Has anyone read...

[El Gordo]

Well, OK, as you've mentioned my reservations...

It's certainly an entertaining read, and I wouldn't want to put anyone off. It's a pretty ideal book to take on holiday where you can get some vicarious exercise from it while flopping round doing nothing.

The two things I didn't like have been mentioned by MLCM. The humour is relentless. I wanted to know more about the serious side of running. What was he getting out of it apart from a lot of funny ideas for the next chapter? No reflections on anything, just a series of sketches. After a while it begins to feel a bit lopsided.

But there's a more fundamental problem. The book's central pillar of humour is that he's a crap runner, struggling to get round, but actually he's pretty good. I seem to remember his first race being full of jokes about being overtaken by elderly runners, yet at the end he says his average pace was 7 mins-something per mile, which is pretty damn nippy from where I'm standing. His marathon is 3 hours-something. Non-runners probably wouldn't notice, but true plodders like me felt slightly resentful about that.

But it's still worth reading.