After dropping her son, Colt, off at school, Kara Goucher usually goes for a run.
The Olympic runner is not training for anything, not like she used to, but she still finds herself drawn to the act of putting one foot in front of the other, with no finish line or world championship in sight.
Lately, she has felt lighter than ever, just days after her memoir, “The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team,” was released to the public.
The book, written with Mary Pilon, a former New York Times sports reporter, has been a long time coming. Goucher, 44, was a star witness who brought down Alberto Salazar, a now-disgraced elite running coach whose name and image once flanked the halls of buildings on Nike’s campus in Beaverton, Ore. She thought it would be years before the weight truly lifted.
“I knew I was ready to stop holding other people’s secrets,” she said over the phone.
The book arrives at a moment of reckoning for the running world, as more female runners have come forward to share their stories of the sport’s dark underbelly, one that can be rife with manipulation, eating disorders and physical and emotional abuse. And it comes at what feels like a golden age of American women’s distance running, as…
