I remember running in my very first race in July 1987. Lining up with over two hundred others to run fifteen kilometres was exhilarating and daunting. I hadn’t really known how to train for a race, but there I was. To this day, I still remember the nerves and the excitement. After many races, including marathons and triathlons, I would discover that I was indeed pursuing life. I was running for the small boy inside of me who was beat down by childhood sexual abuse. I was running for the angry teenager in me who saw the hypocrisy of the world. I was pursuing the man I knew I could be! I was tired of running away. This is not a how-to book; it’s a to-do book! I have no magic formula or secret to help you live the life you desire. The truth is that you’ll need to do some work. But the ultimate payoff is achieving your vision, drawn from the life-sustaining energy of the Spirit within you. Living dead is not an option. We are Racing Death in pursuit of a life that will give us abundance and eternal peace.

Scott, Shackleton and Mawson were the three great explorers of the Edwardian age. Now Beau Riffenburgh tells the forgotten story of Douglas Mawson and his death-defying expedition of 1911-14. A key member of Ernest Shackleton's famous Nimrod Expedition, Mawson led his own Australasian Antarctic Expedition. However, following the tragic deaths of the other members of his sledging party, he was left to struggle the hundreds of miles back to base alone, only to find that the relief ship had sailed away, leaving him to face another year in Antarctica. Having survived with a small band of men against incredible odds, he later led a groundbreaking two-year expedition which explored hundreds of miles of unknown coastline. Mawson's is a story of true heroism and a fascinating insight into the human psyche under extreme duress.

When Mickey Thompson and his wife Trudy were assassinated in their driveway in the pre-dawn hours of March 16, 1988, the salacious details of the crime and the years of legal wrangling that followed made for hundreds of splashy headlines and sexy television soundbytes. After all, the story had it all . . . unknown hooded gunmen riding into a gated Southern California community on bicycles, ambushing their victims and brutally ending their lives while neighbors ate breakfast and read the morning paper. Leaving behind more than $70,000 in jewelry, the killing was an obvious “hit,” and those close to Mickey and Trudy immediately pointed to Mickey’s hot-headed former business partner Michael Goodwin as the mastermind behind the tragedy. Nearly 20 years later, Goodwin was found guilty by a Pasadena Superior Court jury in 2006 of two counts of first-degree murder. The actual gunmen were never identified or apprehended. John Walsh and America’s Most Wanted did multiple episodes leading up to the conviction. Robert Stack featured the murders on Unsolved Mysteries. CBS’ 48 Hours Mystery got in the act. Everyone wanted a piece of the story. A good story, however, has much more than a powerful ending. Who was Mickey Thompson? What made him more than just another victim of violent crime in America? This is what Mickey Thompson: The Fast Life and Mysterious Death of a Racing Legend explores. Mickey was one of the most influential figures in early American motorsports. While he did have loyal and longtime friends, Mickey always did things one way . . . his way. And he did it with speed . . . he did everything with speed. From his 1950s adventures in the Carrera Panamericana, ending with five dead and dramatic pictures in Life Magazine in 1953, through making a one-way run of 406.60 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1960 in his famed Challenger, through multiple trend-setting entries in the famed Indianapolis 500 and into the creation of some of the most popular off-road racing series and motor sportsstadium shows, Mickey’s life was full of “firsts.” And in a world that seems to be moving faster than even Mickey Thompson could have imagined, the complete story of this true American legend is one worth slowing down for.

An account of the 1955 car-racing season, noted as one of the sport's most violent years, profiles the dispossessed young men who competed against themselves and each other from the perspective of a fictional narrator, in a volume that draws on the author's interviews with surviving racers, mechanics, and historians. Reprint.

This two-volume encyclopedia is the Daytona 500 of stock car racing books—an essential "Bible" that provides an all-encompassing history of the sport as well as an up-to-date examination of modern-day stock car racing. How did stock car racing become firmly entrenched in American pop culture, especially in light of the lack of interest in motorsports overall as a spectator activity in the United States? And what has been the secret to NASCAR's financial success and growth over the last six decades? Encyclopedia of Stock Car Racing highlights approximately 250 subjects that have defined the sport since stock car racing was first organized. Organized in A-Z order, it covers all of the greatest drivers, such as Richard Petty, Jimmie Johnson, Junior Johnson, and David Pearson; the special races such as the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400; and the famed tracks across the country, from Bristol Motor Speedway to Darlington Raceway to Talladega Superspeedway. This unprecedented resource collects information about every element of NASCAR history in one place: the early personalities who shaped the sport and set things in motion, the past greats who have now retired, and today's rising stars who continue to make stock car racing one of the most popular sports in the United States.

In the forty-year period between 1951 and 1991, Canadian sports car competition underwent a massive change, transforming itself from an amateur recreational pastime to a commercialized profession and from an individual sport to a spectacle for mass consumption. The Chequered Past is the story of the struggle over power and purpose within the Canadian auto sport that led to this transformation. The first comprehensive history of sports car racing and rallying in Canada, The Chequered Past traces the efforts of the national governing body - the Canadian Auto Sport Clubs (CASC) - to bring its sports car competition up to a 'world class' level, and to manage the consequences of those efforts in the second half of the twentieth century. David Charters traces the social origins of the sport and the major trends that shaped it: professionalism, technological change, rising costs, and the influence of commercial sponsors. Charters argues that while early enthusiasts set the sport on a course toward professionalism that would eventually produce world-class Canadian events and racers, that course would also ultimately change the purpose of the sport: from personal recreation to mass entertainment. As technological innovations drove up the costs of competing at the top ranks, racers were forced to rely on sponsors, who commercialized and ultimately gained control of the sport. The end result, Charters argues, was the marginalization of the amateur competitor and of the CASC itself. Based on extensive research into the CASC's records and dozens of interviews with former competitors and officials, The Chequered Past opens a window into the rich but virtually unknown history of the auto sport, and claims for it a place in Canadian sports history.

Racing Green is the story of how motorsport science has become smarter and more environmentally friendly, and how these developments on the track are changing the world. Motor racing is one of the world's most watched sports. In the United States alone, NASCAR has over 75 million fans and counting. It's also the most scientifically demanding sport on Earth, requiring a combination of peak physical and mental skill, world-class engineers and a constant drive for technological innovation. Racing Green explores the science that has been translated from racing to the road, from the early 19th century through to innovations such as electric cars and autonomous vehicles. The history of motor racing, both its glories and its tragedies, led to some of the most important modern developments we see in car design today. Just as the heartbreaking death of Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona 500 led NASCAR to introduce a new raceway barrier method, ideas pioneered during races – such as crush zones to crash helmets – have been incorporated into race car and track designs around the world. Cleaner technologies first trialed and improved in modern racing are also shaping our communities beyond the track, from the hidden aerodynamics in everything from your grocery aisle to Apple's new $5 billion headquarters to a Porsche made from flax and tires made from dandelions. Through exclusive interviews with NASCAR's Research and Development Center, Formula 1 insiders, engineers, scientists and drivers, lifelong motorsport fan Kit Chapman goes behind the scenes of the current breakthroughs to show where motorsport is likely to take us in the future, picking up extraordinary tales along the way, such as the Ohio State University's experimental electric car, the Buckeye Bullet, which broke the electric land speed record on the salt flats in Utah, hitting an astounding 340 mph, and the untold story of how motorsport used its unparalleled mechanical expertise to help during the COVID-19 pandemic. Racing Green is a mix of travelogue and historical retrospective, combining visits to the experts and discussing the science with retellings of real-life incidents that represent milestones in shaping the modern world