Key Details
- Voice: Andrew Eiden reads seven hours and four minutes of relentlessly first-person memoir; the runner whose head you are inside is not the voice you hear.
- Big ideas: ultrarunning, aging and reckoning, intrinsic motivation, returning to an old race
- Atmosphere: Steady and interior, closer to a long effort than a sprint
- Worth it?: Seven honest hours on aging and mileage, hung under a listing whose numbers do not add up.
Preordering from a storefront in another country is how one of the five written responses under this audiobook opens. A reader living in Europe explains that getting hold of it meant ordering from the Amazon US site, that it arrived, and that it was finished within days. Every detail in that account describes a physical object moving through the mail. It is the clearest signal available that the responses gathered here were written by people holding a book, and not by anyone who pressed play on the seven hour recording.
First, the Big Picture
Where this listing turns genuinely strange is the number under the title. The badge reads 4.6. The vote counter reads one. A single whole-star vote cannot produce 4.6 under any rounding convention in use, because one vote can only ever land on a whole number. Sitting underneath that impossible average are five written responses, each carrying its own star rating, which means the counter is reporting fewer votes than the page itself displays. Something in the tally is broken, and no amount of squinting will produce a reading that holds together.
Anyone who knows the author's earlier work knows the shape of the challenge, and this one is specific. The description places Karnazes back at the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in his mid-fifties, decades after first completing it, and calls the race the most demanding competition of his life. The framing is a reckoning. He is "Confronting his age, his career path, and his life choices," and the book's central claim is that running is "not the sum of achievements but a story that continues to be told each day, with each step." The copy also supplies the resume behind that reckoning: the heat of Death Valley, the cold of the South Pole, and fifty marathons in fifty states across fifty consecutive days.
Every memoir read by somebody other than its author asks the listener to accept a small fiction, and this one asks it for seven hours and four minutes. Andrew Eiden holds the credit. The text is relentlessly first person, built on interior monologue sustained across very long efforts, and the voice delivering it will not be the voice that had the experience. That is a normal arrangement and frequently the better one. It is worth knowing going in, because the appeal of this particular book is proximity to one specific runner's head.
What Makes A Runner’s High Worth Hearing
Most of what the written responses admire is the argument rather than the events. One four-star reader writes that the book "provides a profound meaning to running that is far less extrinsic than I once thought," then singles out "The intrinsic nature of getting lost and letting your feet take you where they will." Another calls it "an incredible story of relentless perseverance" and hands the credit to the author for the life behind it. Nobody in the column praises a scene. They praise a position.
This gets described repeatedly as a sequel, and the two readers who describe it that way do not spell the earlier title the same way. One calls it "a worthy sequel to Ultra Marathon Man." The other opens with "While Ultramarathon Man motivated me to start running." Nothing on this listing mentions that earlier book anywhere, so a newcomer would have no idea it existed. Both readers treat familiarity with it as the baseline, and one measures this book directly against the effect the first had on other people's lives. The page carries no series entry and no note that this is a return to old ground, which leaves the connection entirely to the review column to supply.
Both the copy and the review column shorten the title when it suits them. The book is A Runner’s High. The most detailed response names it once and drops the article when it does, while the description writes "In A Runner’s High" once and afterwards talks about the running experience generically. That drift is small and mostly harmless. It does make corroboration harder to chase down than it should be, on a page whose vote counter has already advised you not to take it at face value.
A Few Reservations
One response after another describes an object, not a recording. The reader in Europe reports a delivery and a finish inside a few days. A five-star entry calls it "Just a brilliant read." A four-star entry calls it "just another fantastic read by Dean." A third praises the way the author "effortlessly weaves his captivating storytelling" from "the very first pages." Pages, reads and arrivals: nowhere across those five responses does anybody mention a narrator, a pace, or how the recording handles the long silent stretches of a hundred mile race.
Somewhere between the essay-length entries and the badge sits a five-star review whose entire body reads "Great Book!!" under the headline "Motivating!!!" That is the whole of it, and it counts toward a column of five that the counter insists contains one. The others run considerably longer, and the ones doing any arguing are arguing about what running means. Weight them accordingly. This is a column of readers who already admired the author before they opened the book.
Should You Listen to A Runner’s High?
Under seven hours is short for an endurance memoir, and the brevity suits the material well. The description promises "an endorphin-fueled adventure and a love letter to the sport," aimed at "both casual and serious runners," and that is an accurate audience note. Anybody who has run a distance that genuinely hurt will recognize the interior weather immediately. Anybody who has not may find the reckoning less interesting than the mileage, since the mileage is the part the book takes for granted. The genre tag attached here reads Running and Jogging, which undersells a title spending most of its energy on why anybody keeps going at all. Seven hours also means the book cannot pad, and a reckoning with age has nowhere to hide at that length.
By the standards of the genre this is a modest, self-questioning book, and the listing does it no favors whatsoever. A broken vote counter. A review column talking about paper. No mention of the earlier volume every reader is measuring it against. A narrator credited without one word of comment from anybody. None of that touches the seven hours themselves, which remain a specific runner's account of going back to a race he first finished decades earlier. Runners will forgive the counter; nobody else has to.
Why does the audiobook show a 4.6 rating from a single vote?
It cannot be correct. One whole-star vote can only produce a whole number, so 4.6 is unreachable from a count of one under any rounding rule. Five written responses with their own star ratings are visible below it, meaning the counter is also reporting fewer votes than the page itself already shows.
Does the audiobook work if I have not read the earlier Karnazes book?
Two reviewers treat the earlier title as assumed knowledge, and one measures this book against it directly. The description itself never mentions a predecessor and presents the Western States return as a self-contained story, so a newcomer loses context and comparisons but not the plot of the race itself.
