An unlikely marathoner sees her method through grief and into the untold history of women and running.

Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike described herself in lots of ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents’ deaths a decade previously, orphan. ‘Runner’ was nowhere near the list. However when she began training for a half marathon on the whim, she discovered herself an instant convert. Shortly she realized that running, ‘a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory,’ was about THE LONG TERM: A Memoir of Loss and Life in Motion assisting her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she have been, for ten messy years, operating away from.

As Catriona excavates her very own past, she also develops curious about other women attracted to running. What she finds is a brief history of repression and denial-running was considered to endanger childbearing, and as late as 1967 the organizer of the Boston Marathon tried to drag a female off the training course, informing her to ‘obtain the hell out of my race’-but also of incredible courage and achievement. As she brings to life the tales of pioneering sportsmen and analyzes the physique of the woman runner in pop tradition, literature, and myth, she involves the center of why she’s operating, and why any of us do.