For us in the northern hemisphere, the spring equinox means we are well on our way to longer summer days. As days get warmer, I tend to spend more time outside. Our family enjoys evening park dinners and playtime, and I often bring a book to read while the kids climb trees and play on slides.
Awesome new reads
I have been absolutely blown away by the literary works that my fellow women runners have produced lately.
Lauren Fleshman’s Good For A Girl became a NY Times bestseller, speaking to the world of competitive collegiate and professional athletics. Lauren details the inequalities and the improvements the world of womens’ sports needs.
The Longest Race, by Kara Goucher, speaks to the darker side of professional running. She details her road towards Olympic medals, training on one of the most coveted distance running teams in the world, and the betrayals of ethics she experienced.
Not to be outshone, Des Linden’s memoir, Choosing to Run, speaks to the beauty of running and the resolve needed to pursue her running lifestyle. This story talks about the deep love required to perform at the highest levels of sport.
These books are by women I know and have raced against. I met Lauren when we were both runners in the PAC-10 (she at Stanford, I was at University of Oregon), and we have been friends for over 20 years. We’ve seen each others’ lives change, evolve, and families grow. I raced the Olympic marathon trials with both Kara and Des, and I am so impressed with their perpetual growth through life.
As these three women (and many others!) have set the bar for defining women’s distance running since 2000, I am so excited to see where today’s young runners take us in the next years and decades.
Equinox – what?
To keep things real, a bit of what the equinox is! Also called the Vernal equinox, or the March equinox, the spring equinox is the moment in time when both north and south hemispheres get almost exactly equal amounts of daylight and nighttime. What this looks like, is the “shadow edge” of the night-time on the globe (also called the solar terminator) is essentially vertical. This happens because the plane of the Earth’s equator passes through the center of the sun.
Your turn
Have you read any of these books? What were your thoughts?
What are you looking forward to as spring approaches?