Marathon Running for Mortals

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View books by John Bingham, Jenny Hadfield.

A Mortal's Opinion - Rated
When I said I was going to attempt a marathon a friend recommended this book and said "You will need no other book" and she was right. Yes, the style can be irritating and it's not a book for seasoned runners BUT for the absolute beginner, like me, it is great. I did as I was told by the book and I DID IT! It works. Buy it.

An Ordinary Mortals Guide:- a step in the right direction - Rated
Generally the advice was very good. A very chatty style that would irritate some, but written for the nervous novice rather than the seasoned athlete.

I read this about a week before running my first half marathon and did identify many of my own mistakes in the book, (comforting to know that I was not alone). Certainly found it informative and interesting and helped to keep everything in perspective.

Have been reading it again as I prepare for a marathon.

Informative & realistic - Rated
I found this book easy to read with plenty of good tips I know I will be trying out. It covers the basics of running & training & is ideal for somebody who is contemplating a marathon or half marathon for the 1st time. It is very easy to understand & stick with & definitly gives inspiration to those of us who didnt think we could ever cover the distance. I reckon I will pick it up again during my training to refer back to. I would reccomend it to any mortal!

Waste of time - Rated
The book is long on generalisations, platitudes and psychobabble, and short on specifics. The authors' chatty style, in which they constantly tell you how they didn't have a clue and how they repeatedly went wrong, very quickly wears thin. The 30 or so "Marathon Mortal" spots, where a mere mortal tells you how great they felt when they completed a marathon despite having always been last in their PE class, similarly get very repetitive very quickly. And the book seems to assume throughout that you're going to be tempted to over-train and run far too much, but hardly addresses at all the need for motivation for those of us who face the opposite problem. Overall it feels as though it's been padded out with material that fills the pages but doesn't provide any useful substance. There must be a better book to tell you about running a marathon than this.

Simply fantastic. - Rated
I decided at the start of this year I was going to run a half-marathon. Having done nothing more than the odd couple of miles here and there, 13.1 miles sounded a bit daunting but do-able in time. So, off I went, training (so I thought) the right way. Turns out, it was the wrong way. I was basically an accident waiting to happen. I reckon a couple more weeks of doing what I was doing would have left me with problems.

This book goes into very good detail about what you should do to train to cover this sort of distance, from walking a half-marathon to running a whole 26.2 miles. It covers not only training, but also gear you should be looking at, getting the right shoes (all shoes are not created equal, it turns out), why cotton is a bad thing, heart-monitors.... It is also quite inspirational, with little side-boxes of info written by 'mortal' runners who never thought they could do it. Add to that training schedules to suit your needs, and you've got an excellent little book to more than keep you going. The book is also very chatty, and while I can see this annoying some people, I found it more like listening to two people talking rather than reading a training manual.

Buy this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough!