Young Runners at the Top to be published in June

Young Runners at the Top, the combined brainchild of Lize Brittin, Brad Hudson and myself, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in June. For a look inside, look inside.

I didn't write my own author blurb for the site; I merely supplied background information and they handled the rest. That's why at first, when I saw that I am someone who "gives talks across the country," I was fully prepared to deny it. But it's actually sort of true, as long as you think of the country as ending roughly where it did in about 1790. I have talked to Boy Scouts in Concord, New Hampshire about the value of exercise, to a cadre of novice women marathoners in West Palm Beach, Florida at Sonja Friend-Uhl's fitness studio, at the pre-race dinner at the Space Coast Marathon in Melbourne, Florida (fortunately offering my "wisdom" and "experience" before rather than after Bill Rodgers did), at the monthly meeting of the Utica Road Runners, Well, I've talked to other people too, often at great length, but I'm focusing here on people and groups who have actually asked me to do this, which is far more rare than my unsolicited soliloquies.

I did not actually know until today that the book will be published in hardcover. That is basically unheard of for a trade running book. Maybe it's because of the scratch-and-sniff pictures we opted to include, I dunno.

Interestingly, the publisher's page allows people to add the book to Goodreads and review it without, obviously, having read it. There is something of a very recent precedent for this, however, and fortuitously it involves one of the other authors of YouRATT, as I'm affectionately calling it. Because I hate to pollute a positive blog post with an all-too-familiar flavor of toxicity, I have reserved the rest of that story for a separate post.