While not well-known in the United States, Paula Radcliffe is a star in her native Britain and was even voted BBC Sports Personality of the year in 2002. Radcliffe has made herself into a public figure through her public protests against the use of performance enhancing drugs and her work for the furthering of asthma research, but also through her public argument with her husband at the World Championships at Edmonton and tearful dropout from the 2004 Olympic Marathon and 10, 000 meters races. Her career has been filled with several great accomplishments including World Cross-Country Championship titles at the junior and senior levels, British 5,000 and 10,000 national records, European Championships and Commonwealth Games gold medals, and most notably a world record in the Women's Marathon with her 2:15.25 run at the 2003 London Marathon. In spite of these achievements, she is also known as an athlete who performs poorly at many major championships with many 4th and 5th place finishes. Following the 2004 Olympics, Radcliffe was faced with a huge amount of media scrutiny and the disappointment of all of her fans at home who view her as the hope for British distance running. In her book Paula: My Story so Far (Simon and Schuster UK, 2004, $17.99) she gets a chance to answer her critics by chronicling her life from her childhood in Bedford, England and concluding with a description of the circumstances leading up to the 2004 Olympic Games.

Her story begins with her childhood and introduction to running at a young age following the example of her marathon-running father and motivated by competition with her younger brother. She stresses the fact that she was encouraged to try many activities ranging from judo to the piano, and this freedom to choose what she wanted to do rather than being forced into a particular sport or activity helped to fuel her true love of running. As she says, "The act of running has been and will always be something that I love and cannot imagine being unable to do." She believes that running is something that she truly loves and is thrilled to be able to do it for a living, but feels that she would run regardless of whether or not it was her career.

She describes joining the Bedford County Athletics Club when she is eleven, and at this point making the decision to focus on running as her primary sport. Through joining the club she is brought under the tutelage of Alex Stanton with whom she has remained throughout her entire running career. Her first major success comes with her victory at the Junior World Cross- Country Championships in 1991, sparking her move to the professional level of competition. In spite of her great running success, though, Radcliffe strongly believes in the need for an academic degree and was able to balance elite training and competition with studying to receive a first-class degree in modern languages from Louborough University.

During her studies at the university she is introduced to her future husband and former professional 1500 meter distance runner, Gary Lough. She describes the development of her relationship with Lough and the book is filled with notes from him describing his perspective of her races and injuries. Throughout the book, Radcliffe stresses the importance of her husband and "team" of parents, physical therapist, and coach in helping her to train and achieve success in her running. Her story continues past her college graduation and through her experiences on the professional racing circuit up through the 2004 Olympic Games.

The experiences she outlines show both the great happiness resulting from victories as well as the major disappointments that can result from the extreme amount of training required to be an elite distance runner. She has suffered from stress fractures, a hernia, a bike accident and viruses throughout her career. Leading up to the 2004 Olympics, a stomach problem resulting from the anti-inflammatory medications taken to help treat a leg injury hinders her ability to train. Her fast times when she is healthy often put her in the position as a favorite going into the race but she describes how her many disappointing finishes teach her that distance running is not all about running fast times but rather is about competing well in races. As she says when approaching the 1992 World Junior Track Championships in Seoul, "On time, I was the fastest runner in the field, but that guaranteed nothing and in my eyes it didn't make me the favorite."

While she ran poorly at the 2004 Olympics, she finally comes to the conclusion that "I was still the same person who had gone to the Olympics with such hopes. I had not lost the ability to run, nor the desire. There would be other races, other good times and I would be ready to seize them and appreciate them all the more after this. I promised myself that in four years I would be back at the Olympics. There was no way I was giving up on that dream yet." Radcliffe's book shows the many ups and downs that accompany life as an elite athlete and it has good descriptions of the psychology and physical preparation that go into competition at that level. The book leaves her future open-ended since has not yet given up on professional competition. It will be interesting to see if she will indeed be able to fulfill her dream of winning an Olympic medal in the 2008 Games.