Becoming a Sustainable Runner: A Guide to Running for Life, Community, and Planet

Becoming a Sustainable Runner is not just another running guide on developing the physical attributes to run faster or longer. What it will help you achieve is a newfound purpose that merges your passion for running with your concern for your health, your community, and the environment. It weaves together concepts of internal and external sustainability in a way that will help you run, think, and act in a way that is in line with your values.

Divided into three parts, the book begins by giving you the tools to find excitement and joy in your runs and sustain your running for the long term. These include acknowledging stressors, setting new challenges, changing where you run and who you run with, and prioritizing physical and mental rest to minimize the risk of injury, illness, and burnout.

Next, discover ways to enrich your running through personal connections. Learn about the importance of joining or forming a running community that fosters comradery with others who believe in the power of service and in giving back in meaningful and impactful ways.

Then, tap into your passion to sustain our planet. Know what it means to be an eco-conscious traveler, make environmentally friendly choices about where you run and the products you use, and reduce your carbon footprint through the 3R’s: reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Throughout the book you’ll enjoy stories from the authors about their personal challenges and triumphs as runners and stewards of the environment. Quotes and insights from well-known runners who are also climate change and environmental justice advocates underscore the breadth and depth of the issues facing us all.

As a runner, you have the power to change the world for the better. Becoming a Sustainable Runner provides actionable steps to help you do just that.

Originally from St. Albans, England, Tina Muir was a professional runner who represented Great Britain and Northern Ireland in a world championship. Now in St. Louis, Missouri, Muir founded her own business for runners, Running for Real, providing camaraderie and opportunity for growth. Her podcast of the same name has amassed over six million downloads and was voted Best Fitness Podcast at the Sports Podcast Awards in 2021. It is a collective of conversations about running, the climate emergency, and social justice. Guests have included Rich Roll, Des Linden, David Epstein, Reshma Saujani, Kara Goucher, and Malcolm Gladwell. Muir also hosts a second podcast with Knox Robinson called Running Realized, noted as “The ‘Invisibilia’ of running” by Women’s Running.

Muir has published articles in The Guardian, Runner’s World, Self, and Women’s Running and released a self-published book in January 2019 that was featured on major running outlets as well as multiple podcasts. In 2021, she began collaborating with the United Nations and has been celebrated as one of the lead climate activists in the running space. Voted as one of the 17 women changing the world of running by Women’s Running in 2017, she has inspired many others to speak out about their own passions.

Zoë Rom is the editor in chief at Trail Runner magazine; managing editor at Women’s Running; and writer, host, and producer of the DNF podcast, which has been called the “This American Life of running podcasts” by Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2022, she joined a collective of athletes and writers (including Kara Goucher and other elite runners and podcast hosts) as part of Relay, which creates written content, podcasts, and videos that are offered through a Patreon subscription.

Rom is an award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in Outside, Backpacker, and Trail Runner magazines as well as on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. In 2019, she won the Colorado Broadcasters Association’s award for Outstanding Feature Reporting. Her writing has also appeared in Women’s Running, Discover, REI Co-op Journal, and on Threshold, a Peabody-award-winning environmental podcast.

Rom is an elite trail runner with a master’s degree in environmental journalism from the University of Colorado–Boulder. She has covered sled dog racing in the Alaskan bush, arctic sea ice exploration in Norway, morel hunting in northern Arkansas, competitive alpaca racing in the Colorado Rockies, and much more. Her running accomplishments include first place at the Crested Butte 100K and Athens Big Fork Trail Marathon as well as two consecutive wins at the War Eagle 50K.