Title: Keep On Running
Author: Phil Hewitt
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 320
Rating: 4/5
This is the kind of book that I would never have thought I’d be interested in even as recently as a year ago. But as my interest in and passion for running has increased, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to books like this, which are basically running-themed memoirs for people who can’t get enough of putting their bodies through hell on the tracks and fields.
Hewitt is an above-average marathon runner, but he’s not one of the all-time greats and he’d be the first to admit that. But that’s good news, because that makes this memoir feel much more approachable to someone like me. At the time of reading it, I’d ran a half-marathon but not a full-length one, although I have a couple of potential targets in mind.
Hewitt worked as an arts writer and took up running after his publication was offered a free place in the London Marathon and the sports writer was too overweight to take it on. He ended up getting the bug and had run about a dozen or so different marathons by the time that this book came out in around 2011.
I can’t help wondering how many more marathons Hewitt has run since then, and indeed whether he still has the buzz for running a dozen or so years later. And that kind of points to the only thing that I didn’t get on with, which is that the book occasionally feels dated.
That’s because Hewitt’s runs pre-date smartphones, Garmins and Strava, and so when he’s writing about some of his experiences, I couldn’t help getting the heebie jeebies and thinking that all of his woes could have been solved if he’d just turned his Strava on. But that’s not his fault, it’s just the nature of time.
