Olympic Runners Library and More

Knowing that everything is to be found on the Internet, from imagined UFO sightings among shooting stars to celebrations of scientific achievements amidst the stars, I decided one day to search for a serious virtual runners library. A non-commercial one. I used to be a runner, of a lesser, non-competitive sort - a jogger. Today, conceding to age, my bones tolerate walking. Still, is there a runners library?

I did not find such a resource at any public library. What I did find is Let’s Move in Libraries, a non-profit 501(C)3 organization led by Dr. Noah Lenstra, Associate Professor of Library Information Science at the University of North Carolina Greensboro School of Education.

The web site (https://letsmovelibraries.org) offers that: “More and more public libraries are committed to supporting healthy living. The Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, states that it is committed ‘to offer free, accessible cooking, physical activity, gardening and mindfulness programming at neighborhood libraries.' Let’s Move in Libraries exists to help public libraries make and keep these commitments by helping librarians discover new program ideas, sharing stories of success, and inspiring new community partnerships, like the one the Free Library of Philadelphia has with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention.”

Still, the Let’s Move in Libraries site has little to offer as a center for information about vigorous or competitive running. More focused on walking. Eventually, searching led me to the Olympic World Library (OWL), which is hosted by the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland (https://library.olympics.com). There you will find an actual collection of books about serious running, 174 in all, available by subscription. Examples include “The Complete History of Cross-country Running: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day” by Hutchinson Andrew Boyd (1918) and “When Running Made History” by Roger Robinson (2018). Those are intriguing titles, so much so as to fulfill my quest as the kind of site that I had in my mind when I began the search.

The OWL also has books about pole vaulting, shot put, hurdles, skiing, ice skating and all the Olympic sports that we are accustomed to watching in summer or winter on a four-year cycle, two years apart. To put another flavor on the subject: Titles include “Meso-pacing in Olympic and World Championship Sprints and Hurdles: Medallists Save Their Best for the Final” by Brian Hanley (2021) and ‘Winning Jumps and Pole Vault” by Ed Jacoby (2009). Meso-pacing is strategic energy management, which presides over all.

In this the year of the winter Olympics, as well as the Paralympics, it is such a pleasant surprise to learn of this resource, one that has books that speak to energy management, the history of particular sports, and technique. A veritable gold mine of information in a very specialized collection, a very particular kind of Library.

Better known to most of us are specialized sports libraries at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The Olympic Studies Centre just adds to my building view that there are countless specialized book collections in virtual space. You only have to search for a while.