This post turned out to be not great reflection on the book itself, but rather the experience of reading it.

A few days ago, I finished reading Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide by Hal Higdon. There’s this one quote in the book that I remember (but as I’m flipping through the pages I can’t find it for the life of me). It goes something like this: Keeping a diary is like writing love letters to your future self.

One of the suggestions in this book was to keep a running diary so that you can better track what physical experiences, emotions or otherwise might have led up to a particular injury and hopefully prevent making the same mistake twice.

I started to keep a running diary with all the considerations of making it as simple as possible, but I still fail to be diligent about keeping it up to date. Knowing that I’m pretty bad with writing things that I should (and even things that I want to write), I intentionally created a calandar event to remind myself to write this blog post.

Why?

Not because this book was a great read (though it certainly was). But because it was the first book that I managed to read since 2022. The last book that I read was Zero to One by Peter Thiel and despite its short length, I slogged through that one. Higdon’s book was different. It was the first time in a long time that reading felt effortless to me. For whatever reason, I couldn’t put it down. I brought it with me to read on car rides, the toilet, and even just standing in the middle of my hallway.

Now that’s not to say everything in the book was riveting. If you picked up the book, regardless of your interest in running, you might be a bit underwhelmed and perhaps a bit perplexed why I feel the way I do. I think it wasn’t so much that the book was great as it was great for me. Considering I haven’t read a book in a long time, it was very digestible for me. Though I wouldn’t say I’m actively training for a marathon, running has always been an important activity in my life, so a lot of the insights resonated with my own experiences and made me feel more receptive to new ideas posed by the author. This created the perfect dopaminergic cycle with the right amount of tension of enjoyment and impatience that kept me hooked on the book. When I finally finished it, it felt like a great accomplishment, which is something that I rarely feel these days.

After reading this book, I picked up another book that has been sitting on my shelf unread for the past few years and feel a little ridiculous that such a source of joy has been sitting there dormant and ignored this whole time. Who knows how long I can keep this reading frenzy going, but I’m going to try to ride this wave for as long as possible. Wherever it takes me I look forward to looking back at this book to remind me where it all started.