Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running by Rachel Toor

Product Details

Synopsis

Rachel Toor was a bookish egghead who ran only to catch a bus. How such an unlikely athlete became a runner of ultramarathons is the story of Personal Record, an exhilarating meditation on the making, and the minutiae, of a runner’s life. The food, the clothes, the races, the injuries, the watch (and Toor loves her watch) are all essential to the runner, as readers discover here, and discover why.
            
A chronicle of Toor’s relationship with the sport of running, from her early incarnation as an Oreo-eating couch potato to her emergence as a hard-bodied marathoner, this book explores the sport of running, the community it brings into being, and the personal satisfaction of pursuing it to its limit. Alternating with Toor’s account of becoming a runner are the stories—meditations, examinations, celebrations—of how runners become a pack. An homage to running, a literary take on how an activity can turn into a passion, and how a passion can become a way of life, this book runs all the way from individual achievement—a personal record—to the world of friendship and belonging, the community that runners inevitably find.

Kirkus Reviews

Running Times senior writer Toor (Writing/Eastern Washington Univ.; The Pig and I: Why It's So Easy to Love an Animal, and So Hard to Love a Man, 2005, etc.) charts her transformation from exercise-resistant "pretentious little intellectual" in college to 40-something ultramarathoner. Fifteen years after forswearing her Oreo-eating ways, Toor has run more than "forty marathons and ultras" and won "a handful of small boutiquey races in mountainous, out-of-the-way places" like the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the Himalayas. She has also become one of a dozen or so athletes selected by Clif Bar as pacers, who volunteer in helping less-experienced runners achieve their PRs (personal records, or personal best times at a given distance) in marathons throughout the country. Toor's somewhat fractured collection of short essays on all things running offers many helpful maxims for long-distance runners, ranging from what to expect after a marathon ("You finish the race and walk around feeling fat. Bloated. Porked out. Your whole everything is swollen like a bruise") to a detailed description of Ride and Tie events, lengthy races involving teams comprised of a pair of runners and a horse. No matter what the subject, though, the spotlight always returns to, and shines brightest on, the author and her accomplishments. She doesn't hesitate to relate why she prefers running with men ("you can talk about nothing for hours") or offer reasons why she's had trouble in relationships ("I don't cook, and I'm kind of mean"), admitting she's guilty of that "least appealing" runnerly trait: "blinkered self-absorption." She writes: "Sometimes, when I'm racing, the thing that keeps my mind off the discomfortI am feeling is the story I will tell about it when I'm finished." For Toor, the acts of running and writing are seemingly intertwined, so readers will gather that the present volume brought much therapeutic relief. Narcissus in Nikes. Agent: Susan Arellano/Susan Rabiner Literary Agency

Biography

Rachel Toor teaches writing at Eastern Washington University, is a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a senior writer for Running Times. She is the author of The Pig and I: How I Learned to Love Men (Almost) as Much as I Love My Pets and Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process. A graduate of Yale University, she received an MFA from the University of Montana and currently lives in Spokane.