Hooray, I finally finished Running Home, by Kati Arnold, Outside Magazine contributing editor and ultrarunner. It took me a freaking month to read, sigh (it’s not long – 353 pages).

The book is mostly about Arnold’s relationship with her father, and her struggle with his death in 2010, the same year she had her second child. She gets in to (talking about) her ultramarathon running toward the end of the book.

Arnold’s parents separated when she was young, and she’s never understood why her dad left and tries to figure it out during the book. SPOILER (she doesn’t realize this until the end) – despite the connection she had with him, she’s been mad at him all her life and even after his death. But she finds peace through ultrarunning.

Her dad was a photographer for National Geographic, and documented his life with photos, journals, letters (he even kept copies of the ones he sent), and tape recordings. He seemed ahead of his time with documenting his life.

Memoirs like this are typically my jam, but man, this book didn’t click for me until the very end (during the running parts). Arnold is a great writer, but I think there’s just too much she focused on that I didn’t relate to:

• Her father’s death
• Her identity as a mother
• Her anxieties and fears about her own death
• Her parent’s separation
• Her father’s infidelity

I’ve read (with interest!) about topics I can’t relate to before, so I’m not sure why I struggled so much here. I can understand why she felt the way she did about everything, I just COULD NOT get in to it until she started writing more about running toward the end. Ugh. I stuck with it because I wanted to read about her ultrarunning, ha.

A few things did interest me though:

• Her discovery of “flow” with running (flow is a topic I’m very interested in!).
• What it would be like to read through a parent’s journals and letters after their passing, and discover that they (sometimes) resented you (um…) and that your father documented all his love interests (even when he was with your mom whuuuuut…)
• That her father left “because he felt stifled by parenthood,” and how she used that as a lesson to still be “free” as a parent.
• How people show love. This is something I think about often. Arnold really wanted her dad to fight for her and her sister differently than he did. He was making an effort, but not the effort she wanted. This is SO hard, and why I believe The Five Love Languages is definitely on to something. The big question is… how do we deal with someone now showing us love the way we want them to?! It seems Arnold comes to peace with it. I struggle with it big time, but try so hard to remind myself it’s not my responsibility to understand why people are the way they are, just to have the most peaceful, fulfilling relationship with them I can, without doing (what feels like) all the work.

On to the next book… another memoir… that’s due July 7th, eek! CORRECTION: I have until July 11th, phew.