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When I go backpacking or canoeing, I like to travel as light as possible. I have a long-running debate with one of my tripping partners about whether strands of contraband dental floss that he smuggles among his belongings are what make our portages so miserable. As a result, I rarely bring books with me on backcountry trips. If I wasn’t wound so tightly, here are some of the best summer reads I’d recommend for around the campfire or in the ultralight minimalist hammock.

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Unbound, by Bill Donahue

This one’s a slam dunk for any endurance person. If you’ve read Donahue’s writing, either here in �����ԹϺ��� or elsewhere, you know that his stories are never quite what you expect—not just a superficial athlete profile or simple retelling of some event.  He’s always probing a little deeper, looking for twists and trying to understand the whys. The results are also, in many cases, hilarious.

This collection ranges from a 1989 account of his own childhood attempt to set a pogo-stick world record to last year’s prescient profile of Evans Chebet, which was published the day before Chebet upset Eliud Kipchoge to win a second consecutive Boston Marathon. There are sections on running, cycling, skiing, exploration, and other more obscure byways of endurance.

Warming Up, by Madeleine Orr

There are two linked questions in this book (which I reviewed ). One is how climate change is affecting sports: world-championship marathons starting at midnight, high-school football players dying of heat stroke, and so on. The other is how sports, at both the participatory and professional levels, are affecting climate change: think of the air travel and massive amounts of waste like single-use cups produced by a major marathon, for example.

Orr is a sport ecologist—a very modern niche—at the University of Toronto who consults with sports organizations around the world, giving her an inside look at the various ways people are tackling these questions. You might think the topic is a bit of a downer (that was my initial assumption, I’ll admit), but Orr has a light touch and got me thinking.

Running Throughout Time, by Roger Robinson

This is a book of “the greatest running stories ever told,” from the mythical Atalanta in ancient Greece to the near-mythical Joan Benoit in Los Angeles. Some of the stories will sound familiar: Pheidippides and the Battle of Marathon, Dorando Pietri collapsing at the 1908 Olympics, the four-minute mile, Billy Mills, and so on. But in Robinson’s hands, they’re very different from the versions you’re familiar with: his research is exceptionally thorough.

My favorite detail: it turns out that Arthur Conan Doyle covered the 1908 Olympics for the Daily Mail, and was sitting a few yards from where Pietri collapsed. In the Sherlock Holmes story “The �����ԹϺ��� of Wisteria Lodge,” which he was finishing around the time of the Olympics, Holmes named a character Victor Durando—reflecting, Robinson argues, the U.S.-British tensions at the Games and the feeling that Pietri, rather than the American Johnny Hayes, was the true victor in the marathon. Like I said, his research is thorough.

The Olympic Odyssey, by Phil Cousineau

This is an Olympic summer, so here’s a wild-card pick to get you in the spirit. I stumbled across this book while researching another topic: Cousineau published a book of interviews with the mythologist Joseph Campbell back in 1990. His Olympic book, which was published in 2003 and issued to all U.S. athletes competing in the 2004 Games, is a curious hybrid: it’s framed as a history of the Olympics from its ancient Greek origins up to the (near) present, but it’s interwoven with reflections on the meaning and mythos of sport over the centuries. It’s worth reading just for the history, which is briskly told and filled with anecdotes that were new to me—but it’s the extra layer on the “spirit of sport,” quoting thinkers from Pindar to Pele, that I found most interesting

Progression of World Athletics Records, edited by Richard Hyman

Okay, I’m letting my geek flag fly here. Earlier this month, World Athletics a new edition of its definitive book on world records, available either in print or as . You’re probably not going to bring this one to the beach, but it’s a hugely fun skim for track fans. I discovered an earlier edition about a decade ago, and was blown away by the details.

It’s not just a list of records; it also includes splits for distance races, and in many cases snippets of contemporary race description. You can read about Roger Bannister’s first sub-four mile anywhere, but where else are you going to read about Walter George’s 4:12 ¾ in 1886, a record that stood until Paavo Nurmi finally broke it in 1923? (For the record: George ran the first two laps in 58 ½ and 63 ⅕ , then William Cummings led the third lap in 65 ¾. George caught him with half a lap to go, then Cummings collapsed just 70 yards from the finish! The crowd went wild after George’s time was announced: “Those who got near him slapped him and banged him on the back… thus they continued until the little remaining breath in George’s body was well-nigh beaten out of it.”)

A Brief History of Intelligence, by Max Bennett

Artificial intelligence systems are really smart in some ways, really dumb in other ways. To understand why, and to design better ones, we have to understand how human intelligence evolved. That’s the very large task that Bennett, an AI entrepreneur, takes on in this book. He organizes the history into five key evolutionary breakthroughs, from steering to speaking. What this really entails is a massive synthesis of a huge amount of complex research—and Bennett does this better than anyone I’ve seen in this area. Sometimes popular science books read like a couple of good ideas stretched out to fill the chapters. This one is the opposite: it feels like six books for the price of one.

Not Too Late, by Gwendolyn Bounds

The opening anecdote hit home for me: at a dinner party, someone asks a little girl what she wants to be when she grows up. And as the girl prattles on, Bounds realizes that she herself will never be asked that question again. Fast forward a few years and Bounds, previously a sedentary and unathletic journalist in her mid 40s, has transformed herself into world-class age-group obstacle course racer.

The book is about what Bounds discovered along the way—about the physical, mental, and emotional sides of changing course and pushing limits as an adult (I won’t say “older adult,” because she’s roughly my age, i.e. at her peak). The set-up is familiar, but Bounds’s telling of it repeatedly kept me turning pages long after I’d intended to turn out the lights.

The Examined Run, by Sabrina Little

Lots of running books claim that running will make you a better person. This one claims that being a better person will make you a better runner. Traits like perseverance, resilience, joy, and gratitude? “These are the carbon-plated shoes of the soul,” writes Little, a philosophy professor and world-class ultrarunner. “We cannot buy them, but we can develop them.” Following this argument requires a closer look at the ways in which running can reward both virtues (like persistence) and vices (like stubbornness). Figuring out which is which isn’t always easy, and this book (which I reviewed ) is a good place to start.

Pain & Performance, by Ryan Whited and Matt Fitzgerald

The conventional view is that pain is a sign of damage in your body. If that’s the case, then fixing a running injury requires identifying and fixing the damage. In reality, you can have pain without detectable damage, and damage without pain. That disconnect is one of the reasons the mechanistic approach to fixing sports injuries often produces disappointing results.

Whited, a Flagstaff-based personal trainer who has worked with prominent athletes like ultrarunner Rob Krar, has an approach that he calls “training as treatment.” (Fitzgerald, Whited’s co-author, is an advanced computer system sent back in time from the twenty-third century to produce running-related books at an astounding rate.) Whited’s approach fits into a broader move toward thinking of pain as a broader “biopsychosocial” phenomenon rather than a simple indicator that something is broken. If you’re looking for a different perspective on how to handle sports injuries—or if you just want someone to validate your belief that “training through it” is often the best solution—you’ll enjoy this one.

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