Book review - The Complete
Guide to Marathon Walking (McGovern)
Date first posted on eCommunity - 13
May 2007
The Complete Guide to Marathon Walking
By Dave McGovern
World Class Publications
Second edition 2005
ISBN 0-9662176-2-4
WRITER
Dave McGovern is a former member of the US National Racewalk Team and was National Champion at all distances from 10 to 40 kilometres.
He has also won the competitive racewalking divisions in half a dozen major road marathons. A racewalking coach since 1986 he has
written two other books about competitive walking. He has also written for Walking magazine and for Walk magazine.
CONTENTS
The book has 212 pages and 26 chapters, plus a little afterword called "Chapter 26.2". It is organised into three sections.
Section 1 ("Background") includes a short history of marathon walking as well as some general scene-setting about endurance
walking.
Section 2 ("Training") contains 12 chapters, only two of which are specific to walking. One of the latter covers race-walking
technique. It should be of interest to Nordic walkers, especially as by implication it questions the suitability of their own stride
pattern for fast-paced walking. The other gives 18-week training schedules for marathon walkers at three different standards:
beginner, intermediate and advanced. (You can download this chapter – as well as half-marathon schedules - free of charge from Dave
McGovern's website at
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/rayzwocker/worldclass/martrain.htm.)
The other chapters in this section are relevant to people training for any endurance event - walking, running, cross-country skiing or
whatever. They start with a useful and accessible summary of marathon physiology. This in turn leads into a review of different
training methods: long slow distance; threshold (intervals and steady-state); economy repeats and recovery workouts. There are then
chapters on overtraining and coping with injuries, and a short guide to maintaining a training diary.
Section 3 ("The race") has eight helpful chapters on how to manage the race itself:
what to wear, what to eat, what to expect, how to recover afterwards. Pace-management is especially well covered.
COMMENT
This is a really good book. Dave McGovern obviously knows his stuff. He can handle the technical material when he needs to, but generally he
carries the reader along with an easy, accessible and very witty style. Although it is written for walkers it should be of interest
to anyone wanting to train for any kind of endurance event. I think Nordic walkers will find lots of ideas to help them make their
workouts more focussed, more effective and more varied. And anyone training for a cross-country ski marathon will also benefit – from
the general advice and from the very motivating style. I'd never wanted to walk a marathon before reading this book, but I do now,
and I can see how I might use the walking race as a stepping-stone towards a skiing event in the winter.
It may seem too early to be talking about training for next winter's races. But it's not. The task of laying down a good endurance base
takes several months. So if you've got your eye on the Engadin next March, buy this book and start your preparation now.
PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
The Complete Guide to Marathon Walking is published in the USA and the list price is $19.95. If you live in the US or Canada you can
order it from Dave's website, at the list price plus postage:
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/rayzwocker/worldclass/homepage.htm.
If you live in the UK, Amazon currently sell it for £9.01 plus postage. Alternatively you can get it (as I did) for £6.19 plus
postage from The Book Depository, one of Amazon's Marketplace sellers.
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