I really wanted to give this 3 1/2 stars, but since all other reviews are four or five stars, I went for the low side since it has severe technical problems that need to be addressed. Nonetheless, the program is outstanding and I DO recommend the book.
First the good news:
It works! Seven days ago, I finished my first half-marathon. This was an accomplishment! When I started the program I was 48, obese with a BMI of 32, and coming out of a extremely sedentary lifestyle. I had spent a couple of months before on a different program:
The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer, with disastrous results, which cause me to spend two months recovering from a Achilles' tendon injury. I needed something that was suitable for a REAL non-runner like me.
Galloway's run-walk-run approach rose to the challenge. The basic rule is to never overdo training, and he gives excellent advice on how to learn your limits, respect your limits, and when appropriate, push them. The heart of the method is two-fold.
First, is developing a training pace based on your ability to run a carefully-controlled test mile. This pace is further adjusted for heat and other factors, and for some new runners it might seem almost impossibly slow, but Galloway is guiding you to realize that training your body is *not* the same as racing. Taking it slow as Galloway urges, works!
Second, Galloway promotes regularly-timed walk breaks, his "run-walk-run" method. For a slow novice runner, these might be timed 30 sec running, 30 sec walking. For someone running 7-min miles, he suggests 7 min running, 30 sec walking. Throughout, you're encouraged to be flexible, experiment, and find the ratio that works for you. (In my half-marathon, I choose a ratio of 100 / 80 seconds).
This not only serves as a control against overexertion, but also as a form of interval training. It's certainly a different beast from HIIT (high-intensity interval training), but I found that that can be incorporated judiciously into some workouts as well.
Other valuable pointers are on keeping a running journal, tips for mental motivation, troubleshooting aches and injuries, and diet.
The bad news is strictly with the editing and presentation of the book, but those problems really hurt its readability with needless confusion and backtracking. There are typos in almost every chapter. For example, after a paragraph that says "For long run training pace, add 3 minutes per mile," the table that follows says "(add 2 min/mi) Long Run Training Pace." On another occasion, an entire paragraph is repeated within a chapter. Metric equivalents are seriously off throughout--even as much as sixteen degrees (-20C isn't -20F; it's -4F. p.181) At best, non-American readers will waste time having to calculate the correct values they need; at worst, they'll use advice for the wrong temperature or pace and suffer the consequences. I don't blame Galloway for all these errors; this woeful lack of editorship is endemic in the publishing industry, but I would've loved for this to be a polished guide.
The layout is a disaster. The over-the-top use of two-page photos, background color blocks, repeated photos in the margin of *every* page, and GIANT TYPE might have been useful to get people to buy the book, but it hurts when reading it. It's a train wreck of distractions. Sure, many of the photos are excellent, and I love good pictures, but the excessive illustration makes it feel like an awkward coffee table book, rather than a runner's essential manual. Nearly a third of the pictures advertise Polar Electro heart-rate monitors, though there's not a word on heart-rate training. Lists that should fit on a single page are split over several pages, as are reversed-out color blocks. It is almost impossible to read linearly. There are no sidebars; supplementary information is in the main flow, constantly disrupting it. Every chapter feels scattered and disjointed, and it's virtually a nightmare for anyone with ADD (or a background in design). Despite having it for more than six months, and reading it very often, I still don't know if I've read the whole thing or not. Yes, getting through is *that* bad.
Don't let that stop you from getting it, though. There is still *much* more information here than on his website, and the book is nicely priced. Most important of all, this method works, and took me from injured couch potato, to half-marathoner.
