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
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
