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Nice title. Could almost have been devised to get the most search engine hits or bookshop queries. It reminds me of a book by the English humorist Alan Coren, who, when research told him that the best selling books were on golf, cats and the Nazis, titled his next collection of stories ‘Golfing for Cats’, with a cover illustration of a cat hitting a golf ball, wearing a swastika-emblazoned uniform. Needless to say, within the book there is no golf, no cats and and no Nazis.

Which is uncannily similar to the relationship between title and content of this book by Geoff Hollister, which is as much about Geoff Hollister as anything else. Chapter 18 begins with how huge Nike were by 1982, rendering the ‘Out of Nowhere’ part of the title redundant for nearly half the book. Not long after this point, much space is devoted to Hollister’s efforts to design the Aquasock for windsurfers, and market sailing clothing to sailors, as well as Nike’s advances in basketball and (American) football. So the ‘Culture of Running’ part dribbles away about there. Generally, the book is a vehicle for the author to  write down a lot of his personal life - which, since he worked for Nike pretty much from day one, is certainly closely entwined with that company, but which is still his personal life. It takes four chapters before we hear anything about Bowerman’s efforts to get better shoes for his runners, five chapters before Nike founder Phil Knight emerges; we need to endure Hollister’s Navy service too before the seminal ‘waffle iron’ moment, when Bowerman poured rubber into a waffle iron to create a new type of running sole. If this is the historic point at which Nike is born, even though there was at that time no name and only the beginnings of a business, then we have to wade through an awful lot of gratuitous anecdotes to get there.

So if the title was an exam question, then the book would lose marks for not answering it. Yes, it’s about Nike, and yes, it’s about Geoff Hollister. But is it any good? (more…)

OK, ‘Feet In The Clouds‘ was published in 2004, so I can’t pretend for one second that this is a groundbreaking review. And it’s not as if I’ve only just read it myself and thought to spread the word. But I do think that this blog can and should turn its attention to running literature every now and then. So that’s what we will do!

So, ‘Feet In The Clouds‘ is about that peculiarly English - and northern English, at that - style of racing called fell-running. For those of you who have lost me at the word ‘fell’, it is a word of Old Norse origin meaning ‘hill’, that is commonly used in the North of England. Up there, the hills aren’t big, but they are damned steep and a typical fell race may not be more than a few miles long, of brutal ascent followed by bone-wrecking descent. So fast do the best fell runners learn to go down the steep inclines that the author notes one ex-runner turned publican who used to bet tourists in his pub that he could run 100m in less than 10 seconds - which, when he trotted up to the top of a steep slag heap near the pub and sprinted down, he could do with ease.

Richard Askwith is a proper journalist (on The Independent) so he writes very well. That, in an arena where good writing is not a given, is very welcome. He leads the reader through three main, intertwined, themes: the history of fell-running, complete with a cast of slightly loony characters and excellent accounts of their amazing achievements; samples of what is going on in a typical year of competition - called ‘Scenes From A Fell-running Year, one chapter for each month of the year; and, possibly the most absorbing, Askwith’s own burgeoning obsession with the sport, which, as a nancy-boy southerner who used to smoke, he freely admits he isn’t the ideal candidate for.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough, really. God knows there’s little enough out there on running that is truly well written and absorbing, so for that reason alone you should get it. Then it gives a superb insight into a fascinating and relatively ancient area of our sport, so get it and learn about fell-running, too.

Happy reading!