The author takes you from rainy London streets to the red dirt roads of the Iten, the so-called Home of Champions, as he lives and trains with some of the world’s greatest distance runners. This is a story of friendship and community as much as a story of elite and non-elite athletics; it is as compelling for non-runners as it is for those who dream of running through the forests above the Great Rift Valley.

Picked by Stephen

After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world’s biggest long-distance races, Runner’s World contributor Adharanand Finn set out to discover what it was that made them so fast – and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his family, he moved to Iten, Kenya, the running capital of the world, and started investigating. Was it running barefoot to school, the food, the altitude, or something else? At the end of his journey he put his research to the test by running his first marathon, across the Kenyan plains.

This edition includes a new chapter covering the 2012 Olympics.