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Reviews of Following The Flame From Kevin Beck, Senior Writer for Running Times MagazineFollowing The Flame is at its core a tribute to top-level distance running by a gifted storyteller. But as a work of art it is a lot more than that. Centering on 5000- and 10,000-meter specialist Jonny Langenfelder’s protracted and single-minded quest to reach the Olympic Games, it balances obligatory and humorous accounts of carousing, womanizing, red-neck track “coaches,” and tomfoolery with sober and touching subplots involving Jonny’s family, friends, and chief confidants. As a running novel it is particularly meaningful to long-time runners hoping to invigorate or recapture their running mojos, be they weekend warriors or national class athletes. The story—stories, really—reach a brilliant and credible crescendo, and the book’s 400-plus pages include enough surprises to add intrigue to the absorbing pathos of the central theme. Lautenslager, in writing this book, was clearly a man on a mission, and there is no question that this opus accomplishes it. Readers seeking a pure running novel won’t find it in Following The Flame. Instead they will be treated to a meaning treatise on living young and powerfully, perseverance, frustration, vainglory, and triumph—elements that resonate within all our hearts. From Gary Nesbit, Nesport CommuicationsThe author’s name will be familiar to readers of Athletics in Action; he writes the Tasman Centre report. Greg is also a runner and a coach. He won the Texas state high-school mile in 1976 and won 28 races at Texas Tech University, where he held the 5,000m record. He went on to compete in various U.S. Olympic Trials over 5,000m and 10,000m. Greg was a sportswriter at The Dallas Morning News and has written for other sports magazines. He moved to New Zealand with his wife in 2001. This is a novel about an athlete following his dream—to see that burning flame of the Olympic Games for himself, like his boyhood hero Steve Prefontaine, the United States distance running champ. Obviously Jonny Langenfelder’s dream is to compete at the Olympic Games, but first he has to qualify for the US Olympic Trials… This is quite a sad, but at the same time gripping and exciting story. It delves into not only his running career but his trials as he grows up as a Catholic with all the influences that a young man could expect to come up against in the seventies and eighties. There are also lighter sides to this novel. Jonny has a problem with his surname which makes for amusing reading; his surname is so unusual that it often gets pronounced incorrectly. Even the athletics commentators mispronounce Langenfelder and this leads his best mates to tease him all the more. The book traverses athletics meets around the globe, across the United States and Europe to the top international meets. He eventually even gets to compete down under and that’s when the excitement starts. Does Jonny get to the Olympic trials? Does he qualify for the Olympics? I enjoyed reading this book. I could identify with it, perhaps in part because I grew up and started running in the same era as Jonny and have followed athletics avidly for much of that time. |
