Beginners Half Marathon Trainer [Carmel's review]

Beginners Half Marathon Trainer: The 14 Week Program to Completing a Half-Marathon in Your Best Time makes Carmel yearn for spring:

From the moment I opened the book I felt confident that it could help me achieve the fitness and skill to complete a half-marathon.  When I first received the book, I'd flipped through the pages, checking out the different parts of the book in no particular order.  I stumbled across a guide to fitting sneakers properly, and dressing for training, nutrition, and week by week training schedules.

As I read the book from the start and got into the details, my confidence deepened.  It is not solely a book of workout routines, it covers preparing and completing a marathon from soup to nuts.  From the start, the book covers why to do a marathon, basic fitness, reading your heart rate, buying the right equipment and nutrition.  For me, the novice runner, it was especially helpful to cover the correct posture to run and how it impacts your stride and stamina.

The workouts are broken up by week.  You're given information on how to train, and how not to train.  The book provides not only the routines, but why you're doing certain types of training during particular weeks.  It not only covers the training aspects, but how your body might be responding during certain periods of the training and how to stay on track mentally.  It also stresses the importance of staying on track with the scheduled routines whether you're feeling strong or tired.  It also talks about the importance of rest days, and allowing yourself the time off, and not beating yourself up for a missed training day.

Overall, I liked the book for it's straight forward approach to the subject.  It gives clear information without masking it in jargon or being elitist.  It's good for the absolute beginner getting into running for the first time, as well as the runner with a few marathons under their belt.  I'd suspect that more experienced runners would find much of the information to be too basic, though could fill in some gaps and help even them refine their training.  A great place to start if you want to get into running, too bad I'll have to wait until spring to put it into action. 
* 4 stars *

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More information

• Ulysses Press | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com
• ISBN-10: 1569756368 
• ISBN-13: 978-1569756362