The Road to Sparta

This past week I read a really inspiring book, and even though I have done many book reviews as of late I felt that it was necessary to write about it. Dean Karnazes The Road to Sparta is the second book of his that I've read, and I enjoy his first person style. It feels very personal like he's telling me a story. This book is about a great LARPing adventure he took to run between Athens and Sparta in 36 hours eating only food that would have been available to ancient Greek messangers.

The story starts off with his Greek genealogy, of course, because it is a very personal, very American story about inquiring into one's heritage. He scouts the route, consults historians and then runs. As someone who has returned to their ancestral European homeland and felt immediately connected to the geography, I could relate to almost everything Karnazes wrote about his own journey even though my own was here in Norway rather than Greece. Also having driven the route from Athens across the Corinthian Isthmus through Nemea and through the mountains into Sparta, it brought back memories of my own time there. My longest run was I think in the hills of Attica north of Sounio which are pretty barren and punishing even in the Fall. And then there are the mountains around Sparta where we hiked to waterfalls that were surprisingly freezing and the vegetation varied so much based on the proximty to water.

Karnazes is an inspiring runner and, although I am no where close to his level of ability, I can relate to the pain and mental toughness in distance running. Being on Mallorca with the great bike trails I rented one and biked 100 kilometers along the coast from Platja de Palma to Port Andratx, which I far further than I've ever run or biked before. I chose to read the book on the Mediterrenean because this was my second to last training week before the Berlin Halbmarathon, but the day I finished reading this book I got robbed of my wallet and phone so getting there and running is a dodgy proposition at best.

In the final analysis, Dean Karnazes The Road to Sparta is definitely the best book I've read this year. And now I REALLY want to do the Half Marathon des Sables in September.