Geoge Sheehan's Running & Being - Still Timeless!

Lately I’ve been hankering for a great book on running – something that will move and inspire me…and get me back on the road now that my 4-week hiatus is nearly through.

Maybe its all the talk about the 40^th anniversary of Woodstock that’s set me reminiscing, but I’ve found myself searching for books by and about the “greats” of running – Prefontaine, Fixx and the like.

In my quest for the perfect read, I’ve come across a real gem you may not have heard of.  It’s Dr. George Sheehan’s bestseller from the late 1970s called Running & Being (great title, right?). Sheehan was probably one of the first well-known runners to give voice to the psycho-spiritual aspect of the sport and the ways in which running helps us find ourselves.

An educated man, and cardiologist by trade, Sheehan passed away from cancer in the late 90s but his following continues.

Running & Being is out of print, but you can still find used copies on the web.  In searching for a copy for myself, I came across the George Sheehan website (who knew?) and a wonderful (old) review of this classic.  I offer it here:

Timeless Words from a Wise Man
The essays George Sheehan published 20 years ago still inform and inspire

Remember the '70s? Disco? Bell-bottoms and leisure suits? The running boom? While the plastic music and god-awful getups are making a somewhat ironic comeback, it's worth noting that, once the world started running, it never really stopped. More people are joining running clubs and participating in road races than ever before. What has changed, it seems, is the mind-set behind the miles.

Back in 1978 a middle-aged New Jersey cardiologist-turned-marathon-runner named George Sheehan published a collection of essays called Running & Being, which spent 14 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. To be a best-seller these days, a book on marathoning would have to be titled Running & Having Really Good Abs. Runners have largely shed the spiritual side of their sport like a sweaty T-shirt. Which makes the 20th-anniversary edition of Running & Being so intriguing. Can the man whom USA Today called the voice of the running movement, and whom Bill Rodgers termed "the spirit of our sport" still have something to say to a reader in the '90s?

The revelation upon rereading Sheehan, who died of cancer in 1993 at age 74, is just how unpretentious a guru he was. A modestly accomplished college miler who took up the sport again in his mid-40s in hopes of recapturing some of the fitness he had lost during years of practicing medicine and helping his wife, Mary Jane, raise their 12 kids, Sheehan began writing a fitness column for a newspaper in Red Bank, N.J., in 1968. "As a writer," he once said, "I'm Eddie Stanky, a .230 hitter….When I write, I tell who I am, what I'm like, what I've discovered running."


It was a discovery other runners were eager to share, and Sheehan showed them the route. "There on a country road, moving at eight miles an hour, I discover the total universe, the natural and the supernatural that wise men speculate about," he wrote. Sheehan was fond of quoting wise men from Socrates to Thoreau to Vince Lombardi. Citing Pascal, he wrote, " We are not. We hope to be." Sheehan was relentlessly honest in his self-assessments. "Like most distance runners," he wrote in Running & Being, "I have all the bad features of a saint without any of the redeeming ones. Pity the family and friends who have to care for us."

As this book makes clear, there are rewards along the way. Certainly for anyone who has ever laced on a pair of trainers and slogged through a couple of miles of what Sheehan liked to call "play," the good doctor's musings and observations to excel, his inveterate quoting-his sheer enthusiasm for the long run of life-made him, then and now, a delightful companion. 

Yes, you read that right…12 kids. Mmm – sounds like his wife should have done a little running too LOL! 

Seriously, this is really a great read, so if you’re looking for something to take with you poolside, think about snatching up a copy. Guaranteed inspiration!

• Currently 2.0/5 Stars.