Reading on running

I read a lot, and by "a lot" I mean 4-10 books a week. My interests vary - some weeks I read nothing but murder mysteries, some weeks it's all YA lit, some weeks I can't get enough of memoirs or nonfiction. I read while eating breakfast, walking down the sidewalk, riding the subway, cooking dinner, using a stationary bicycle. I am only partly kidding when I say that it is one of life's great disappointments that I cannot read while running or rowing.

My current running plan is actually one that I found by browsing through a bookstore's running section: I poked around until I found some authors whose styles I liked, narrowed those down to running plans that were challenging enough to keep me happy but manageable enough that I wouldn't accidentally keel over dead, and... went to the library to see what was available.

(I'm poor. If this whole running thing works out, I'll buy the book for real.)

Anyway, after deciding that I liked the flexible attitude demonstrated in Hal Higdon's books, I ended up using a plan from his website (http://www.halhigdon.com/). First, though, I checked out some general books on running. The library options were a bit limited, actually, but I did find a couple of running books tailored to women...

...which were quite a disappointment.

Don't get me wrong - they had good advice, and a lot of what they said made good sense. But I was struck by the emphasis on beginner that these books had compared to books not tailored towards women. Gender-neutral books (with the exception of books written specifically for beginners) spend a couple of chapters talking about beginning to run and then dive into longer distances, competitions, running for time. The women's running books that I read spent chapter after chapter on diet and weight loss and the benefits of running and what to wear and how it's really not that hard to run a 5k! You can do it!

Again: don't get me wrong. The books have a point, and for a beginning runner the emphasis on, well, beginning is much more useful than a book geared towards serious long-distance runners. I think I just resent the fact that there's so little on long-distance running for women - a couple of chapters at best. (That, and I just can't get behind a book that refers to taking a bathroom break while running as "taking a potty break". I guarantee that that phrasing wouldn't fly in a gender-neutral book.)

...One author said that, if you're going to judge other runners, don't judge them by how far/fast they run but by how devoted they are to running (i.e., whether they run every day, rain or shine, or only on weekends). That was about where I stopped taking the book seriously - I'm not interested in judging how "real" a runner anybody else is.

I picked up some useful tips from these books, but when I buy a couple of books about running, they probably won't be geared towards women. I'm not in it to lose weight or to de-stress after work. I'm in it to run.