Honey, Do You Need a Ride? Confessions of a Fat Runner / Jennifer Graham

In fact, she's not anyone's wife anymore, and she's been running for more than 10 years without losing any weight, getting any faster or looking any more like a runner. Moreover, she looks so unlike a runner that sometimes, when she's out trotting happily on the road, a passing car slows and the driver will ask if she needs a ride home.

Despite the indignity of it all, Graham believes that somewhere within her walrusy husk, there's a kernel of an athlete, if only she had a big-name coach, like, say, Alberto Salazar.

Or Steve Prefontaine.

Well, yeah, he's been dead for more than 35 years, but that's a minor metaphysical challenge more easily overcome than making a thick, slow mom skinny and fast.

Graham, a newspaper columnist with the heart of Erma Bombeck, the soul of Anne Lamott and the girth of G.K. Chesterton, shares her experiences of growing up fat, becoming an improbable athlete in adulthood, and battling daily with a malevolent scale that mocks her physical ambitions. Coached by the spirit of the great Prefontaine, she tries to run away from a difficult divorce while training for the same half-marathon she'd run 10 years earlier. Along the way she learned some lessons that will resonate with anyone who ever blew up a marriage, chased a donkey, or kicked a scale.