Book Review: My Life on the Run

Title: My Life on the Run

Author: Bart Yasso

Genre: non-fiction/autobiography

Review:

I'm about halfway through rereading this book. I loved this book and the dry humor infused into the narrative of Bart Yasso, an incredible runner (in my eyes.)  As a lover of running myself, I could totally relate to some of the situations mentioned in the book. And just to give you a sense of how much I enjoyed the book, I finished the book in 1-2 days reading on an ipod touch screen (it's pretty small!)

This is one of those books I read for inspiration or to convince myself that bundling up in the middle of January for a six miler is worth the time and effort.  The adventures Yasso takes on are engaging and often end up taking an unexpected turn of the event. 

One of my favorite chapters is Yasso's reminiscent of his crazy run across Death Valley known as Badwater 135, in which he runs 135 miles in some crazy temperatures with extreme elevation gains. Just to give you an idea of how hot it was, he had to swap out his sneakers every few hours or so because the heat radiating off the ground melted his soles!! Anyways, Yasso thinks he's hallucinating when he begins to see banana bread along the side of the road in the middle of the race. Told in a humorous tone, Yasso later discovers he was not hallucinating because there were indeed baked bananas along the road...a runner a ahead of him had eaten bananas and was throwing them up. The heat cooked the bananas! (My reaction to this little incident was a mixture of "eew!" and "hahaha!")

Of course, I believe that there were some exaggerations made to make this book a more intense read, so maybe not everything was 100% accurate. Nevertheless, I still loved My Life on the Run and rank it up there with Born to Run (another book I adore.) To be honest, I rarely read non-fiction books, so this is truly an exception :-)

Rating: