May 7, 2012
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 émigré 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 "inheritedâ¦passion" that pushed him to succeed. Paradoxically, running was also a way for the Salazar to escape the "atmosphere of rageâ¦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.
April 1, 2012
Assisted by Brant (Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley and America's Greatest Marathon, 2007), former long-distance running prodigy Salazar incorporates lessons learned from bitter experience in this account of his life. The author, associated for years with Phil Knight's Nike sports sponsorship, has come full circle and is now a trainer of long-distance runners at the Nike campus in Eugene, Ore. He reflects on an action-packed life that brought him fame for his successive marathon victories in New York City and Boston in the early 1980s, and made him a contender for the Olympics in 1984 and 1988. However, his successes came at a cost. In 2007 Salazar collapsed on the Nike campus and was counted dead for 14 minutes. "Searing marathons and other races" probably contributed to this episode. Salazar writes that his "excesses caught up with" him in 1988. He had been severely dehydrated in 1979, and then lost 10 pounds to dehydration in the 1982 Boston marathon; he also suffered bone fractures, exercise-induced asthma and possible damage to his endocrine system. In 1994, while preparing for the Comrades double marathon in South Africa, Salazar starved himself to excess. The author describes how he failed to heed the sensible advice of his first trainer that he "shouldn't even think about the marathon until [he] was out of college." Ultimately, Salazar came back from death with a renewed respect for the marathon and a desire to save his trainees from the "the self-immolating mistakes" of his younger days. He doesn't relate any mystical experience about his near-death event, but he does claim a deeper religious awareness after the experience. A dramatic account of the risks and rewards of top-level long-distance running.
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