A book as much about fathers and sons as it is about an emotionally driven obsession with running
Geoffrey Beattie is an extremely successful academic and celebrity psychologist. He was perhaps a less successful father. His obsession with his career and his driving passion for running when he was at home almost destroyed his relationship with his son, but, ironically, it is running that has brought them back together. This is the emotional story of a father and son trying to repair a relationship through a shared activity that depends on sheer physical effort, the kind of physical effort that may once have been the source of commonality between father and son in all previous generations but which seems to be absent in the modern world.
Geoffrey Beattie is a professor at the University of Manchester. Television viewers know him better as the resident psychologist in the popular reality show Big Brother. His academic publications have appeared in a wide variety of international journals, including Nature, and he has also written for a diverse range of newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Observer.
Ben Beattie's ambition is to become an elite runner, a goal that he juggles with full-time work. If he takes two minutes off his half-marathon time, his ambition will be fulfilled, but those two minutes could take a lifetime.