Growing up, Jeffrey Weiss’s sport was tennis. When it became clear that he didn’t have what it takes to play on a professional level, he moved on to bodybuilding and weightlifting. It wasn’t until after his fortieth birthday that he took up running, a hobby that quickly sparked an intense, decades-long commitment to endurance sports.
Weiss’s memoir, RACING AGAINST TIME: On Ironman, Ultramarathons and the Quest for Transformation in Mid-Life, is a chronicle of his journey from novice runner competing in 10k races to experienced triathlete finishing the fabled Ironman. Most of this book revolves around the author’s training, preparation, and race results. He writes at length about the physical toughness of endurance sports and the toll they take on one’s body. The Ironman triathlon is notorious for its brutality. Weiss has completed two of them in just under 16 hours.
Before he did an Ironman, Weiss attempted another—and perhaps harder—race called the Comrades. The Comrades is an ultramarathon (56 miles) held every year in South Africa. Weiss has run the Comrades twice, and both times failed to make the time cut. The sections dealing with these failures are compelling, and, to his credit, Weiss does not try to sensationalize them. The writing never gets oversentimental.
But RACING AGAINST TIME is, until the final chapters, rather one-note. Weiss occasionally mentions aspects of his personal life (e.g., his divorce from his wife of 25 years), but only in passing. Sports is the lens through which we get to know him as a man. That may not be a problem for those who share Weiss’s passion for marathons and triathlons, but some readers are bound to find it too circumscribed and desire more passages like this: “distance racing had always been an escape from life’s myriad pressures for me. It was also more than that. Putting in the effort and making sacrifices, sometimes painful ones, in the pursuit of a goal was truly a metaphor for life.”
Weiss expands on this in the last chapter, in which he movingly reflects on his successes and shortcomings as an athlete in a broader philosophical perspective: “Sometimes, with the right amount of effort and discipline, we can achieve things we once thought impossible.” RACING AGAINST TIME will surely find its most receptive audience among fitness enthusiasts, but there is just enough subtext in inspirational passages like that to give the book broader resonance.
Written by Jeffrey Weiss, RACING AGAINST TIME: On Ironman, Ultramarathons and the Quest for Transformation in Mid-Life is a fine memoir about seeking and finding reasons to sustain personal growth into and beyond middle age.
~ Michael Howard for IndieReader