What Makes Olga Run

The Mystery of the 90-Something Track Star and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives

A fascinating look at the way we age today and the extent to which we can shape the process

In What Makes Olga Run? Bruce Grierson explores what the wild success of a ninety-four-year-old track star can tell us about how our bodies and minds age. Olga Kotelko is not your average ninety-four-year-old. She not only looks and acts like a much younger woman, she holds over twenty-three world records in track and field, seventeen in her current ninety to ninety-five category. Convinced that this remarkable woman could help unlock many of the mysteries of aging, Grierson set out to uncover what it is that’s driving Olga.

U-Turn

What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?

Every day, in almost every field, someone perceives themselves to be on the wrong side of a psychic divide. The “second brain” in their gut tells them their life must change. Bruce Grierson draws on over 300 hundred stories of u-turners, including famous cases like Gandhi and Gauguin as well as a host of other gripping tales of people who have risked everything to answer life’s wake-up call: people who change political parties and careers, people give up their jobs as doctors to become poets, men who become women, professional athletes who quit to spend more time with their families, mothers who quit their families to pursue careers, people who suddenly become revolutionaries for a cause they didn’t care about the day before.