Book Review: For the Love of the Grind

Title: For the Love of the Grind

Author: Sara (Bei) Hall

Photo from Google.

Publisher: St Martin's

Date: 2026

ISBN: 9781250404299

Quote:  "I'm grateful to have found running. This is what I have been made for."

As a teenager, Sara Bei ran so much faster than the other girls that the coach made her run with the boys on the cross-country team. At Stanford, she made such an impression on the other champion runner, Ryan Hall, that they became personal friends and married after graduation. As adults, they've continued to run for more than twenty years, putting them among the longest-lived athletic couples in human history. 

This is Sara's story; she mentions Ryan Hall and the children they've adopted enough to show that she does have a home life, but avoids telling their stories. Her story is mostly about races run, injuries incurred, treatments indicated, and recoveries made. Readers learn about athletics and general health. We get to peek into the runners' world of training, racing, and squeezing in time for a little bit of a personal life. We get to share Hall's first feeling of empathy when she sees runners unused to wet track conditions hiding under every possible shelter on a wet day, followed quickly by triumph: "This will be my secret weapon." We hear the whine of envy as people tell the Halls that watching them run is a joyful experience, and others insinuate that it's a "selfish" career...as if preaching or singing were less of a mix of obsessive training, intense discipline, lapping up emotional support from a crowd, and radiating emotional support back to them.

The Halls are Christians who wanted to be missionaries and have built a house in Ethiopia with missionary intentions. This book walks the very thin line between giving Christian readers enough of a "testimony" that they don't forget to pray so that Christians won't worry about that, and not alienating readers from other faith traditions with a heavy evangelical message. Sara Hall reminisces wryly about debates over Santa Claus being a replacement for Jesus for little children, tells us that (although Little Debbie cookies are made by a bakery that's part of a church college community) she turned down a contract to endorse the brand after having had to run in lower-tech shoes that showed the right brand and deciding she didn't want to put sugary cookies in the children's lunchboxes, but she keeps these stories short and maintains a focus on what works for top runners...everything from diet and training through the magical thinking athletes tend to indulge in when competing with other people who diet and train as rigorously as they do. (Focus on the runner ahead of you, pace yourself to pass that person, imagine energy flowing out of person and into you as you pass...) 

Her commitment to faith and family, and intentions to help other Ethiopians in and beyond the athletic culture that has swept that country, always shine through. Sometimes I wonder how it's possible for the underdeveloped extrovert brain to have any spirituality. I think, despite moments of rebellion (she ate a "magic" mushroom, legally and with proper supervision, in Oakdale! And it felt "spiritual" to her!), this book shows how that works in practice. (In Hall's church the classic four personality types, often called by oldfashioned names that describe their typical weak points, are affirmed as "dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness." Hall is told that she excels in "influence," meaning that she's seen as an extrovert.) Hall doesn't do Christianity the way I do or the way most church ladies do, but she does it the way her unique brain and body are built to do.