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The Long Run (Catriona Menzies-Pike, Affirm Press)

While distance running has become popular with women today, incredibly, women didn’t run the Olympic marathon till 1984 and were barred from entering the Boston Marathon until 1972. Catriona Menzies-Pike reveals some surprising facts about the history of women and running in her ‘personal and cultural’ memoir The Long Run. Menzies-Pike, who has a PhD in English literature and is currently editor of the Sydney Review of Books, took up running at 30 after the death of her parents in a light plane crash a decade earlier. In her memoir she weaves accounts of her grief, her unlikely introduction to running and her training for longer runs, with a history of women distance runners and their representation in books, films and art. The Western world’s uneasiness with women running has deep roots, she finds, with recurrent historical depictions of women running to flee violence and wanton women running away. The accounts of pioneering women runners in this book are fascinating. Another highlight is Menzies-Pike’s descriptions of her training runs through the lush streets and parks of Sydney; ‘my body carries a record of the city’s history,’ she writes. This is a well written and pleasurably varied history of women and running, which will appeal in particular to readers with a cultural/literary bent.

Andrea Hanke is editor-in-chief of Books+Publishing

 

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