26 Miles to Boston by Michael Connelly
26 Miles to Boston: The Boston Marathon Experience from Hopkinton to Copley Square is a good idea executed only moderately well. The pictures are good and the book contains a wealth of information, history, and anecdotes from the first 100 years of the marathon. The information about past runnings is supplemented by the author’s experience of running the marathon on its 100th anniversary.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from two problems. First, is its schizophrenic formatting. The author uses italics to relay his own current thoughts and experiences. Italics are also used for other interjections. Sometimes it seemed like they just italicized every other paragraph for fun. The narrative jumped back and forth between history, scenery, and current events. I’m sure the intention was for the past to illuminate the present and for the present to refer back to the past, but the actual result was jarring and unpredictable. I feel like more informative formatting (e.g. only italicizing the present) and a more predictable rhythm (e.g. each chapter opens with scenery, goes to history, and them moves to the present) would have helped.
The second problem is that the author didn’t actually get into the race. He was a gypsy runner. I’m very sorry he wasn’t able to get a number but it seems like the book should have been written by someone who did. Also, he was very non-competitive. I’m not saying you need an elite athlete to write this book since the race is very much about its weekend warriors, but someone who had trained longer, run other races for comparison sake, and had a target pace might have made for more interesting reading.
I enjoyed most the more factual parts of the book–where the course goes and what happens at each step. The history was also interesting although I don’t know enough about running to put it into perspective. It’s too bad that the intertwining of past and present didn’t work better.