The 2025 Treeline Endurance Book List

In keeping with tradition for us all at this time of year, 2025 is coming to a close and I'm left reflecting on the year behind me.

One of the things that drove me to coaching years ago was how the learning process has no end. New ideas, perspectives, and data are always emerging. Along that grain, I know it's been a good year when I feel like I see the world in a slightly different light than when the year started.

Some of the books on my list this year are a reflection of works-in-progress that I'd call "coaching-adjacent"-- I wrote a little bit about one of these projects on here a little while ago, and there's more to come.

But all of that's for next year. This year, I found that these titles added perspective. Perhaps next year one or two of them can widen yours as well. Here's our 2025 book list.

Good for a Girl - Lauren Fleshman

Fleshman is a retired professional American distance runner, once sponsored by Nike. She's since gone on to coach elite female runners and pursue entrepreneurship with the nutritional bar company, Picky Bars, and the women's athletic clothing company Oiselle.

Good for a Girl is Fleshman's memoir on a life during and after a career in elite American distance running. It's an exceptionally thoughtful, candid, and enlightening glimpse into what companies, coaches, and a society expect of female distance runners. She breaches the culture of disordered eating and body shaming that exists for female distance runners, along with a look behind the scenes at sponsor-athlete contract relations. It's a moving story that I hope will drive social change around the issues Fleshman surfaces.

Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez

I came across Perez's book on a recommendation from one of my athletes not long after reading a paper about the sex data gap in sports and exercise science. At the time, I was scratching my head over some discrepancies between men and women I'd come across in shoe science. As far as I could tell, those differences in responses to footwear were not yet fully investigated or explained. I picked up Invisible Women to better understand how far this data gap between men and women extended-- beyond sport.

Perez's 2019 bestseller is the most comprehensive accounting of the data bias toward the default-male that exists to date. Whether in public safety, city infrastructure, medicine, corporate recognition and parental leave policies, Perez explains the wide gaps in consideration that exist where there is data to show it. However, she points out, the bigger problem is that the female half of the population has historically been ignored. Invisible Women takes us beyond broad understanding of the gender gap that exists, clarifies the issues we should be aware of, and proposes policy reform.

Outlive - Peter Attia, MD

While performance is at the heart of what I do as a coach, it's an obligation of all running coaches to think beyond tomorrow's performance, and ask if we're promoting the best things for athletes' long-term health and happiness. Longevity is far more important than any single finishing time or position. Performance and longevity don't always dictate the same athletic practices, so it's important to hold both goals in the mind at the same time when we put together training schedules.

Outlive is a manifesto on the topic of longevity. Rooting us in the physiology at play, Attia details the leading diseases our society faces, and the steps we can take to proactively protect ourselves against them. In a sentence, Attia's message is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and then some. For anyone interested in the topic, Outlive is a great place to start, and Attia's podcast, The Drive, is great place to continue education on related topics.

Win the Inside Game - Steve Magness

Magness first made headlines as a middle distance running standout in high school, but later became further known as assistant coach and whistleblower to the abuses of Alberto Salazar in the Nike Oregon Project elite running team. It's a topic he hasn't addressed much in the last few years, but Magness makes clear that Win the Inside Game was borne largely out of his own journey back from that experience.

Magness's follow up to his last book, Do Hard Things, brings the same science-driven narrative form. This time: to provide clarity on the war we fight with ourselves in our own head. Win the Inside Game is a lesson in getting out of our own way so that we can be our best and struggle less in the process. As a coach, I found it to be a guide in how to help athletes think about themselves and their goals more productively.

The Explorer's Gene - Alex Hutchinson, PhD

Hutchinson is the brain behind the decade-running Sweat Science column that appears several time a month in Outside Magazine, and appeared for years before that in Runner's World. The column has brought Hutchinson to be know as an expert on all things performance, whether in covering the Nike Breaking2 project or the latest scientific study on the performance benefit (or lack thereof) of Vitamin D supplementation.

Hutchinson's new book sees him wrangle with a wildly different question, and one that proves rather hard to explain--is there an instinctive human need to explore new things, and if so, where does that innate interest come from? I've always loved Hutchinson's work, but I felt that his storytelling was at its best in The Explorer's Gene. Wrapping up the book, and in spite of its thoroughness, I found myself wanting more.

Onward to a new year and a new perspective.

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