7 Running Books by DMV Authors
The DMV has produced its share of fast runners. It has also produced a surprising number of people who write about it. These are books by runners who trained on the same trails you do, from an Olympic Trials qualifier out of Arlington to a Northwest DC coach who took a high school team to the Penn Relays.
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All My Trials
By Alisa Harvey, 2026
Alisa Harvey grew up in Arlington and ran at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, where she set the Virginia high school record in the 1600 meters. She went on to the University of Tennessee, ran on the 4x800 team that set the NCAA record, and won the 1500 at the 1986 NCAA Women's Outdoor Track and Field Championship. She kept winning well into the 1990s. In 2019, the National Black Marathoners Association inducted her into the National Black Distance Running Hall of Fame.
The memoir covers all forty years of it. Harvey writes about a turbulent home life, the people who helped her through it, and the path that took her from a high school track star to an Olympic Trials qualifier in three different events: the 800, the 1500, and the marathon.
Don’t Call It a Comeback: What Happened When I Stopped Chasing PRs, and Started Chasing Happiness
By Keira D’Amato, 2025
Kindle | Paperback | Hardcover
Keira D'Amato was an All-American who thought she was finished. An injury in her early twenties ended her competitive career, and she moved on to life as a military spouse and mother of two.
Her comeback started in Richmond with ninety seconds of running. That was the goal she set for herself in her early thirties, down the street and back, and she could not do it. She tried again two days later. Six years after that, at thirty-seven, she broke the American women's marathon record.
D'Amato is a Virginia native and now lives in Utah.
Marine Corps Marathon Honor And Pride
By George Banker With Rick Nealis, 2025
George Banker has been part of the DC running scene for decades, and this book is a collection of runner stories built around the race that defines the local calendar. The Marine Corps Marathon earned the nickname "The People's Marathon" for a reason. Banker's argument is that the feeling comes from the staff, the volunteers, and the Marines who work the course, not just the runners on it.
Banker is a retired U.S. Air Force TSgt. who has finished hundreds of races, including the Marine Corps Marathon and the JFK 50 Miler. He is also a journalist and photographer, and he serves on the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security's Marathon and Endurance Events Advisory Committee. Rick Nealis was the longtime director of the Marine Corps Marathon. He retired in 2023 after 30 years at the helm.
Running Against The Odds: An Inspirational Journey to Making High School Sports History
By Desmond Dunham, 2021
Desmond Dunham grew up in Gary, Indiana, with a distant, alcoholic father and not much else going his way. He got to Howard University, found the track, and found people willing to help him. The memoir runs from that childhood to the 2007 Penn Relays, the moment he treats as the defining one of his career.
Coach Dez lives in Northwest DC and has coached youth athletics across the DMV, at Wilson High School (now Jackson-Reed), St. John's College High School, and Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
Saving Myself One Step at a Time: A Running Memoir
By T. J. Bryan, 2020
T. J. Bryan took up distance running at 64. She had just been pushed out of the job she had spent her career climbing toward, and before that her athletic résumé consisted of aerobics classes in her forties and early fifties.
She started racing anyway, at every distance, and settled on the marathon. She was rarely running alongside anyone her age, and almost never alongside another Black woman. The book covers the ten years that followed and the community that took her in.
Bryan was born in Scotland, Maryland, and grew up poor. She became Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Maryland, and in 2003 became the first African-American woman elected by the UNC Board of Governors to lead one of its institutions. She was Chancellor of Fayetteville State University through 2007.
Confessions of an Unlikely Runner: A Guide to Racing and Obstacle Courses for the Averagely Fit and Halfway Dedicated
By Dana Ayers, 2017
Dana Ayers spent nearly twenty years living and working in Washington, and she racked up dozens of races in that time without getting appreciably faster, thinner, or more disciplined. She says so herself. She calls herself an ambassador of slow runners.
The book is a comic account of how a childhood bookworm ended up at the Army Ten-Miler, Tough Mudder, Ragnar, Warrior Dash, and a long list of mud runs and obstacle courses. Along the way she made national television, split her pants, and got electrocuted. Between the mishaps she gets at the real question, which is why she keeps signing up.Ayers now lives in North Carolina.
The Longest Race: A Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance
By Ed Ayres, 2013
Ed Ayres has run more than 600 races over fifty-five years. The Longest Race is built around one of them, the 2001 JFK 50 Mile, the oldest and largest ultramarathon in the country. Ayres was sixty and going after the age-division record.
DMV runners will recognize every mile of the course. It climbs the rocky ridge of the Appalachian Trail, drops onto the Potomac towpath and its headwinds, and runs past Harpers Ferry and Antietam. Ayres uses the race to make a broader argument about the connection between personal endurance and a society that can sustain itself.He edited Running Times and served as editorial director of the Worldwatch Institute in D.C.
If you know a DMV runner who has written a book we missed, send it to newsletter@thecapitalrunner.com and we will add it. In the meantime, we have rounded up six of the best running books and five that will make you a stronger marathon runner.