The Road to Sparta : Retracing the Ancient Battle and Epic Run That Inspired the World's Greatest Fo

[cornerofmadness]

The Road to Sparta : Retracing the Ancient Battle and Epic Run That Inspired the World's Greatest Foot Race by Dean Karnazes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have to admit I am not the audience for this book. I read it for a reading challenge about reading a book about a marathon runner and I thought this was going to be about the historic event. It only is tangentially. Dean himself is an ultramarathoner and apparently a lauded one. I think he went into this with the best of intentions and was working with a historian who knows more about this than he does (whether or not it's mere legend vs real history is debatable and not really the point of this).

My issues came in with the repetitiveness of a lot of it. An editor should have taken a firmer hand in this. As Dean decides to embrace his Greek heritage and recreate Pheippides' run it should have been interesting to see but it goes into the minutia far too much. It felt like a love letter to Greece which isn't bad either but it just wasn't engaging to me. Maybe if I actually cared about running...



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