Life is Like a Marathon: Marat(h)on Memoirs

After the death of his father, Sunny in his twenties is looking for something to hold on to. In the little four years after that death, Sunny first finds running and after a while also the marathon. Read the book Marat(h)on Memoirs – In it for the long run and you will see that this Amsterdam runner embraces his new love just as he embraces life: greedily. In his book, Sunny covers the 77 marathons he ran until the moment he sent the book to the printer. His counter now stands at 97 marathons, run in fifty countries.

Up close and personal

It has become a special work, the book by Sunny Schippers. If you expect an anthology of 77 marathons, you will be presented with something completely different. The reader becomes ‘up close and personal’ with all facets of Sunny’s life. It starts with the grief over the death of his father, but you read about love, friendships, the bond with brother Scip, drink, drugs, blood, sweat, tears and shit. At first glance, the marathon is the common thread in the book, but you could just as well argue that the writer’s life is the common thread and the marathons form the backdrop in which that life takes place.

And Sunny does a good job of describing that! The book is well written, fast paced. For runners it is a feast of recognition. All rituals surrounding a race, the emotions and physical experiences during such a race and the euphoria of finishing are strongly captured in words. This is a wonderful book to read, especially for marathon runners, but I would also absolutely recommend it to anyone with a marathon wish. It is, as the author himself says, not a book that wants to tell you how to run a marathon, but one that will – hopefully – make you want to do it yourself.

Tokyo, Taipei and Amstelveen

Sunny traveled all over the world to run marathons, but in the book you can read that a marathon that starts in, say, Amstelveen can be just as special as one in Tokyo or Vilnius. The one in Amstelveen was very special for Sunny, because how many marathon runners can say they won one? In the year that he won the marathon in Amstelveen, he also finished third at the Dutch Championships in the M 35 category a few months and kilometers away. ) to get drunk in a bar on the Amstelveenseweg. Undoubtedly more fun than a podium ceremony.

Marathon Memoirs is an ode to the marathon. Sunny ran so many, in so many different places, with so many different emotions in his body and with so many different sporting intentions that he gives the reader an exceptionally varied sketch of that wonderful monster called the marathon.

To order

Sunny’s running and writing work has resulted in a hefty bundle of 400 pages. To have? You order it here.