Outdoors Memoirs

Kara Goucher grew up with Olympic dreams. She excelled at running from a young age and was offered a Nike sponsorship deal when she graduated from college. Then in 2004, she was invited to join a secretive, lavishly funded new team, dubbed the Nike Oregon Project. Coached by distance running legend Alberto Salazar, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Kara was soon winning a World Championship medal, going to the Olympics, and standing on the podium at the New York and Boston marathons, just like her coach. But behind the scenes, Salazar was hiding dark secrets.

Three-time New York Times best-selling author and six-time WWE champion Chris Jericho shares 20 of his most valuable lessons for achieving your goals and living the life you want, jam-packed with fantastic stories and the classic off-the-wall, laugh-out-loud Jericho references he's famous for.

Paret lay on the ground, quivering gently, a small froth on his mouth. The house doctor jumped into the ring. He knelt. He pried Paret's eyelid open. He looked at the eyeball staring out. He let the lid snap shut. He reached into his satchel, took out a needle, jabbed Paret with a stimulant. Paret's back rose in a high arch. He writhed in real agony. They were calling him back from death. One wanted to cry out, "Leave the man alone. Let him die."

Superman. Diesel. The Big Aristotle. Shaq Fu. The Big Daddy. The Big Shaqtus. Wilt Chamberneezy. The Real Deal. The Big Shamrock. Shaq....From growing up in difficult circumstances and getting cut from his high-school basketball team to his larger-than-life basketball career, Shaquille O'Neal lays it all out in Shaq Uncut: My Story.

The road from a high school track to an Olympic starting line is long and sometimes shadowy. Obstacles like chronic injuries, under-fueled nutrition, and coercive coaching can threaten to derail careers before they’ve even begun. Frustrated by seeing young talent burn out before reaching their potential, professional distance runner Molly Huddle and college coach Sara Slattery have teamed up with trailblazing running legends and sports medicine professionals to create an essential guide to reach your running potential.

LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he’s in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. The reigning king of the game and the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, LeBron wears the crown like he was born with it. Yet his ascent has been anything but effortless and predetermined—the truth is vastly more interesting than that. LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict paints a vivid picture of LeBron’s epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star.

Carroll Shelby wasn’t born to run. He was born to race - some of the fastest cars ever to tear up a speedway. The exciting new feature film Ford v Ferrari - starring Matt Damon as Shelby and Christian Bale as fellow racer Ken Miles - immortalizes the small-town Texas boy who won the notorious Le Mans 24-hour endurance challenge and changed the face of auto racing with the legendary Shelby Cobra. But there’s much more to his high-velocity, history-making story.

What happens when a man of today's overconnected world sets off alone across the Pacific at the age of 71? Christian Williams, a veteran sailor and writer, planned a 6,000-mile voyage as a test of his own seamanship and endurance, and to fulfill a lifelong goal. But he found his focus quickly turning from the surrounding sea to all of us. Is anyone the same person when no one else is there? Do we dare to find out?

For years, Geraint Thomas appeared blessed with extraordinary talent but jinxed at the greatest bike race in the world: twice Olympic gold medalist on the track, Commonwealth champion, yet at the Tour de France a victim of crashes, bad luck, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for his teammates. In the summer of 2018, that curse was blown away in spectacular fashion.

When we first meet the young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story, he is one of 13 children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school. And he has no serious experience playing organized football.

Ross' ascent in WWE mirrors the rise of professional wrestling itself from a DIY sideshow to a billion-dollar business. Under the Black Hat traces all the highs and lows of that wild ride, in which Jim served not only as on-air commentator, but talent manager, payroll master, and even occasional in-ring foil to threats like Paul "Triple H" Levesque and Undertaker.

Mourinho is both a sumptuous celebration of The Special One's managerial career so far, and an enigmatic insight into his unique brand of football wisdom and philosophy. In the legendary manager's very first audiobook, and in his own images and captions, José Mourinho charts the peaks and troughs of the opening 15 years of what has been a stellar rise to the summit of the global game.

Peter Sagan, at just 28 years of age, is already one of cycling's greatest riders of all time. With four Tour de France points jersey victories, three road-race world championships, the 2018 Paris-Roubaix, and multiple spring classics among Sagan's palmares, the world of cycling agrees that this intense, yet fun-loving rider is among the most dominant and fun-to-watch riders of his generation. In My World, for the very first time, bike racing fans will have the opportunity to glimpse behind the scenes of Sagan's cycling life.

Total Competition is the most compelling, comprehensive and revealing insight into what it takes to get to the top in Formula One that has ever been published. Across four decades, Ross Brawn was one of the most innovative and successful technical directors and then team principals in Formula One. Leading Benetton, Ferrari, Honda, Brawn and Mercedes, he worked with drivers such as Michael Schumacher, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton to make them world champions.

The Chair and The Valley is a raw, gut-wrenching, and amazing story about healing from trauma and starting over. It is a testament to the importance of chosen family, the restorative power of nature, and the strength it takes to build a new life in the face of fear and doubt. Banning takes listeners through his fraught relationship with his family, the mistreatment he suffered at the hospital, the lawsuit against the owners of the facility, and his desire to make sense of what happened to him. We witness Banning navigate the difficult landscape of trauma and his battle to live a normal life.

Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago, which still stands. At the same time, he was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn’t. Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America’s most epic tragedies, the rise and fall of Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

The Big Miss is Hank Haney's candid and surprisingly insightful account of his tumultuous six-year journey with Tiger Woods, during which the supremely gifted golfer collected six major championships and rewrote golf history. Hank was one of the very few people allowed behind the curtain. He was with Tiger 110 days a year, spoke to him over 200 days a year, and stayed at his home up to 30 days a year, observing him in nearly every circumstance....

Tim Richmond was, fellow NASCAR driver Kyle Petty said, "a stranger in time." In one regard, the flashy, flamboyant driver from Ashland, Ohio, was years ahead of the trends in a sport that would soon enjoy explosive growth in popularity. Women who were NASCAR fans loved him - and so did their husbands and boyfriends.

Ride alongside Jon Moxley as he retraces some of the highways traveled on his remarkable journey. Revel in the never-before-told stories about his early life in Cincinnati, Ohio; the gritty independent wrestling scene where he cut his teeth; the complicated corporate landscape of the WWE where he bucked against authority; and the rebellious upstart AEW, where he won the championship in 2020 and was finally free to achieve the vision of the wrestler he'd always wanted to be. With plenty of pitstops and revelatory insights, MOX is the riveting account of the life of a brawler.

Iron Cowboy is an endurance memoir in the tradition of Dean Karnazes’s Ultramarathon Man - a lifetime’s worth of intensely lived experience packed into 20 riveting chapters. Listeners will discover the secret to redefining their own goals and achieving great success. When James Lawrence (aka the Iron Cowboy) announced his plan to complete 50 full-distance triathlons in 50 consecutive days in all 50 states, the only person who believed that he could pull it off was James himself (and his wife, Sunny).