Born to Run by Christopher McDougal

This is a non-fiction (although it strays dangerously close to the border sometimes) book which is about a mexican tribe of super runners who live in the Copper Canyons. It is essentially an argument that the ability to run (long distances, not sprint) is an important aspect of our evolution and as such of tremendous benefit to our health to do so. He argues that the ubiquity of running related injuries can be linked to using running shoes and poor technique.

There was a lot of times when this book made claims based backed up by anecdotes of one or two freak runners, who "eat nothing that needs to be cooked mannnnnnn" and they did alright, so meat eating==bad. While I found the unsubstantiated hippy bullshit quite annoying at times, it didn't ruin the book for me. As I see it he makes two big claims: that running shoes actually make you more injury prone or at best, do just as well as a pair of sandshoes and that our bodies evolved to make us good at distance running. I think he did a reasonable job at trying to support these claims, although this is not really a "check the footnotes" kind of non-fiction book (the author writes for Men's Health, so don't expect too much in the way of scientific rigour).

Whatever the merit of his claims, it is certainly an amazing story, told with a lot of poetic license with "filling in the gaps", that made me hate modern sport all the more for its hyper competitive bullshit and inspired me to try taking up running again.

The short version is don't expect The rise and fall of the Roman empire and you'll find a highly entertaining and motivating story, with a few plausible theories (and some not so plausible hippy crap ><) thrown in along the way. Thoroughly recommended.