Menzies-Pike takes us through parallel histories – the historical and the personal. Her parents were killed in a light plane crash when she was twenty. By her own account, she endured the ensuing decade in a fog of grief and dysfunction, though her biography shows that she has led a successful career as an academic and editor (she now edits the Sydney Review of Books). She skirts the question of why she started running at thirty, and why she now runs marathons for the pure joy of it. 'I loathed running, but something about the idea of running long distances had lodged in my imagination.' She seems as surprised as she expects other people to be at this development. One friend comments, 'You battled through a PhD and you've read all the big modernists. You'll be fine.'

'The word run is a case study in linguistic locomotion,' she notes. Interleaved with her personal story, Menzies-Pike charts the course of women's running in culture and history: a dismal tale of exclusion, pseudoscience, and blind prejudice. Women were not allowed to run in the Olympics until 1984, and encountered sometimes violent opposition elsewhere throughout the twentieth century. She searches art and literature in vain for positive portraits of female runners. Though occasionally indignant, The Long Run is not the work of a 'running evangelist'. It is enlightening, absorbing, and always intelligent.