The Long Run
A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion
An unlikely marathoner finds her way through grief and into the untold history of women and running.
Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike defined herself in many ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents' deaths a decade earlier, orphan. "Runner" was nowhere near the list. Yet when she began training for a half marathon on a whim, she found herself an instant convert. Soon she realized that running, "a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory," was helping her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she had been, for ten messy years, running away from.
As Catriona excavates her own past, she also grows curious about other women drawn to running. What…