14 Minutes
A Running Legend's Life and Death and Life
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
In 2007, after collapsing on a practice field at the Nike campus, champion marathoner Alberto Salazar's heart stopped beating for 14 minutes. Over the crucial moments that followed, rescuers administered CPR to feed oxygen to his brain and EMTs shocked his heart eight times with defibrillator paddles. He was clinically dead. But miraculously, Salazar was back at the Nike campus coaching his runners just nine days later.
Salazar had faced death before, but he survived that and numerous other harrowing episodes thanks to his raw physical talent, maniacal training habits, and sheer will, as well as—he strongly believes—divine grace.
In 14 Minutes, Salazar chronicles in spellbinding detail how a shy, skinny Cuban-American kid from the suburbs of Boston was transformed into the greatest marathon runner of his era. For the first time, he reveals his tempestuous relationship with his father, a former ally of Fidel Castro; his early running life in high school with the Greater Boston Track Club; his unhealthy obsession to train through pain; the dramatic wins in New York, Boston, and South Africa; and how surviving 14 minutes of death taught him to live again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three-time New York Marathon winner Salazar suffered a heart attack in 2007, and was clinically dead for 14 minutes. While admittedly incredible, the author's harrowing experience ultimately proves too unsubstantial to keep this memoir moving. The book chronicles the author's life from boyhood, to competitive success (including a world record at the 1981 New York Marathon), to the career-ending slump that followed. Now a coach, Salazar's message honors determination and drive, but warns against the dangers of "extreme athletic excess" (years of punishing training and an "absolute refusal to lose" may have contributed to Salazar's attack). These sentiments, while valuable, are not sufficiently unique or compelling for the book to transcend the category of the running memoir. The most interesting strand of the narrative is actually Salazar's rocky relationship with his father, a Cuban migr who was "a friend and comrade" of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but who later felt betrayed by the revolution's embrace of communism. Salazar Sr. never recovered from his "obsession" with Cuba, and the author suggests that it is this "inherited passion" that pushed him to succeed. Paradoxically, running was also a way for the Salazar to escape the "atmosphere of rage that father had engendered." Despite the grander familial, political, and existential themes, Salazar's biography will nevertheless appeal mainly to runners. 8 b/w photos.
