by George Sheehan, M.D.
Sheehan discovered the grueling pleasure of long-distance running at 45 and spent the next 20 years both indulging his passion (he ran in 21 Boston marathons) and imparting it to others in newspaper columns, lectures and books, including the 1978 bestseller Running and Being. But despite his obsessively healthful regimen—and his training as a physician—Sheehan went years without having an annual physical. By the time his prostate cancer was detected in 1986, when Sheehan was 67, it had spread to his bones and become inoperable.
To help make sense of his own approaching demise, Sheehan returned to his favorite thinkers—William James, Thoreau and others. The result is this meditation on life and death, a document that, despite its sad chronicling of his crumbling health, offers the sort of inspiration that won Sheehan so many admirers back when he seemed to defy the effects of aging. (At 50, he ran the mile in 4:45, setting a world age-group record.) Going the Distance is a portrait of how a driven, solitary man turns to his family and discovers an emotional bond he has never known. After 40 years of marriage, Sheehan began wearing a wedding ring for the first time. And before being disabled by the disease that took his life in November 1993, he kept running—with a new perspective. Instead of pounding the miles alone, silently stalking the clock, he ran with friends and family. And he talked with them every step of the way. (Villard, $22)
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