Best Half Marathons: Jog, Run, Train or Walk & Race The Half-marathon

Rating:
Summary: Hits the spot with perfect advice
Review: Best Half-marathons will take you to your first 5K and then to your first half-marathon, but gently with small increases in training.
He believes in no aches and no pain to avoid injuries and to keep your motivation yet you will:
Run up-hills, but starting with just a few easy repeats up gentle slopes;
Run at all paces which the half-marathon world record holder trains at...but at your speed, with the same heartrate intensity which the world record holder runs, and starting with a half mile and increasing gradually.
Holt includes motivation tips, stretching, weight and aerobic cross-training and how to peak for faster half-marathons.
Excellent and easy to read with training programs for everyone from jogger to experienced runners at 25 to 60 plus miles per week.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent as always
Review: Half-marathoners will get everything they need from David Holt's newest book. Great starter program to move from 20 to 35 or more miles per week and your first half marathon; 10 to 20 weeks or more programs to become faster at all levels...all levels of both mileage and ability.
The pace tables show you the speeds to train at to reach your full potential and to avoid overtraining. The 40 pages of cross training insights will keep you healthy and running for years.
Great book, great motivation, beautifully organized and researched.

Rating:
Summary: Some good information, not well organized
Review: I purchased this book because I wanted to train for my first half marathon. After reading all the glowing recommendations above I was sure to receive just what I needed. Although I found some great tips on cross-training and how to increase my speed, I didn't find enough specifics on precisely how to create the right training program for me as I did in several other books. The author's writing style is awkward. Narrative sentences are almost non-existent. Instead, most sentences are short commands making the text read like a Dr. Bronner's bottle. This is an author-published book and the formatting is awful! Body text is huge and headings are sometimes underlined and sometimes italicized (and sometimes not). Spelling and grammar are atrocious making reading a scavenger hunt. Overall a thumbs down.

Rating:
Summary: Poor book design clouds sound info.
Review: While the info in this book seems sound it is a great shame that the book design takes so much pleasure away from reading it.

With too-small margins (no space to write your own notes), a chunky font, few photos or drawings, and no quotes or side bars to provide visual relief, reading through it was a chore.

I hope for a future edition that addresses these problems.