Review; Relentless Forward Progress

There are not that many books about Ultra Running and that list gets even smaller once you remove the biographies and autobiographies. As for books that actually provide you any real “how to” information my list stood at at grand total of one, the stoic One Step Beyond, a 500+ page tome which I have owned for four years now and sits dog eared on my bookshelf. Well recently that number just doubled with the publishing of Relentless Forward Progress.

Written by Bryon Powell, the owner and main contributor to the excellent irunfar.com website the book provides a no-nonsense introduction to Ultra Running covering such topics as:

* Why run an Ultra Marathon?

* Time vs. Mileage vs. Trail Mileage

* The Dish on Chafing!

* Dream It, Do It!

In addition to Bryon’s writing , there are contributions from such luminaries in the “scene” as Geoff Roes, Krissy Moehl, Ian Torrance, Dr. David Horton and Karl King, not that Bryon is no slouch, this year he finished Western States for the forth time! My fellow Blogger has interviewed Bryon, you can listen to that here, and he also reviewed the book here as did Donald from Running and Rambling.

So why should you buy this book well, there are three things I really like:

1) It is written for the everyman, new to trail running, there’s a ton of info, been trail running for years, there’s something that you have never heard of to consider

2) It actually offers some realistic training programs, realistic as in they account for the fact that for 99% of the population we have jobs, family and all the other day to day stuff in our lives and as much as we would like to be Pros we’re not…in fact even most of the Pros have real jobs too!

3) It’s out and out inspiring, think you can do, want to do it, this book will help you to do it!

Available through the irunfar.com website you can also pick it up through Amazon.com as a book or download it on your Kindle, I was fortunate to have been sent two copies, I gave mine away; I am banned from anymore running books…so I downloaded it onto my Kindle. That leaves me one copy to give away to a lucky reader. This is simple enough and is the usual form for all my giveaways:

Show some Facebook love will get you an entry.

Post about it on your blog will get you another.

Tweet “I just entered the @quadrathon win a @irunfar #RFP competition you can too http://tinyurl.com/5urxqvz ” and you can have three.

Finally let me know how many you entries you need by leaving a comment on this post for your fourth and I will draw a winner on Friday…I also have a Sony Walkman left so the runner up can have that!