If you want to learn more about Bernd Heinrich, Bill Donohue's wonderful profile in Outside Magazine is a great read. Yet I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn about this runner, a renaissance man who quietly made his mark on the world of running. When he attempts to tie the two concepts together, to this reader, it felt a bit awkward. But for me, the stories about his running and races were much more compelling than his musings about nature. The pandemic took care of that and he shifted focus to running and aging. The book was initially an attempt to document his goal of running a 100k at age 80. In Racing the Clock, Heinrich once again attempts to link his observations of nature with running. He's published many scientific papers and books he has written one book on running, Why We Run: A Natural History, which I have not read. He's also well known in the scientific arena for his work on insect physiology and biology. Bernd Heinrich is the runner you've never heard of. I received a PRC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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

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