Racing the Clock

Running Across a Lifetime

By: Bernd Heinrich

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

An award-winning, much-loved biologist turns his gaze on himself, using his long-distance running to illuminate the changes to a human body over a lifetime

Part memoir, part scientific investigation, Racing the Clock is the book biologist and natural historian Bernd Heinrich has been waiting his entire life to write. A dedicated and accomplished marathon (and ultra-marathon) runner who won his first marathon at age thirty-nine, Heinrich looks deeply at running, aging, and the body, exploring the unresolved relationship between metabolism, diet, exercise, and age.

Why do some bodies age differently than others? How much control do we have over that process and what effect, if any, does being active have? Bringing to bear research from his entire career and in the spirit of his classic Why We Run, Heinrich probes the questions of how we use energy and continue to adapt to our mutable surroundings and circumstances. Beyond that, he examines how our bodies change while we age but also how we can work with, if not overcome, many of these changes—and what all this tells us about evolution and the mechanisms of life, health, and happiness.

Racing the Clock offers fascinating and surprising conclusions, all while bringing the reader along on Heinrich’s compelling journey to what he says will be his final race—a fifty-kilometer race at age eighty.

A masterpiece on nature, running and our mortality and how they are beautifully intertwined.

I have read about half a dozen of Heinrich’s books and am amazed how he absorbs the reader in the life of birds, insects and trees. I got hooked 20 years ago after reading A Year In The Maine Woods. In Racing The Clock Heinrich also provides details on his fascinating life. He has accomplished much as a biologist and world record holding runner. Heinrich deserves to sing his song. One of his goals is to inspire his fellow man to appreciate and learn about nature and he certainly has done this with my life. As a result of his work I now feel the passion for the outdoors and to continually learn about my surroundings. I will always be grateful for his wonderful and captivating books.

Good Book, Decent Narration

I especially enjoyed the parts where Bernd reflected on connections between distance running and the aging process, a subject close to my heart as a 58yo distance runner. I also enjoyed the last couple of chapters, where he discovers trail ultras for the first time at age 79-80, and has a religious experience (trail ultras are all I've ever run, because being out in nature is my favorite part of running).

I did not always feel like the lines were delivered with the same inflection/emotional flavor that Bernd would have used if he were talking. The narration was not bad (I gave it 3 stars), but I sometimes wished I was reading instead so I could supply my own (imagined) voice tones.

essential reading

I can't even begin to offer enough superlatives to this book. It probably helps that I feel empathic connections to the writer, his interests, his struggles, his conclusions about life. But even had I had to struggle to connect with him or relate to him, nonetheless his story wonderfully conveys a rich and deep and full portrayal of what life is, or can be, if we but drop the bars of the cages we are all too likely to construct for ourselves if we follow the path most modern lifestyles entice us to adhere to. Read this book and taste the fulness of being fully human.

The creation is not the creator.

Not much about running, I understand his love for mother nature, I was expecting more saying about running, but this guy is preaching that God is nature, we must worship the creator not the creation even I agree with him that admiring mother nature give as a good glimpse to understand God greatness.