Its Christmas Eve! There’s still time for shopping for that runner on your list! Jesse Squire of The Final Sprint website has published the second installment of his 101 top books relating to running and track. Each listed title includes a short description of the book, ideal for helping us pick the perfect volume for that runner on our Christmas list. Here are the second 10 books in the list in no particular order:

A Cold Clear Day: The Athletic Biography of Buddy Edelen
Frank Murphy
Windsprint Press, 2000
Buddy Edelen was an American runner who didn’t become world-class until he moved to England. In 1963 he set a marathon world record, the first American to do so in over 50 years (Khalid Khannouchi being the only American man since). This slim biography was Frank Murphy’s first book–he has written another two–and it’s unusually good reading for a first-timer and for a sports biography.

C.C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America
Geoff Williams
Rodale Books, 2007
In 1928, C.C. “Cash & Carry” Pyle put on an amazing road show called the Transcontinental Footrace. Pyle, the man who almost singlehandedly made Red Grange famous, was something like a combination of P.T. Barnum and Arli$$. This was a professional stage race from Los Angeles to New York, with runners going anywhere from ten to fifty miles per day. A story long forgotten by the sports media, it was a huge event in its day, and spawned three books, a PBS special, and a Paul Newman-directed play. Williams’ book, the best on the subject, takes you inside the race to see not just the runners but the whole cast of wierd and wonderful characters.

The Perfect Distance – Ovett and Coe: The Record-Breaking Rivalry
Pat Butcher
Pheonix, 2005
In the late 70s and early 80s, Steve Ovett and Seb Coe were the dominant forces in middle distance racing, setting 12 world records between them. They were opposites in many ways; Ovett from a blue-collar background, Coe from an upper-class one. They rarely met on the track, but those few encounters were some of the greatest Olympic races of all time. Butcher gives us a two-for-one biography, as their life stories cannot be told separately.

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World
David Maraniss
Simon & Schuster, 2008
Politics, commercialism, doping, nonstop TV coverage—it all started in 1960. Maraniss, a Pulitzer prize winner, describes the Olympics of the late 50s and early 60s as everything was seen at the time; as part and parcel of the cold war.

The Fast Men
Tom McNab
Simon & Schuster, 1986
This novel is set in the American west of the 1870s, and its protagonists compete in the sport of “pedestrianism”, as 19th-century professional track & field was called. Back then, the money in sports came exclusively from gambling, and so honesty was rarely the best policy. These two sprinters and their entourage engage in a series of long cons reminiscent of The Sting, often disappearing from a frontier town just before the hoodwinked come after them with torches and pitchforks. McNab knows the sport; he was an Olympic coach and was an advisor for Chariots of Fire.

The Decathlon: A Colorful History of Track and Field’s Most Challenging Event
Frank Zarnowski
Leisure Press, 1989
Zarnowski is the world-wide expert on the decathlon and a decent writer as well. His passion for the multi-events comes out on the pages, taking what is often an esoteric numbers-based sport and making the athletes and the competitions come alive.

Kenyan Running: Movement Culture, Geography and Global Change
John Bale and Joe Sang
Routledge, 1996
This is an academic book but good enough to read on its own terms. I stumbled on it while doing research for a paper in grad school and ended up reading the whole thing. It provides a deep and complex explanation as to why Kenya produces so many good runners, looking at history, culture, geography and economics. Bale is a professor at Britain’s University of Keele who has pioneered the geographical study of sport; Sang is a Kenyan, now a Minister in the Odinga government, who was a student at Keele.

The Runner
Cynthia Voigt
Ballantine, 1985
Set in 1967, this novel follows high school runner “Bullet” Tillerman through a troubled adolescence and a troubled time in America. One of the few books in this compilation taught in school, it is generally geared towards 13 to 16 year olds, but good writing appeals to all ages. Voigt has won a number of awards for her writing, including the Newbery Medal; she considers this to be her best novel.

The lords of the rings: Power, money, and drugs in the modern Olympics
Vyv Simson and Andrew Jennings
Simon & Schuster, 1992
In 1992, this tabloidish tell-all about the unseen workings of the Olympic “movement” was shocking. By the time the Salt Lake City bribery scandal came out, the corruption of the IOC was dismaying but hardly surprising. In terms of track and running, it informs us about how the fix was in for the 1987 World Championships long jump, and the authors say it went right to the top–then-IAAF president Primo Nebiolo. Simson and Jennings’s description of an organization with unchecked power makes clear how all kinds of corruption ran rampant, doping included. A follow-up book was published by Jennings in 1996.

To the Edge : A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance
Kirk Johnson
Warner Books, 2001
Johnson, a New York Times reporter, began running in order to deal with his brother’s death. Eventually he found his way into ultramarathoning and went right for the big one, the Badwater race across Death Valley in July. His outsider status enhances the reading experience, because we are all outsiders to the Badwater experience as well.