The Long Run
Mishka Shubaly was a hard-drinking touring musician with a drug problem and a long history of self-destruction when, somewhere around his thirtieth birthday, he laced up a pair of shoes and started running. The Long Run is his short, propulsive memoir of how that small act of motion turned, over a few brutal years, into ultramarathons of fifty and one hundred miles and into a life he no longer wanted to set on fire. Shubaly is honest about what running cannot fix, the family wreckage and the appetites that follow him to every starting line, and clear-eyed about what it can: a body that knows the difference between pain and harm, a discipline that survives the morning after, and the strange peace of putting one foot in front of the other for hours after the music has stopped. Published as part of Kindle Singles' early nonfiction lineup, it became a quiet underground hit among runners and recovering addicts.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Long Run
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An ultra-distance runner enters a brutal qualifying race that stretches well past the point any of the other entrants planned to keep going. Across the long course the book moves between his thoughts on the trail, the coaches and family at the aid stations, and the rivals still moving behind him.
Multiple books share this title. The most commonly searched recent book is The Long Run by Mishka Shubaly. The metadata above lists Stephen King in error; King has not published a novel by this exact title.
Yes. Mishka Shubaly's The Long Run (2014) is a Kindle Single memoir about getting sober and starting to run ultramarathons. It launched his career as a memoirist.
The Long Run is 426 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Long Run takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Long Run is a standalone novel by Stephen King, not part of a series.
The Long Run is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.