Book #25 of 2016. 
 I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, and finishing it two nights before my second half-marathon was perfect timing. 
 McDougall writes for Runners World, and his style reflects that. Occasionally, "Born to Run" feels more like a collection of magazine articles than it does a cohesive novel. The chapters on barefoot running and the running shoe industry felt the most extraneous. However, this style also means that the words run off of the page with the ease of a Tarahumara runner. 
 The message here is what is most important: Despite what we have been told, humans are made for running. While the science might not be entirely sound, it's hard to disagree with the theories. What keeps us from running? Ourselves. The best runners are those who just love running for the sake of it, those who run with smiles on their faces. Let your feet kiss the ground, your mind wipe itself into oblivion, and just enjoy the outdoors and being one with your body and those around you. These are the messages that I can use to improve myself. 
 For those of us runners, this book is also full of affirmations: 
 "When things look worse, we run the most. Three times, American has seen distance-running skyrocket, and it's always in the midst of a national crisis" (11). 
 "Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone." -Ken Chlouber (57). 
 "You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else" (93). 
 "Was Zatopek a great man who happened to run, or a great man because he ran? Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, put aside what you wanted and appreciating what you got, being patient and forgiving and undemanding" (98). 
 "Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction." -William James (112). 
 "When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever." -Tarahumara saying (114). 
 "Lisa Smith-Batchen, the amazingly sunny and pixie-tailed ultrarunner for Idaho who trained through blizzards to win a six-day race in the Sahara, talks about exhaustion as if it's a playful pet. 'I love the Beast,' she says. 'I actually look forward to the Beast showing up, because every time he does, I handle him better. I get him more under control.' Once the Beast arrives, Lisa knows what she has to deal with and can get down to work. And isn't that the reason she's running through the desert in the first place-- to put her training to work? To have a friendly little tussle with the Beast and show it who's boss? You can't hate the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it" (125). 
 "Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude-- they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I cam to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race." -Herb Elliot (250). 
 "The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other" (253).