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All books listed alphabetically.

Once A Runner
John L. Parker, Jr
This is the inspirational cult classic that Runner's World (and many others) have called "the best novel ever written about running".

The Reno Gazette-Journal has also called it "a book so good, people will steal it."

How often do you hear about someone borrowing a friend's book, then later buying their own copy because they liked it so much? Or a book so treasured that it gets passed from friend to friend until it simply falls apart from so many readings? Once a Runner is such a book. It has become a cult classic and our all-time best seller. It's been acclaimed over the years by Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar and many other top runners.

Many regard the story of Quenton Cassidy's battle to the top as the most accurate portrayal yet written of the tiny universe of world class runners. And it's a great source of training inspiration and wisdom as well. Many readers say they learned more about running from this novel than from all the training books they have read.

It has won Running magazine's award as the best book of the year, and has been highly acclaimed by Runner's World, Running Times, Racing South, and Track & Field News, as well as by writers like Don Kardong, Kenny Moore Tom Jordan and Hal Higdon.

Pain
Dan Middleman
This novel recounts the senior year of a talented collegiate distance runner named Richard Dubin. Richard's competitive year is a roller-coaster of stunning success and numbing disappointment, and his life is complicated by a steamy relationship he enters into with a beautiful, but unpredictable, woman 10 years his senior. Richard's university is one of the great party schools of the American South and the reader is treated to a series of uninhibited college bashes, featuring copious liquid consumption, naked kegstands, nude relays, andmost daring of allpoetry readings! As the pressures mount, Richard's life begins to unravel. All the forces converge at the Olympic Trials in New Orleans and it is there that Richard comes to the edge of the abyss. Note: adult language and situations.

The Lonliness Of The Long Distance Runner
Alan Sillitoe
This is Sillitoe's best-known work, a collection of stories presumably drawn in large part from his working class life in Great Britain. The book's emphasis on gritty realism will not be everyone's cup of tea -- no pun intended -- but I found his prose clean, powerful and nearly free of sentimentality.

Sillitoe's sympathy for the working class is best demonstrated in the title story, narrated by a teen resident of a reform school whose voice vibrates with rebellion. The youth shows a keen awareness of his position within England's rigid class structure and has made a conscious decision to resist those whom he says have "the whip hand" over him. Sillitoe reveals the motivation for his protagonist's attitude in an understated but memorable scene in which the youth remembers finding his laborer father dead, blood spilled out of his consumptive body. The reader sees the boy's perception that his father's life has been used up by the system. In the story's surprising final turn, the youth -- who has become a champion runner for his school -- attempts in his own way to turn the tables on that system.

The Olympian
Brian Glanville
This critically acclaimed novel, first published in 1969, has for years been regarded as one of the true classics not only in the literature of footracing, but in general interest literature as well.

Glanville's beautifully portrayed relationship between runner Ike Low and the eccentric and charismatic coach Sam Dee has become a set piece in the tales of athletes: Rocky, Chariots of Fire, even Long Road to Boston owe a debt to this work.

There are echoes of Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner as well. You will be captivated by the story of the working-class stiff, Ike Low, as Sam Dee discovers him thrashing through inconsequential races, a mediocre sprinter at a local running club.

The first time I met him, I thought he was a nut case, said Ike of his coach.

You are built to run the mile, Dee told him. You are the perfect combination of ectomorph-mesomorph; long calves, lean, muscular thighs and arms, chest between thirty-seven and thirty-eight, and broad, slim shoulders. A miler is the aristocrat of running. A miler is the nearest to a thoroughbred racehorse that exists on two legs.

And thus begins the relationship that will transform Ike into one of the great distance runners in the world.

The Purple Runner
Paul Christman
This is one of the big "three" in fictional running books. (The other two are "Once a Runner" and "The Long Road to Boston".) What makes this a most unique experience is that it tells a double story - about a New Zealand woman marathoner who looks to break her cycle of "not quite good enough finishes" in the marathon and a mystery man who is world class but has a disfigured face and is embarrassed by it. The workouts run by the mystery man are jaw dropping to say the least. Even with today's super athletes in the distance specialties from African nations would have trouble keeping up with this guy. But it is all compelling and the climax is both the New Zealand woman and the mystery man running in the London Marathon. The whole tale by the way, takes place around London. Having competed at a high level in the past I can honestly say the woman's tale is even more believable than the mystery man (his time in the marathon is much better than the current world record). Still, it is enjoyable reading for any runner.