How was your weekend running?

Welcome to pre-marathon week. Please enter carefully, making sure you don’t trip over anything or stub your toe. Hand sanitiser is available to your left, on your right please check in your common sense.

But enough of that. I’m boring myself with marathon talk now. I’m ready for the whole thing to be over so I can have a huge glass of wine, a massive bar of chocolate and stop wearing a surgical mask and gown when hugging my children.

Instead I will skip insouciantly over my first place and PB at Fulham Palace Parkrun (blatant #humblebrag) and my weirdly uneven run yesterday (having to slow down one minute, struggling at marathon place plus 30 seconds the next) and move on to a good book.

Because it struck me the other day we haven’t talked about our favourite running books here for a long time, if at all. Prompted partly by my friend and colleague Adharanand’s new book – The Way of the Runner – which you must obviously all go out and buy right now, but also by more practical tomes such as Nell McAndrew’s Guide to Running.

On the former first. Adharanand Finn toted his ever-tolerant family to Japan to learn more about why the nation is running-obsessed, and packed with superb athletes – who for the most part never quite make it on the international scene. Where are they going right – and where are they going wrong? It’s brilliant, superbly written and a cracking read (Adharanand, you can pass me that fiver now …).

It’s a different genre, of course, but I’ve also just finished Nell McAndrew and Lucy Waterlow’s new book. It’s got good, sensible advice for beginners and more advanced alike, but for me the most interesting bits are the insight into McAndrew’s own dedicated training. She ran a 2h 54m marathon and was clocking up 70-plus miles a week in between nursery pick-ups and childcare. Clearly a bit of a role model for me there.

So, share your favourite running books below the line – and of course what you got up to at the weekend.

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