An ideal book to get your new year fitness drive up and running
Running For Success, by Ellis Warren (Sportsbook of the month.com price: £8.99, saving £2 on rrp)
FOR most of us, 2020 cannot end soon enough. Indeed, such has been the miserable nature of the year we’ve just endured that many New Year resolutions will encapsulate little more than an overwhelming desire to return to normal life.
Not surprisingly, there’s a larger-than-usual mountain of books you can expect to see published in the near future that focus on fitness, exercise and generally ‘creating a new body’. This is standard January fare; we snap up more fitness-related books in the first month of the new year than any other genre, convincing ourselves we’ll glide into our new-found role as an athlete just as soon as we’ve exercised away the festive season’s excesses.
One tip: do not buy expensive kit in the hope it will somehow assist in the transformational process. It won’t. Instead, there could be greater merit in dropping nine quid on Ellis Warren’s excellent Running For Success, a book which captivates from the off. The author’s voyage is ably assisted by the fact he had almost no previous serious experience of running.
The book opens with Warren in his first term at university where he’s reading economics and Japanese and seemingly out of his intellectual depth. His selfesteem takes a bruising during this miserable period, a phase where full-on depression feels very close; that is until he starts running.
Almost immediately, Warren is rewarded with physical and mental improvement, now thoroughly enjoying his regular ‘runner’s high’.
It’s at this point that Running For Success could have started churning out the sort of platitudes that frequently litter self
help books. Warren maintains that “anyone can run a marathon”, insisting it requires only patience, tenacity and vision; fortunately, this is a rare diversion into cliché.
Perhaps the most important attribute to possess if you’re wanting to run a marathon is a strong mind: willpower is absolutely essential for anyone wishing to make a change in their lives declares Warren.
Cultivating a strong willpower has many benefits. Not only does it act as a driver, it also persuades us to ditch our ego, to dismiss excuses and counter our natural laziness.
Instead, we start setting ourselves goals and tackling challenges we previously considered impossible.
For many people, lockdown will have felt remarkably similar to Warren’s first few cheerless weeks at university which makes Running For Success an ideal read for anyone who fancies turning over a new leaf in 2021.
❝Perhaps the most important attribute to possess if you’re wanting to run a marathon is a strong mind