Written by Garnet Morris and Olivia Chadwick, 17 RUNS: The Unbeaten Path to Unlock Life’s True Potential blends memoir and self-help to share lessons on personal and professional development. Running coach Olivia Chadwick narrates training entrepreneur Garnet Morris for a 10K race and relays their conversations about their goals, values, and traumas. Chadwick transforms these discussions into lessons on goal-setting with bullet points that outline the process she and Morris suggest for personal growth.
The book’s guidance mirrors modern self-help discourse, including analyzing “limiting beliefs,” habit stacking, attempting manifestation via visualization exercises, and seeking out mentors. Among the most tangible lessons is a recommendation to set audacious goals and work backward, setting smaller goals along the way. Suggestions to take “cues from real people you’ve met—not social media, because that is not reality” ring true, and probing questions that ask readers to dissect how their “limiting beliefs sometimes got in the way of living in alignment with [their] values” inspire productive introspection.
While the advice may not be novel, the book’s structure outlines the information in a new, approachable way. Each chapter contains three sections: a conversation from a training session, an overview of the lessons discussed, and an autobiographical narrative from each author sharing struggles they’ve overcome. Presenting their conversations as building blocks over the course of their training reinforces the lesson on “progress, not perfection” and shows how the lessons build upon each other. Chadwick’s narrative voice is immersive, seamlessly intertwining advice and memoir like a story rather than a didactic guidebook. Sensory detail sets the scene to make the dialogue feel natural and authentic: “We began to run, with leaves falling all around us. As always, the crunching sounds took me back to my childhood, when I loved to step on leaves as I walked to school.”
The development of their friendship despite their age gap (Chadwick is in her early thirties, Morris in his fifties) also feels natural because of the depth of their conversations. Readers may feel skeptical about Garnet’s intentions in forming a friendship with Chadwick’s young son, but depictions of the relationship as fatherly may quell mistrust. The moving memoir sections detail formative moments—they both lost siblings to suicide and navigated divorce—but when these sections catch up to the present-day and begin to overlap, scenes become repetitive, as when Chadwick and Morris are out for a run and express their admiration by welcoming each other into their “chosen family.”
The suggested reading list at the end of the book includes Tuesdays with Morrie, The Secret, and The Four Agreements, among other books about modern spiritualism whose influences are apparent throughout 17 RUNS. With inspiring one-liners such as, “there is a universe of experience inside all of us, and you never really know what’s happening in anyone’s cosmos,” 17 RUNS presents actionable age-old wisdoms from an original perspective.
A seamless blend of memoir and self-help, Garnet Morris and Olivia Chadwick’s 17 RUNS: The Unbeaten Path to Unlock Life’s True Potential presents tried-and-true advice on personal and professional development from an approachable, original perspective.
~Aimee Jodoin for IndieReader