by Larry Eder
The 2024 Cross Country season is over!
This is the second day of easy running!
Warm-up well,
30 minutes of easy running, or take the day off, up to you.
cool-down well,
Another Christmas gift suggestion!
Haile Gebreslessie, Emperor of the Long Distance by Jiro Mochizuki
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Haile-Gebrselassie-Emperor-Long-Distance/dp/0988711907
Jiro Mochizuki is one of the finest sports photographers in the world. He has a very special relationship with Haile, the most outstanding athlete of our time. His book, first published in 2013, celebrates Haile Gebreslassie and the breadth of his career.
The photos are fantastic, and the stories are even better.
I have known Jiro and used his photos for over thirty years. He is one of the most observant photographers I have encountered. Jiro and Haile developed a great relationship, and this book is a labor of love.
It should be on your bookshelf, as either a coach or athlete.
This is a review by Pat Butcher, one of our favorite writers (at Globe Runner):
“There are too few decent books on track and field and its practitioners. But Haile Gebrselassie, the most excellent long-distance runner in history, is fittingly getting another volume to sustain his legend, and one in which he has had a hand. For that, he has another legend to thank. Jiro Mochizuki looks like he has stepped off the set of Seven Samurai. Still, the Japanese-born, Paris-based photographer has been present throughout Haile’s lengthy career, and a long relationship has been forged between the pair, resulting in the publication of Haile Gebrselassie, Emperor of Long Distance. Jiro began as an art photographer and has published several books on his work, displayed in art galleries across Europe and the East. But by the late 1980s, he co-founded a sports photo agency in Tokyo. Jiro-san, the Emperor of the Infield, has supplied most of the pictures for this volume. At the same time, Haile has provided unmediated words to guide us through his career, highlighted by the images themselves. There is a fine selection of photos, all the record-breaking runs, of course, and also including those taken at home, with extended family and friends, but beginning with a faint but historic first, from 1988, taken by his elder brother Tekeye, before Haile s first race in Addis a marathon, would you believe, at age 15, in which he ran 2.48? But the rest of the selection is a celebration of Jiro’s talent. Not only has he visited Addis and Haile’s birthplace in Arsela numerous times, but he (or his photographic partners) seems to have been present at every one of Haile’s innumerable triumphs over the past 20 years, an unparalleled career at the very top for a runner, exemplified by the score or more of world records and firsts. This is another one. The book is available from Amazon” –Pat Butcher Globe Runner
