Welcome to our first ever week dedicated to a professional (and accessible and inspirational) #motherrunner! We’re starting with a gem: Deena Kastor, whose accolades you will read below as Tish Hamilton talks about Deena’s recent book, Let Your Mind Run. 

What else is up for Deena Kastor week? Glad you asked! The lovely Deena will be taking over @TheMotherRunner Instagram account today (Monday), so tune in for a day in the life. We’ve got a giveaway of some of her favorite Asics gear—and a few copies of her book—queued up, as well as an excerpt of Let Your Mind Run. We’ll bookend the week with Deena + Tish as cohost on the Another Mother Runner podcast. 

It’s gonna be a BAM! BAM! BAMR! of a week, so be sure to tune in daily!

I love running. I love reading. But I don’t necessarily love reading about running. GASP!

What’s my problem?

I blame the 20+ years I worked as an editor at running and other fitness magazines, where—because I read about running (or fitness) all day, all week—I just couldn’t do it in my “free” time. It was too much of a busman’s holiday.*

*What’s a busman’s holiday? asked my dear running friend Jodi, who thoughtfully gave me running books. It’s doing on holiday what you normally do as a job, like a bus driver going on a bus trip for vacation.

Of course, there are lots of good running books you may have loved reading (but I didn’t, sorry!): John L. Parker’s classic Once a Runner, Chris McDougall’s best-selling Born to Run, Haruki Murakami’s cerebral What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, to name just a few.

Non-runners accuse us of being hopelessly self-involved, monomaniacal in our interests even … boring. And it’s true, a badly written, ill thought out, rambling and unedited running story can be as excruciating as having a preteen recount the plot summaries of every episode of Grey’s Anatomy. All fourteen seasons. The experience is scarring.

So it took me a while to get around to reading Deena Kastor’s new book, Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory, co-written with Michelle Hamilton, even though Deena and Michelle are two of the finest people on the running planet, and I’d had the great pleasure of working with both of them in the past, and I’d even read an early draft.

 

My boyfriend, Rick, bought himself a copy of Deena and Michelle’s book. “It’s really good,” he said. Oh yeah?

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s really well-written. It’s not like [other athlete’s memoir Jodi gave us]. It flows from chapter to chapter and hangs together really well.” Okay, okay, but I’ll be the judge of that.

Denna kastor

Deena’s bronze medal in the 2004 Olympic marathon was the first US women’s Olympic marathon medal since Joan Benoit won in 1984.

Deena Kastor describes herself as a “happy, mostly cheerful person,” and if/when you ever meet her or hear her speak, you feel that right way: Her cheerful positivity is contagious. You come away all pumped up to recast your negative thoughts into positive alternatives.

Deena is a preternaturally gifted runner: She started running when she was 11, and pretty much won every race she entered, charging hard from the line and never looking back, more or less, through high school, college, and a pro career. Over the years, she has accumulated many, many accolades, of which these are just a few: She nabbed the bronze medal in the scorchingly hot 2004 Olympic Marathon in Athens, Greece. She set (and still holds) the American marathon record of 2:19:36 in London 2006. In October 2015, she set the American Masters record of 2:27:47 at age 42.

She is also a mother to Piper, now 7, a coach and cheerleader of the Mammoth Track Club with her husband, Andrew, a terrific cook, baker, wine connoisseur, entertainer of many friends, reader and writer.

Deena at home with daughter Piper, who is now 7, husband Andrew and one of their two mastiffs.

As gleaming as that resume looks, her was not a journey without setbacks (thank goodness, otherwise bor-ing). Most famously, she suffered a broken foot near the 5K mark of the Beijing Olympic marathon. But there were other, less public, more internal bumps in the road.

“When I first became a professional runner, I thought the hardest part would be the physical training,” she writes in the prologue. “What could be more taxing than interval workouts so intense you taste blood in the back of your throat? The answer quickly became clear: wrestling with my mind. Starting out, I had no idea running would be so mental.”

She calls her book an “instructional memoir” on the power of positivity on performance. But you don’t have to be chasing an Olympic medal—or even a PR—to appreciate how her methods apply to everyday life. “Positive thinking has long been considered a powerful life tool, to the point that it has almost become a cliché,” she writes. “Yet its great power emerges when applied as a lifelong process. Changing a single thought improved the moment I was in, but years of dedicated practice changed my career, my life, and ultimately me.”

Lucky me got to meet and interview Deena (in white), and she is truly genuinely positively cheerfully inspiring! (And also gracious about posing for photos.)

You may come to Deena’s memoir to vicariously experience the many international stages on which she has performed spectacularly and you may use her insights to power your own positive performance—in whatever arena you find yourself competing. But here’s why you’ll stay: The book is really well-written. Rick was right! It is well paced. It flows from chapter to chapter and hangs together really well. Which makes this old editor weep with gratitude.

WHAT RUNNING BOOKS HAVE INSPIRED YOUR JOURNEY?
(and come back later this week for a chance to win Let Your Mind Run + to read an excerpt!)