Personal Record

Rachel Toor was a bookish egghead who ran only to catch a bus. How such an unlikely athlete became a runner of ultramarathons is the story ofPersonal Record, an exhilarating meditation on the making, and the minutiae, of a runner's life. The food, the clothes, the races, the injuries, and the watch are all essential to the runner, as readers discover here, and discover why. A chronicle of Toor's relationship with the sport of running, from her early incarnation as an Oreo-eating couch potato to her emergence as a hard-bodied marathoner, this book explores the sport of running, the community it brings into being, and the personal satisfaction of pursuing it to its limit. An homage to running, a literary take on how an activity can turn into a passion and how a passion can become a way of life, Toor's book runs all the way from individual achievementa personal recordto the world of friendship and community.

Rachel Toor teaches writing at Eastern Washington University and is a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education and a senior writer for Running Times. She is the author of The Pig and I (available in a Bison Books edition) and Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process. A graduate of Yale University, she received an MFA from the University of Montana and currently lives in Spokane.