Running Through the Pain
In <em>The Long Run</em>, Catriona Menzies-Pike delves into the history of women’s marathoning while considering the sport’s impact on her own life after unimaginable loss.
In 1998, when Catriona Menzies-Pike was 20 years old, both her parents were killed in a plane crash. “It could be worse, I reminded myself,” she writes in her new book, The Long Run: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion, “but actually, this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.” In retrospect, she notes, the platitudes she heard were the same kinds of things people tell long-distance runners: “Just keep going. It will all be over soon. You’ll get there.”
This framing of grief as an endurance sport underpins , which is an elegant and erudite jumble of different things. The author’s own experiences of learning to love running almost by accident are interspersed with sections of
