Racing the Clock
Running Across a Lifetime
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning, much-loved biologist turns his gaze on himself, using his long-distance running to illuminate the changes to a human body over a lifetime
Part memoir, part scientific investigation, Racing the Clock is the book biologist and natural historian Bernd Heinrich has been waiting his entire life to write. A dedicated and accomplished marathon (and ultra-marathon) runner who won his first marathon at age thirty-nine, Heinrich looks deeply at running, aging, and the body, exploring the unresolved relationship between metabolism, diet, exercise, and age.
Why do some bodies age differently than others? How much control do we have over that process and what effect, if any, does being active have? Bringing to bear research from his entire career and in the spirit of his classic Why We Run, Heinrich probes the questions of how we use energy and continue to adapt to our mutable surroundings and circumstances. Beyond that, he examines how our bodies change while we age but also how we can work with, if not overcome, many of these changes—and what all this tells us about evolution and the mechanisms of life, health, and happiness.
Racing the Clock offers fascinating and surprising conclusions, all while bringing the reader along on Heinrich’s compelling journey to what he says will be his final race—a fifty-kilometer race at age eighty.
Blending a lifetime of scientific inquiry with the raw data of his own body, Heinrich reveals the intricate dance between physiology and time.
The Biological Clock: Heinrich examines how circadian and circannual rhythms govern not just our energy and adaptation, but the very pace of our lives.A Scientist's Memoir: From running his first marathon at thirty-nine to setting world records as a masters athlete, Heinrich uses his own life as the ultimate field experiment.The Science of Running: Explore the physiology of endurance, from the role of metabolism and diet to how the body adapts, repairs, and ultimately succumbs to the stress of long-distance running.Endurance and Aging: Follow Heinrich's compelling journey as he prepares for a fifty-kilometer race at age eighty, testing the very limits of what is possible in the race against time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biologist Heinrich (Why We Run) delivers a powerful reflection on his decades of competitive running that's nicely colored by an exploration of the effects of aging on the human body. Heinrich spent his childhood in a cabin in the woods of northern Germany, where his family subsisted on berries, nuts, and mice, and later moved to rural Maine, where cross-country running became his "entry into American society." In adulthood, he balanced his passions for science and running, beating his own records on the campuses where he taught. Along the way, Heinrich explores the science behind running, covering metabolism, temperature regulation, and endurance, and finds parallels in the natural world. Studies of moths and bees, for example, show that their breathing is "synchronized with their blood flow pattern," something Heinrich became conscious of in his long-distance running when his "unlabored" strides matched his breathing. In evocative prose, Heinrich treats readers to precise explanations of such diverse subjects as the physiology of tree frogs and the life cycle of the "suicide tree" of Central America. Heinrich's keen observations and unique story will keep readers hooked.
