Review: My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman

I started running when I was 36. I ran consistently for about two years and then I slowly stopped running, getting consumed by the demands of raising three children. I only started running again at the age of 52. That 14-year gap turned out to be a big one and coming back to a sport I'd only ever been thoroughly mediocre at was decidedly not easy. But it's been rewarding. So, when I saw Tom Foreman's memoir, My Year of Running Dangerously: A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan, I was curious to see how his journey paralleled mine. It diverged in many ways but in the ways that matter, it felt similar and made me smile.

Foreman is an Emmy winning CNN Correspondent whose daughter asked him to run a marathon with her. Well into middle-age, he hadn't run since school, although he had been a pretty accomplished runner back then. As parents do, when your child invites you to participate in their life, you jump in with both feet, happy for the connection this gives you. Foreman has to carve out training time around his busy career, checking in with his daughter away at college, sharing the joys and agonies of training for a marathon. And in doing this, he rediscovers his love for running, continuing to run long after his shared marathon is over. In fact, he then moves on to train for an ultramarathon (a race beyond the 26.2 mile marathon distance and often run on trails of varying degrees of difficulty). The book captures the vagaries of training, how aging affects a runner's body, the overwhelming time commitment required to run these long races, and it does it all with humor. The portions around Foreman's daughter's request to her dad and their shared race are just the hook of the story and they end earlier in the book than might be expected given the subtitle, but Foreman's writing is engaging enough to keep readers going. Training can be (and is) monotonous and repetitive but there are enough differences on each run to make reading about his long runs and the running life he is living fun. Foreman is honest about all aspects of endurance running (my own running partners are probably very tired of my dissertations on poop), from the physical to the emotional, and while I can't know if he's convinced anyone to try this crazy sport, I can say that he certainly kept the attention of this late middle-aged runner who has only just begun to dip her toe into the ultra world. If you're a runner, you'll probably enjoy this, even if you have no intentions of ever running an ultra, and if you're not a runner, it's a revealing look into the life and mind that drives one such man.