FOOTRACE: How an Average Runner Completed One of the World's Most Ridiculous Running Races

FOOTRACE: How an Average Runner Completed One of the World's Most Ridiculous Running Races

Over four-thousand people have summited Mount Everest. Over five-hundred people have travelled into space. But as of 2019, only one-hundred and fifty or so had ever managed to run seven marathons on the seven different continents on seven consecutive days. That year, the author, at fifty years old and a complete amateur, became one of them. FOOTRACE: How an Average Runner Completed One of the World’s Most Ridiculous Running Races , is the inspirational, informative and extremely entertaining story of the World Marathon Challenge, one of the strangest and most challenging running races in the world. Rather than being a prescriptive book about running, Footrace is a story – a story about an incredibly logistically and physically challenging race. The reader is taken to all seven continents and is introduced to some of the inspirational people undertaking this epic challenge. The overarching message the book imparts is how mindset and belief can help anyone accomplish almost anything. As the World Marathon Challenge comprised running seven full marathons on the seven different continents on seven consecutive days, there are chapters on each marathon and through these chapters the author draws the reader through the ‘story’ of the book. These chapters focus not just on the technicalities of the races but on the many difficulties and challenges encountered and the importance of grit, resilience, determination and self-belief. The reader is taken on a self-deprecating and humourous tour around the world. The focus is not on how talented and able the author is, but rather the opposite, how ‘average’ people can accomplish quite phenomenal things. Separating each of these chapters is a chapter on one of the amazing competitors the author met during the race. Each are amazing people in their own way – world record holders; the oldest person ever to complete the race; an amazing woman who started running marathons to escape domestic violence; a competitor who uses distance running to continue his battle against alcohol and opioid addiction. These characters are inspirational and eminently relatable as the reader follows them through their torturous, exhausting, sleep-deprived, hellish week of running. In the end this isn’t really a book about running at all – it is a thesis on how any of us can accomplish whatever we put our minds to – if we just believe in ourselves and commit to the process.