Running Sports

Today, millions of women and girls around the world enjoy running and entering races. It wasn't always so. First Ladies of Running tells the inspiring stories runners who refused to give up despite the cultural and sports barriers they faced. Legends such as Doris Brown, Francie Larrieu, Mary Decker, Jackie Hansen, Miki Gorman, and Grete Waitz are chronicled by Runner's World editor Amby Burfoot.

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies, the mountains have always been home for Jenny Tough. Travelling the world, she's always discovered commonalities with mountains—and mountain people. Her major project is to run solo and unsupported across a mountain range on every continent where indigenous mountain people live isolated from the outside, urban world. Running solo and unsupported comes with obvious logistical as well as physical challenges, but running is also a common language.

Long before Cory Reese strapped on his first pair of running shoes, he learned the key to being a successful ultrarunner: He knew how to suffer. In Nowhere Near First, Cory shares his deeply personal story about experiencing his father’s suicide at a young age, and how this led to a career in endurance running and a desire to live life to the fullest. Nowhere Near First is a humorous, captivating, and uplifting account of Cory’s memorable ultramarathon experiences.

Why are so many people drawn to running? Why is running the most common physical activity? What is it about running that empowers so many people? And how can runners harness that power to create a more meaningful life? The Inner Runner addresses these questions and a whole lot more. This book is not about how to get faster or run a marathon; rather, it explores how the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other helps you harness your creative powers.

David Clark went from the rock bottom of bankruptcy, addiction, and obesity to becoming an accomplished athlete. In this compelling story of his life, he not only shares his journey with complete honesty, but he also lays out a blueprint for change that anyone can use to redefine what is possible.

In Running Ransom Road, Daniloff, many years sober, confronts his past by setting out, over the course of 18 months, to run marathons in the cities where he once lived and wreaked havoc. Competing from Boston to New York, Vermont to Moscow, Daniloff explores the sobering and inspiring effects of running as he traverses the trails of his former self, lined with dark bars, ratty apartments, lost loves, and lost chances.

There is No Finish introduces the exploding world of the Backyard Ultra. Birthed from the high school musings of Lazarus Lake, renowned for the Barkley Marathons, the running event has spread globally—to over eighty countries— with sky-rocketing numbers. Runners have up to one hour to complete a 4.1-mile lap. At the start of the next hour, again they attempt to complete the same lap. The race keeps going, with no finish, until all except one person gives up. The winner is the last one standing who does one lap more than anyone else.

Push the reset button to unleash your body’s power and endurance for running naturally. If you’re like 80 percent of runners, an injury is going to force you to stop your running routine at some point this year, and the demands of daily life only add to the wear and tear on your body. Life in the modern world has trashed and undercut dedicated runners’ ability to transform their running. The harsh effects of too much sitting and too much time wearing the wrong shoes has left us shackled to lower back problems, chronic knee injuries, and debilitating foot pain.

Jennifer Pharr Davis, the former record holder of the FKT (or Fastest Known Time) on the Appalachian Trail, tells the story of her meteoric rise in the world of endurance hiking and, in doing so, unpacks key traits that make women uniquely suited to endurance. With a storyteller's ear for fascinating detail and description, she takes us with her as she sets the record on the Appalachian Trail and introduces us to the mentors who helped her to identify and unlock different facets of her endurance capabilities.

Along the path to any goal - completing a marathon or a thesis paper, winning a medal or a contract - familiar mental hurdles arise: We may fixate on the odds of failure or find our interest flags two-thirds of the way through. That’s when elite endurance athletes - top performers in running, cycling, and swimming - turn to their rich arsenal of cognitive strategies to overcome self-doubt and unlock peak performance.

Olympian and World Champion Caster Semenya is finally ready to share the vivid and heartbreaking story of how the world came to know her name. Thrust into the spotlight at just 18 years old after winning the Berlin World Championships in 2009, Semenya’s win was quickly overshadowed by criticism and speculation about her body, and she became the center of a still-raging firestorm about how gender plays out in sports, our expectations of female athletes, and the right to compete as you are.

Anna McNuff had never run a mile without shoes on before. And yet, one British summer, she set off to run a (very) wiggly route from the Shetland Islands to London–on a mission to cover the distance of 100 marathons…in bare feet.

A man takes on the challenge of a lifetime after hitting rock bottom. He finds himself divorced, unemployed, and in a deep depression when a degenerative eye condition renders him blind with limited light perception. Feeling a calling to run across America, he dedicated the next two years of his life to prepare for, and ultimately run, more than 3,000 miles from California to New York in less than 60 days, averaging 51.5 miles per day, to log the seventh-fastest transcontinental foot crossing in the history of the world.

If you want to run your first ultra marathon, but are afraid of being unprepared for such an incredible adventure, then you need the secrets to success this book holds. Ultra marathons require a healthy body, a strengthened mind, and a solid resolve to see everything through from start to finish. However, you are not going to do anything you have not already done. You just need to use your previous experiences and the new techniques you will learn from this book to help you carve the best path forward.

Everyone learns how to run at an early age. It's naturally wired into your body. Yet in recent years, running has become complicated by trendy gadgets and doctrine. With a Boston Marathon win and over 100,000 miles run on his resume, Amby Burfoot steers the sport back to its simple roots in Run Forever. From a warm and welcoming perspective, Burfoot provides clear, actionable guidance to runners of every age and ability level.

Grant Falloon isn’t just good at track; he’s close to breaking the world record 100-meter time for his age group. So when the mega-rich Babblemoney sneaker company announces an international competition to find the fastest kid in the world, he’s desperate to sign up. But not so fast. Nothing’s ever that easy with the eccentric Falloon family. Turns out, his non-conformist parents never got him a legal birth certificate. He can’t race for the United States, so now if he wants to compete, he may just have to invent his own country.

Joe De Sena designed the Spartan races to test overall conditioning: strength, flexibility, endurance, and speed. His signature take-no-prisoners approach to achieving physical and mental fitness has taken the endurance world by storm and inspired millions. Now, in Spartan Fit!, De Sena breaks down that approach and gives listeners the tools they need to conquer the course.

We've all side-eyed the chipper runners jogging by in their short-shorts and "Fun Run"-finisher tops and felt a little envious. How do they get out there and do it every day? How did they become Runners? Though it's theoretically one of the most natural sports for humans, the general response to running tends to be, "It's hard. It sucks. I wish I could do it."

Elizabeth Clor wanted nothing more than to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon. Dead-set on achieving this goal, she found herself bound up in a vicious cycle of perfectionism and anxiety that thwarted her at every turn, despite making significant gains in her physical abilities over seven years. Boston Bound is the story of how Elizabeth discovered that her own brain was the culprit, and explains the steps she took to completely overhaul her mindset about her running and her life.

Millions of us run every day, whether it’s to catch a bus, a relaxing fun run around a park, or a longer distance like a 10k or marathon. Only a small few take on ultramarathon running - distances that usually start at around 50 km and can be very much longer. Whether you are someone who is thinking about taking up this sport, or you are already doing it and want to add an alternative and less stressful tactic to your training regime, then this is the book you should be listening to now.