An
award-winning, much-loved biologist turns his gaze on himself, using his
long-distance running to illuminate the changes to a human body over a lifetime

Part
memoir, part scientific investigation, Racing the Clock is
the book biologist and natural historian Bernd Heinrich has been waiting his
entire life to write. A dedicated and accomplished marathon (and
ultra-marathon) runner who won his first marathon at age thirty-nine, Heinrich
looks deeply at running, aging, and the body, exploring the unresolved
relationship between metabolism, diet, exercise, and age.

Why do some bodies age differently than others? How
much control do we have over that process and what effect, if any, does being
active have? Bringing to bear research from his entire career and in the spirit
of his classic Why We Run, Heinrich probes the
questions of how we use energy and continue to adapt to our mutable
surroundings and circumstances. Beyond that, he examines how our bodies change
while we age but also how we can work with, if not overcome, many of these
changes—and what all this tells us about evolution and the mechanisms of life,
health, and happiness.

Racing the Clock offers
fascinating and surprising conclusions, all while bringing the reader along on
Heinrich’s compelling journey to what he says will be his final race—a
fifty-kilometer race at age eighty.