An Evening with Tom Foreman

Delaware Valley Regional High School Frenchtown, NJ

An Evening with Tom Foreman 7 pm

Delaware Valley Regional High School

Tickets are $30 and include a signed copy of his book. Pre-ordered tickets are $25 if purchased before Oct. 25th. Contact The Book Garden to purchase tickets www.bookgarden.biz. D e l V a l E d F o u n d a t i o n The

` 1 “Tom Foreman has an ability to capture honest humor while talking about something as horrible and painful as exercise. I loved everything about this book except the running.” —Jim Gaffigan

“Foreman’s prose is as gladsome to read as a glass of cold lemonade after a brisk five MY YEAR OF miles...readers will enjoy running alongside him.” —Kirkus RUNNING DANGEROUSLY A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan “Tom Foreman demonstrates how he balances his passion for running with all else that is important in life. I’ve interacted with thousands of runners throughout my career and I can say that Tom is one of the most passionate runners I’ve met.” —Meb Keflezighi, Olympic Silver medalist, Boston and NYC Marathon champion by Tom Foreman

“As a—don’t laugh—basketball player, I understand full well Tom Foreman’s mad desire to exert above his age. But his recital of the perils of long-distance running made me decide that turning the pages of this graceful and amusing saga was enough exercise for a summer day. Run—but only to your bookstore.” —Harry Shearer

“Tom Foreman has one of the most unique, interesting and honest minds that I've ever encountered in journalism. His book captures so much of what makes him such a pleasure to call colleague and friend. Despite the truly ridiculous amount of running he describes, this book is really about so much more: family, relationships, career, change, and ultimately about making it all fit. It may or may not awaken the hidden runner in you, but it will bring you along for his hilarious and moving journey.” —, CNN

Publicity: Eliza Rosenberry, Senior Publicist 212-366-2201, [email protected]

2 MY YEAR OF RUNNING DANGEROUSLY: A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan (Blue Rider Press; Publication Date: October 6, 2015; ISBN: 978-0-17547-3; Price: $25.95 U.S./$33.95 CAN) is Tom Foreman’s entertaining and inspiring memoir of a single year in which he went from being an armchair athlete to competing in four half-marathons, three marathons, and a 55-mile ultramarathon, Emmy Award-winning CNN correspondent Tom Foreman has survived natural not to mention covering 2,000 miles in training. On the surface, his account is disasters, eluded knife-wielding criminals, and ducked beneath gunfire in war about a hugely mortal middle-aged man tackling an absurd mountain of running. zones, but he never imagined that the most frightening moment of his life would Beneath that, however, it is about much more important things: watching our take place during a Thanksgiving dinner. That was when his eighteen-year-old children grow up and desperately chasing down new ways of relating to them; daughter asked how he’d feel about running a marathon with her, just sixteen confronting our fears of aging; and keeping alive our dreams of taking on new and weeks away. As a young man, Foreman had been a talented runner, but his last exciting challenges, no matter what our age. marathon was nearly three decades in the past. Now he was an out-of-shape fifty-year-old, with “the flexibility of a stepladder” and lower back muscles you could play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on. Nevertheless, after fruitlessly trying to talk his daughter out of the idea, he sighed the way a man might when the judge Foreman recalls the rough start of his training, as he struggled to make only a few asks him if he understands the charges. “Okay,” he said. “When do we start?” miles a day, with dim hopes of getting anywhere close to the 26.2-mile marathon distance. His knees, hips, ankles, and toes all throbbed intermittently. Sometimes his chest felt torn apart at the hinges, and he was vaguely feverish from constantly pushing his muscles to the tearing point. All the while, he still had to hold down a demanding job at CNN, juggle family needs, and find time to play with the dog. What kept him on track were daily calls to the daughter who had challenged him, Ronnie, who was training on her own while attending Georgia Tech in Atlanta. “We’re a team,” she told him. “We’ll run better if we run for each other instead of just for ourselves.” [p. 38] Both father and daughter had their own hopes for this shared experience. Tom writes:

“Just as Ronnie was charting her course into the adult world and wondering where it would lead, I was feeling the anxiety of watching her go. The relationship we’d had all those years—daddy and daughter playing, talking, reading, singing, and cuddling together—was fading by the day. And I didn’t know what was arising in its place. It had occurred to me that running might hold an answer. If we jointly conquered this challenge, perhaps it would help define our new, more adult connection, drawing us closer in different ways. But I knew all too well that such grand plans can also end in failure.” [p. 41]

3 Father and daughter first put their training to the test at the Mardi Gras half- 80-90 miles per week, consuming long hours each day and forcing him to sacrifice marathon in New Orleans. The atmosphere was festive, with martinis rather than virtually everything else except work and sleep. While running had certainly energy drinks being served by men in tuxedos. But Ronnie was nearly forced to helped him forge a new bond with Ronnie, it now threatened to drive a wedge drop out with severe stomach cramps, and Foreman had to get Band-Aids at a between him and the rest of the family. As Ronnie reminded him, “Doing it without medical station to put on his nipples, which were bleeding from chafing against his letting the rest of your life fall apart is the challenge.” [p. 188] shirt. On a later training run, he nearly got lost in the desert outside Las Vegas at twilight. That was when his wife, Linda, insisted he always carry a cell phone. “Look, I really don’t have a good place to carry a phone,” he told her. “I have one in mind,” she responded. The day after his ultramarathon debut, Tom’s younger daughter, Ali, asked why he had pushed on to the end, despite the difficulty. He considered carefully before answering:

Originally, completing the marathon with Ronnie in Atlanta had been Tom’s only “As people get older, life becomes all about playing it safe. We protect our jobs goal. But having dug himself up from the depths of middle age sloth, he realized and our money. We guard our houses, and we try to make the world as risk-free that he was craving a new goal, something more ambitious than just bagging more as we can for our kids, because that is important. But along the way, you can lose races. A conversation with his CNN colleagues and Lisa Sylvester led yourself. You start thinking that the great adventures are all gone and that you’ve to the answer. Sylvester, herself a good runner, suggested that he try an reached all the limits. Your sister is already out of the house. You will be soon. ultramarathon. Tom had heard rumors of such things, but assumed that they were And I didn’t want us to become some pale shadow of the family we were, with largely mythical. your mom and me sitting around waiting for you to call and tell us about your adventures and never taking any risks of our own. So, when I started this, I don’t know, it felt like something woke up inside me. I stopped getting through my days, As he quickly discovered, however, there was a rapidly growing number of people and I started getting into them. I guess I ran this race because I didn’t want that to running far beyond the limits of the marathon and/or common sense. These end.” [pp. 267-8] intrepid souls were racing 50, 60, 75, or even 100 miles or more in dreadful conditions: at high altitudes, in scorching heat, in brutal cold, in deserts, and through godforsaken wilderness. But here, at last, was one sport where a Tom Foreman’s MY YEAR OF RUNNING DANGEROUSLY will appeal not only to relatively advanced age actually seemed to work in an athlete’s favor: it was well the thirty million runners, half-million marathoners, and the many more who aspire established that older runners dominated in ultras in ways they could never hope to, or to the growing community of ultrarunners in this country, but to everyone to in shorter races. In fact, the advantage held by so-called master runners who struggles to balance work and play, success and failure, the needs of others steadily grows with race length, so much so that many strong twenty-somethings and the needs of themselves in a world where so many forces compete for our are stunned late in long races to see people who could be their grandparents attention and time. Moreover, it offers a vivid, inside look at the relatively new leaving them in the dust. Furthermore, although relatively few women competed in sport of ultrarunning, which is just beginning to break into the consciousness of ultramarathons, on the average they were better at it than men. the broader running community, the medical world, and the public at large, as evidenced by recent articles in The New York Times, Outside, Runner’s World, and other media. For his ultramarathon debut, Tom chose the Stone Mill 50, which runs on a single dirt track through rolling, forested terrain in Maryland. His training kicked up to

4 Filled with the daunting, hilarious, silly, and inspired moments that Tom Foreman experienced as he slogged through rain, sun, snow, and darkness on what at first looked like an improbable and outlandish quest, MY YEAR OF RUNNING Tom Foreman is a four-time Emmy DANGEROUSLY is seeded with the science, history, and practice of running. Award-winning journalist who is Ultimately, however, it is about being in touch with the moment; about renewing currently a correspondent for CNN. our belief in honest effort, the kindness of strangers, and true challenges that can He frequently reports for such be honestly conquered; and about restoring our faith that life is worth loving, programs as The Lead with Jake deeply and passionately, in a way that looks forward and sees an endless road— Tapper, The Situation Room with inevitable and ideal. Wolf Blitzer, and 360°. A journalist for more than thirty years, he has covered nearly every major news story in recent memory, from 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina to the 2008 presidential election and the Gulf oil spill. Foreman has pioneered much of CNN’s work in new media, most recently by playing a key role in the development of an immersive, 3-D Virtual Studio, which has, for example, taken viewers onto distant battlefields to promote better understanding of dangerous conflicts. In addition to being an avid ultramarathoner, he plays guitar and piano, draws and paints, and long ago was a successful magician specializing in illusions, fire eating, and escapology. He lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

5 MY YEAR OF RUNNING DANGEROUSLY A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan

By Tom Foreman

Blue Rider Press

Hardcover

9780399175473

$25.95/$33.95 CAN

On sale October 6, 2015

Publicity: Eliza Rosenberry, 212-366-2201, [email protected]

For more information on Tom Foreman please visit www.facebook.com/ tomforemancnn or @tomforemancnn

For more information on Blue Rider Press please visit www.blueriderpress.com or @blueriderpress

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