Sunday, May 12, 2019

Five of the best books on sporting outliers

Alex Hutchinson is the author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. He writes about the science of endurance and fitness for Outside (where he's a contributing editor and author of the Sweat Science column), The Globe and Mail (where he writes the Jockology column), and Canadian Running magazine.

At the Guardian Hutchinson tagged five of the best books that explore sex, gender and the nature-nurture debate, including:
For all its flaws...sport is often in the vanguard of social struggle and change, from Jackie Robinson to Colin Kaepernick. In his award-winning novel The Illegal, Lawrence Hill follows the saga of Keita Ali, an elite marathon runner fleeing from impoverished Zantoroland to prosperous Freedom State. As so often in fiction and reality, sport becomes a metaphor for and a reflection of Ali’s struggles in life. And there’s a political subtext: how do you balance the rights of the few with the rights of the many? In the wake of all the [Caster] Semenya coverage it’s a question that should sound hauntingly familiar.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue