Book Review: Again to Carthage

I want to start by saying that I loved this book. Some of the things I have to say may indicate otherwise, but I couldn't put it down and I'm a little sad that it is now over.

If you haven't heard of this book, it is a sequel to Once a Runner. It picks up Quenton Cassidy roughly 10 years after his Silver medal in the Olympics. I think it was about 10 years later, the book is fairly vague on an exact timeline. Just like with Once a Runner, John Parker Jr. does a great job with capturing the inner workings of distance runners. This book has extreme relevance to the Dusty Spikes blog. Parker does a good job of reflecting upon an athletic career that is long over. Another cool thing he does is weave fictional characters in with real people that were around at the time.

This leads me to some of my problems with the book. I think there are some major timeline issues. I didn't realize that he was training for the 1980 Trials until the very end of the book. So the timeframe of the book is 1978-1980. There are plenty of references to things that happened well after the timeline of the book. It is narrated as the events occurred, not as a look back. However, the narrator talks about John Campbell's masters running which I clearly remember in the early 90s. Also, a major topic in the book is the small number of men who had run a 4:00 mile and a 2:10 marathon. The characters cite Ken Martin as one of the only guys to have done this. That really didn't make sense to me either, so I looked this one up. Ken Martin shows up at 2:11 in 1984 and 2:09 in 1989 (10 years after the book supposedly took place!!!)

With my track nerd rant aside, I found the story entertaining. I loved living vicariously through Cassidy, who had the ability to take 2 years off from work (and any other form of responsibility) to live in the North Carolina mountains in the summer and Florida in the summer with the sole purpose of running far and fast.

If you are in a Dusty Spikes state of mind, I highly recommend this book. However, please take it for what it is: an often entertaining, sometimes inspiring story that can climb into a runners head and explain what goes on in there.