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Books > Sport & Leisure > Sports & outdoor recreation > Track & field sports, athletics > General
On March 31, 1929, seventy-seven men began an epic 3,554-mile
footrace across America that pushed their bodies to the breaking
point. Nicknamed the ""Bunion Derby"" by the press, this was the
second and last of two trans-America footraces held in the late
1920s. The men averaged forty-six gut-busting miles a day during
seventy-eight days of nonstop racing that took them from New York
City to Los Angeles. Among this group, two brilliant runners,
Johnny Salo of Passaic, New Jersey, and Pete Gavuzzi of England,
emerged to battle for the $25,000 first prize along the mostly
unpaved roads of 1929 America, with each man pushing the other to
go faster as the lead switched back and forth between them. To pay
the prize money, race director Charley Pyle cobbled together a
traveling vaudeville company, complete with dancing debutantes, an
all-girl band wearing pilot outfits, and blackface comedians, all
housed under the massive show tent that Pyle hoped would pack in
audiences. Kastner’s engrossing account, often told from the
perspective of the participants, evokes the remarkable physical
challenge the runners experienced and clearly bolsters the argument
that the last Bunion Derby was the greatest long-distance footrace
of all time.
Runners will be inspired and fascinated reading about Mark Covert
who has run every day for 45 straight years, how Pam Reed won the
Badwater Ultramarathon, and Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in fifty
states over 50 days, how Larry Macon set four world records for the
most marathons in a calendar year, and Amy Winters-Palmiero ran and
finished Badwater with a prosthetic leg. These are just some of the
incredible and inspiring achievements of the endurance athletes
profiled in "Running to Extremes: The Legendary Athletes of
Ultrarunning. Each one of these athletes has pushed the limits of
human endurance to become an inspiration for people around the
world. Their achievements are profiled in individual chapters, each
introduced by prominent ultrarunners and friends. In addition to
the most prolific endurance athletes in the world today, one
section is dedicated to the Father of American Ultrarunning, Ted
Corbitt. Including a foreword by his son, Gary Corbitt, and a
special section on his life and achievements, Running to Extremes
serves to preserve his legacy. Whether you are an ultrarunner
yourself or a casual runner, a fan, a historian, or a scholar,
Running to Extremes and the incredible people and their stories in
it will inspire you and ignite your passion for living life to the
fullest. Above all, this Whos Who of ultrarunning proves one thing:
The impossible is possible!
An odyssey of family, heartbreak, violence, punk rock, brokenness,
broke-ness, sex, love, loss, drinking, drinking, drinking, and an
unlikely savior: distance running.A misfit kid at the best of
times, Mishka Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a
twenty-four-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his
school's campus, then learned that his parents were getting
divorced. His father, a prominent rocket scientist, abandoned the
family and their home was lost to foreclosure. Shubaly swore to
avenge the wrongs against his mother, but instead plunged into a
magnificently toxic love affair with alcohol.Almost two decades
later, Shubaly's life changed again when a fateful five-mile run
after a bar fight inspired him to clean up his life. And when he
finally reconnected with his estranged father, he discovered the
story of his childhood was radically different from what he thought
he knew. In this fiercely honest, emotional, and self-laceratingly
witty book, Shubaly relives his mistakes, misfortunes, and
infrequent good decisions: the disastrous events that fractured his
life his incendiary romances his hot-and-cold career as a rock
musician meeting his newborn nephew while out of his gourd on cough
syrup. I Swear I'll Make It Up to You is an apology for choices
Shubaly never thought he'd live long enough to regret, a journey so
far down the low road that it took him years of running to claw his
way back.
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