Running Sports

Running saved Alison Désir’s life. At rock bottom and searching for meaning and structure, Désir started marathon training, finding that it vastly improved both her physical and mental health. Yet as she became involved in the community and learned its history, she realized that the sport was largely built with white people in mind. Running While Black draws on Désir’s experience as an athlete, activist, and mental health advocate to explore why the seemingly simple, human act of long distance running for exercise and health has never been truly open to Black people.

Est-il possible de reprendre la course une fois qu'on a tout laissé tomber? Après un arrêt complet de la course à pied, l'ultramarathonien Joan Roch entreprend un long retour vers son sport. Il raconte son parcours, cinq années semées de doutes, de douleurs et de joies. Le point culminant: son arrivée triomphale au sommet du mont Royal, à Montréal, au terme d'un périple improvisé de 1135 km amorcé en Gaspésie.

For more than a decade, Katie Arnold chased adventure around the world, reporting on extreme athletes who performed outlandish feats - walking high lines 1,000 feet off the ground without a harness, or running 100 miles through the night. She wrote her stories by living them, until eventually life on the thin edge of risk began to seem normal. After she married, Katie and her husband vowed to raise their daughters to be adventurous, too, in the mountains and canyons of New Mexico. But when her father died of cancer, she was forced to confront her own mortality.

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.

In 2017, world-class ultrarunner Hillary Allen was at the top of her sport - and it felt like she was running on top of the world as she competed in Norway's Tromsø Skyrace. Allen was nearly halfway through the 50-kilometer race when she fell 150 feet off an exposed ridge, fracturing her back and breaking multiple ribs, both feet, and both of her lower arms. Beginning with the dramatic story of her accident and rescue, Out and Back: A Runner's Story of Survival Against All Odds recounts Allen's fight to return to the life she loves.

Susie Chan is an icon of endurance running. Since taking up running at the age of 35, she has completed the legendary Marathon des Sables more times than any other British woman, set the 12-hour treadmill World Record and was one of the first women to finish all the World Marathon Majors. Susie’s story is an inspirational fight against the odds. From leaving a dysfunctional marriage, managing as a single mum and tackling cancer treatment, Susie has had her fair share of adversity. Throughout it all, running has kept her going.

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.

Anna was never anything like those "real" runners on telly, but when she read about New Zealand’s 3,000-kilometer-long Te Araroa Trail, she began to wonder...perhaps being a "real" runner was overrated. Maybe she could just run it anyway? The Pants of Perspective is a witty, colorful, and at times painfully raw account of a journey to the edge of what a woman believes herself to be capable of. It is a coming-of-age story that will lead you on a roller-coaster ride through fear, vulnerability, courage, and failure.

A new edition of a sports icon's memoir, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Kathrine Switzer's historic running of the Boston Marathon as the first woman to run. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to officially run what was then the all-male Boston Marathon, infuriating one of...

In The Examined Run, philosopher and ultramarathon runner Sabrina B. Little asks whether running can be a laboratory for developing our character. She looks at the key ideas in virtue ethics-virtue, vice, exemplarism, moral emotions, and competition-and brings them into conversation with her experience in training and racing.

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.

If you want a fairy tale ending, listen to Snow White. If you want to know what it’s like to dream big, fail hard, get up again, and feel crushing defeat even as you finally taste victory—UNTETHERED is for you. Four years after his 2018 Trans Canada run crashes and burns, four-time champion ultrarunner Dave Proctor returns with a fierce resolve to conquer 7000+ kilometres, a 30-year-old record and his own personal demons.

Marathons have become too easy for some runners. What was once the pinnacle of achievement in a runner's life is now a stepping stone for extraordinary adventure in ultramarathoning. The number of ultrarunners - those running distances of 50k (31 miles), 50 miles, 100k (62 miles), or 100 miles - is growing astronomically each year. To date, there has been no practical guide to ultramarathoning. Now, Bryon Powell has written Relentless Forward Progress, the first how-to manual for aspiring ultrarunners.

Hardest Geezer, Russ Cook, is the first person to ever run the entire length of Africa. From his starting point in Cape Agulhas, South Africa, through sandstorms in the Sahara Desert, rainforests, mountain ranges and long empty roads stretched out for miles in front of him, Russ ran the equivalent of 386 marathons before finally crossing the finish line in Tunisia 50 weeks later.

Fueled by a passion for running dogs, Gary Paulsen entered the Iditarod - the 1,180-mile sled-dog race through the Alaskan wilderness - in dangerous ignorance and with a fierce determination. For 17 days, he and his team of dogs endured blinding wind, snowstorms, frostbite, dogfights, moose attacks, sleeplessness, hallucinations - and the relentless push to go on.

Today, women make up more than half of the nation’s runners. And, as more and more women have hit the roads and trails and laced up for 5-Ks and marathons, the research showing the effects of running on the female body has grown significantly, too. The truth is that even though the gap between men's and women's world best times is shrinking, the latest scientific evidence shows that running is a dramatically different experience for women than men - physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Injuries affect every athlete, from the elite Olympian to the weekend racer. In the moment, a traumatic crash, a torn muscle or a stress fracture can feel like the most devastating event possible. While some athletes are destroyed by the experience, others emerge from their recovery better, stronger and more confident than ever. The key to a swifter, stronger comeback is the use of mental skills: psychological tools that enable an athlete to take control of their recovery and ultimately use the experience to their advantage.

Why does it make sense to Ethiopian runners to get up at three a.m. to run up and down a hill? Who would choose to train on almost impossibly steep and rocky terrain, in hyena territory? And how come Ethiopian men hold six of the top 10 fastest marathon times ever? Michael Crawley spent 15 months in Ethiopia training alongside (and sometimes a fair way behind) runners at all levels of the sport, from night watchmen hoping to change their lives to world-class marathon runners, in order to answer these questions.

First and foremost a book about running, The Longest Race takes listeners alongside ultramarathoner Ed Ayres as he prepares for, runs, and finishes the JFK 50-mile race at a then record-breaking time for his age division - 60 and older. But for Ayres, this race was about more than just running, and the book also encompasses his musings and epiphanies along the way about possibilities for human achievement and the creation of a sustainable civilization.

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.