a test drive and a salesperson that knows something about running specifically, because it is important to have a good comfortable fit.
I found Run for Your Life to be very informative and very evenly geared for the beginning runner. The best part about this author is that she will be coming to run and talk with us sometime in the next couple months. I think she could provide all the ladies in AREC with some helpful hints or at least, a similar experience, to inspire all of you ladies out there to keep running with us.