In his sweeping personal account of depression, anxiety, addiction, and childhood trauma, Thompson brings readers on a journey to discover what it means to be not just an ultramarathoner but also a human being.

The Tahoe 200, broken up into increasingly exhausted stages, provides a framework for the narrative of his earlier, traumatized life. It’s a promising approach, but Thompson is coy about the details of what happened to him, interspersed in a nonlinear fashion. Sometimes that’s his only choice, since his memory is imperfect. Other times it feels like a deliberate vagueness, meant to tease us until he gets over the next ridge.

In this book, the unconscious becomes conscious, the forgotten is recalled, and feelings become thoughts.

[Thompson] eloquently captures the beauty of communing with nature in details runners will soak up, but the focus of this memoir is about a man who had suffered terribly with depression since childhood, and, in later years, overcame drug and alcohol addiction, but not before attempting suicide.

Stark.