Key Details
- Voice: Maggie Mertens is credited in both fields, self-reading just over nine hours of reported history.
- Big ideas: Women's competitive running, medical and press gatekeeping, race and eligibility, records broken late
- Atmosphere: Brisk, documented and quietly furious
- Worth it?: Strong archival journalism that treats running as the place institutions argued about women's bodies.
Blurbs take up close to a third of the description attached to this audiobook, which is unusual enough to be worth reading as information in itself. Gloria Steinem is quoted at the top, framing running as the opposite of foot-binding and corsets. A second quotation, from a competitor turned author, follows immediately underneath. A third endorsement closes the page out. What that stack tells you is who Algonquin Books expected to buy this: not principally runners, but readers of feminist nonfiction who find sport a useful lens. The book underneath the quotes turns out to be considerably more specific than the quotes are.
What We Made of It
Mertens starts from a fact that ought to be better known: a woman ran the very first modern Olympic marathon, in Greece in 1896, and did it without permission. Everything afterward is the long argument over who was allowed to run and who got to decide. The description assembles the evidence in a way that is difficult to argue with. Women running barefoot or in nursing shoes, because running shoes for women did not exist. Sports bras not invented until 1977. Doctors prescribing bed rest. Newspapers reporting that women collapsed after eight hundred meters, which is two laps of a track.
Kathrine Switzer and the 1967 Boston Marathon appear in the copy as the emblem of the entire pattern, the moment an official tried to pull a woman out of a race by hand. The July 28, 2024 response is the best evidence that the book reaches well past its obvious readership. It opens by stating flatly that its writer is neither a runner nor at all athletic, then reports being captivated regardless by what it calls a well researched story of women claiming their equality. The framing runs political rather than athletic, which matches the description's own emphasis and suggests sport is the vehicle rather than the destination.
Why Better Faster Farther Works as an Audiobook
History is what the column's one four-star reader values most, and its list of surprises is usefully specific. That response already knew about the distances women were permitted to race and about Mary Cain, and did not know about the racial politics of the early Olympic squads or the training obstacles facing women runners, white and BIPOC alike. It calls the book wonderful and disheartening at once. It is also the single response on this page that uses the word listen, before switching to the word read two sentences later, and nobody in this column writes a syllable about the recording itself.
Ultramarathons are where the description ends, and the endpoint is the argument's payoff. Having spent most of its length on prohibition, medical gatekeeping and press ridicule, the book arrives at events where women set outright records, sometimes against men. Nine hours and twenty-four minutes gives that arc room to be earned rather than asserted, and the shape suits audio, since a chronological case delivered in sequence is precisely what a listener can follow with no page in front of them. The ending also reframes what came before it, because a chronicle of exclusion that finishes in record-setting reads very differently from one finishing in grudging admission.
What Might Not Land
Endorsements can distort expectations, and here they may well. The three quoted names promise a book about women's existence and excellence, which is accurate and incomplete: a good portion of these nine hours goes to institutional detail, to who wrote which rule and which committee upheld it. If you arrived for inspiration you will find it, and you will also sit through a considerable quantity of administrative history before reaching it. That is the right way to write this particular book. It is not necessarily what someone picks up after reading a line from Gloria Steinem about running like the wind.
Science of sport, race and gender is the strand most likely to divide listeners, and the description signals it early with a sharp aside: the establishment fought to keep women, or at least white women, fragile. That parenthesis carries real weight, and the book evidently follows where it points. Contemporary questions about who counts as a woman in competition are raised directly in the copy, which means the material reaches into arguments still going on now. Done well that is the most valuable stretch in the book. Done poorly it is the reason a listener who wanted running history might feel ambushed by it.
Sixty-nine ratings support the 4.5 average, a healthier base than most listings this size can offer, and the written column beneath the number is far thinner than the number implies. Three of the five responses run under a dozen words apiece: great history and insight, great read for more detailed women's sports history, great book and amazing writing. Enthusiastic, uninformative, and all three landing within the first month after release, when early attention arrives and then stops. Nothing in them misleads anyone. They simply give you almost nothing to weigh, which throws the decision back onto the description.
Who Should Listen to Better Faster Farther
Runners are the expected audience and possibly not the primary one. If you race, the book supplies the lineage behind every women's field you have ever lined up in, together with the specific indignities that had to be overcome before those fields existed at all. If you have never run a mile in your life, the sport functions here as a case study in how institutions decide what a body is permitted to do, a subject with much wider application than running. Listeners following the current arguments about eligibility in women's sport will find the historical groundwork laid with care.
Anybody hoping for training advice should look elsewhere, because nothing in the description promises a single word of it. The same holds for listeners who want the athletes' interior lives, since this is reported history and the copy keeps its focus on records, rules and press coverage rather than on portraiture. The book delivers, in a shade over nine hours and in the author's own voice, an answer to a question most people never think to ask: who decided that women could not run, on what evidence, and how long the disproving took.
Common Questions
Which publisher put out the Better Faster Farther audiobook?
Algonquin Books, which issued it on June 18, 2024 in English, with Maggie Mertens credited as reader as well as author. A trade publisher rather than a sports imprint, which fits a book aimed at general nonfiction readers as much as at competitive runners.
Where does this audiobook sit in the store's categories?
Under sports and outdoors, tagged for running and jogging and nothing else. Nothing points to history, journalism or gender studies anywhere on the page, so a reader browsing for social history will never come across it, despite that being most of what the book is.
Who supplies the endorsements quoted on the listing?
Gloria Steinem opens, followed by Kara Goucher, described as an Olympic runner and the bestselling author of The Longest Race, and Alison Mariella Désir closes it out. Two of the three come from inside the sport, which suggests the running detail holds up under expert reading.
Which other books does the listing point readers toward?
The description names Good and Mad, Born to Run and Fly Girls as comparable titles. If you have read any of the three and liked it, that is the clearest fit signal available here, since it is the publisher's own statement about where the book belongs.
