Customer Reviews

Finding Their Stride: A Team of Young Runners and Their Season of Triumph

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

What a wonderful book!

Sally Pont truly captures the pain and glory of running in this elegant portrait of the Moravian Academy co-ed cross-country team. If you've confronted and embraced the daunting task of running at any time in your life--especially on a competetive level--you will love Sally Pont. As an extremely involved coach and teacher, Pont takes us on a journey through the fall cross-country season, showing us the changes in the leaves and the obstacles her athletes encounter as they continually ask themselves: Why run?

Surprisingly, this book is not just about or for the runners. Reaching into her bag of literary treats, the English teacher in Pont emerges as she looks lovingly at her athletes and compares them to Shakespearean characters or analyses the team in terms of Greek mythology. Her writing is lyrical and beautiful; even for those who have never run a mile, this book is inspirational in the pure feeling that Pont puts into her prose.

In glorious detail, she describes the ins and outs of training for a 5 kilometer race (3.1 miles), the struggle for improving a personal time, and the team effort that is its own ultimate reward at the end of the day. Through Pont, the reader shares in this experience as we find ourselves cheering through each winning race and empathizing with the disappointment of defeat.

An inspiring read for both runner and non-runner alike--I highly recommend Sally Pont's book for all readers!

Reading this book about my own cross country team, our own stuggles, adventures, and laughter, inspires me. No matter how cynical anyone on this page can be about Finding Their Stride, don't worry Pont, you have made us all proud. In your eloquent style of writing (which parallels your speaking that can always wake us up in the middle of a god aweful boring chapel), you have depicted us all beautifully and given us immortality, the only kind, which Gilgamesh found out was fame. Thank you for everything, for your book, for your coaching, for your inspiration. We'll never forget you.

I thoughroughly enjoyed this book. I could not put it down. I found each chapter interesting as they each had their own identity. However they all flowed together very well. I felt the book was interesting to me because I am a runner and have been a coach. I could see both perspectives, that of the runner as well as the author. I recommend this book to anyone who is a runner, coach or parent or someone how is inspired by a heartwarming story.

As a cross country coach and runner, I found this book appealing on several levels. It is an easy read and it shows the joys of running to run, not just to win. The style was very descriptive, but it gave a unique and original twist to the book. That is one thing about distance runners . . . they all have a unique and original twist!

I randomly found this book in a bookstore one day and was so intrigued that I bought it and read it immediately. I've never run competitively but after reading this book I understand the world of competitive running a lot better than I ever had. I thought the writing was beautiful and found myself folding down pages so that I could go back and jot the quotes down when I was finished reading. This book inspires me to run-- and to keep searching for surprise book finds like this. Thank you, Sally Pont.

The story lines that make up this book are interesting, and the development of the team and individual student-athletes during the season makes the book a worthwhile read. Still, I found the author's relentless overuse of adverbs and adjectives almost unbearable at times. There is almost no event too trivial to be overdescribed. I would encourage the author to "think Hemingway" in the future, because sometimes less is more. I do not mean this criticism to be overly harsh, and perhaps for younger readers -- and by that I mean students, not middle-aged former runners like me -- the stylistic elements that annoyed me wouldn't be a concern. I have a son who's an aspiring runner, and he enjoyed the book, so maybe it's best suited for readers close to the age of the students the author teaches and coaches.

First of all I enjoyed reading Ms. Pont's book. I too am also a runner and Cross Country Coach. Her description of a season's worth of experiences is not all that unusal when it comes to the typical High School team. The one real problem I had with the book was the omission of some type of forward or afterword. The rear cover talks about this as being her first season of coaching but I did not gather that from the narrative. Did she change the names of her athletes? A little more backround info would have been nice. She hints at that but does not say for sure. I will definitely recommend this to my athletes as a work that they could perhaps find something of themselves in.

I had high hopes for this book, but the author got caught up in flowery adjectives about irrelevant tangents.

This author's take on the sport of cross country is exactly right as a cross country runner myself. The story of this team to be not unlike my own. It reminded of some moments every runner has. The struggle to finish when your legs don't think they can take another step, fighting through injuries, and using your mind to try to take steps you never thought possible. Even if your not a runner this book will make you want to be one and hopefully give you a new-found perspective on our sport. I read this in June when I wasn't to motivated to train for the season. When I finished this book I jumped up and ran a couple of miles in pouring rain. In short this an inspiring, motivating, and excellant story that everybody should read

I have to admit up-front I'm a former high school cross country teammate of Sally Pont's. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It brought me right back to the crisp fall days of my too-long-ago high school years. Her descriptions of the runners, their struggles, and the realities of being a teenage athlete were just beautiful. I'm still a (very slow) runner and this book brought me some renewed enthusiasm for this beautiful and special sport.