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Photo: (Matt Roth / WBUR)

If you know someone who likes to run barefoot, they might have picked it up after reading Chris McDougall’s Born to Run, the 2009 bestseller that followed a group of indigenous people in Mexico who run hundreds of miles without rest and taught a huge audience that “everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.”

If you know someone who nursed a rescue donkey to good health and taught it to run… well, you probably don’t. But McDougall did. After moving to the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country, McDougall assembled an unlikely team of runners, farmers, truckers, and others to train Sherman for America’s oldest marathon open to all (not you, Boston!). What better way to get to know your new community?

Check out Running With Sherman and McDougall’s other books here.