(Photo by Matt Hartman)
In November 2004, some former teammates of mine ran from the Pacific ocean to the Atlantic ocean. The goal was to beat the time it took a similar team to accomplish the feat 25 years earlier. They ran day and night for 2,730 miles for a total of 12 days 3 hours 48 minutes. They ran through the desert, the mountains, the snow and the rain. Coast to Coast is a record of their relay straight from the mouths of the athletes.
This is your chance to win a free copy of Coast to Coast.
I encourage everybody to buy a copy of Coast to Coast. You can get Paperback versions of the book for $14.94, and hardcover versions are available for $25.42. I will be giving away a copy of the paperback version through this contest. Official rules are included below. Go to my contact page if you have any questions or need any clarifications. If you have any questions for the author, Ryan Pancoast, then I would be more than happy to forward them along for you.
- 264 pages
- 95 photographs
- Coast-to-Coast Sketchbook
- stories from 20 athletes and drivers
- RV specs
- route map
- complete photo-roster
- commentary from President Albert Simone, Don “D” Campbell and Coach Dave Warth
- Only one entry allowed per household.
- To enter the contest, tell everybody something about you and running. This can be anything related to running. For example, a story about your favorite workout, a personal record, your kid’s track meet, or even just the fact that you don’t run.
- You will get between one and three chances to win based on how you tell your story.
- Leave a comment below with your story for 1 chance to win.
- Write your story on another website, and link to this contest for 2 chances to win. Be sure to leave a comment below with a link to your story so that everybody can read it.
- Write your story on another website and if that website is primarily about running then you will have 3 chances to win. Be sure to leave a comment below with a link to your story so that everybody can read it.
(I will be the sole judge of whether a website is primarily about running)
- Trackbacks are disabled. You must leave a comment below to point to any stories on other websites.
- You must use a valid email address to enter. Your email address will not be visible on this website and will only be used to be emailed about this contest and the Coast to Coast book.
- Winner will be chosen at random based on available chances. The drawing is final and I will be the complete and final judge.
- United States shipping addresses only are eligible to win.
- The winner will be announced on this website and will be sent one email informing them that they have won. The winner will have 2 days to send me their shipping address from the time that the winner is announced on this website. I am not responsible for the email not arriving or being blocked by spam filters. If the winner does not respond, then a new winner will be chosen and announced and will have the same 2 day deadline to send me a shipping address.
- Winner must supply their shipping address as either a reply to the email sent to them or coming from the email address that they entered the contest using or both.
- The contest ends at 8:00 PM EDT on Sunday, May 7th.
The winner will be announced before 8:00 PM on Monday, May 8th. - The winner will receive one copy of the paperback version of Coast to Coast shipped directly from the publisher using the “super saver shipping”. Production time prior to shipping may run as long as 10 days.
I have not run for almost 20 years, but I used to run in high school and for a short time in college. One time during cross country, I got a good shove in the back going down a hill. A face plant and sliding a dozen feet or so later and I was struggling to my knees and then getting back into the race. I did not run a PR that day, but I did beat the guy that pushed me.
I just ran the Boston Marathon for the second time. The first time was 24 years ago when I was in college which gives rise to one of my fondest “running memories”. My dorm at the time was in Kenmore Square. Feeling less than spectacular after 24 miles and questioning my ability to finish, I looked forward to seeing my roommates and a few friends cheer for me at Kenmore. I will never forget the moment when I entered the Square. I noticed a huge increase in volume of the cheering crowd. It took me several seconds and several comments from other bedraggled marathoners in my proxcimity asking who I was to realize that the cheers were for me. Most of the dorm must have been in Kenmore waiting for me. I felt like an Olympian and the center of the world. Despite my lagging time and against all odds of physics (and my then current physical condition)my was held high and my pace pick-up. (And yes, I did finish.) My thanks and sincere appreciation to all the side line supporters. Your words of encouragement really do make a difference during a grueling race like a marathon.
One of my best memories was when I ran at the Penn Relays senior year in high school. Since the time that I heard about the event, I had always wanted to go. We were going to run both the 4×400 and the 4×100 but our fastest 400 leg went when we were sophomores and didn’t want to go again. Our coach still wanted to reward the 4×100 team for all the time and effort we put in over the year, so he took us down. Of course the trip couldn’t go as planned. As it turns out, one of our legs forgot his jersey, so we had to find a store so we could buy 4 matching tops. We managed to find a Dicks’ Sporting Goods store and got them to open early for us. Because of this set back, when we arrived at the entrance to the track, we didn’t have our numbers, or even know what heat we were in, because our coach had to park the car. Luckily we got our numbers just a few minutes before our heat. For those who don’t know, for most trial events, they put you on the track as soon as the last race finishes, and you don’t even get to watch your team finish. Well we get in line for our heat and it turns out that we are the only all white team there. We were then thrown onto the track and we ran our race and ended up in beating a team because they were DQ’d. Now when we were waiting for our heat, our coach told us were to meet him, but we didn’t hear what he said, so after the race, we proceeded to walk around the college town and the stadium looking for our coach for a few hours. Once we found him, and after we got yelled at, we found a place to sit to watch some of the races. Luckily we got to watch the shuttle hurdle relay, and me being a hurdler, this was a great chance for me to see some of the best college hurdlers in the nation compete in person. We decided to leave after a bit and we got home pretty late that night. The next day our team had a meet and I decided because I had only ran a 100 I was going to run. I ran the 110 High hurdles and the 400 intermediate hurdles. This turned out to be one of my best meets, winning the 400 hurdles, and getting second in the 110 hurdles by a nose, but running my best time in high school.
To this day, I’ve always wanted to go back to Penn, to get a chance to run with the best in the country again, and see some of the best runners in the world.
Outside of football, I have never run. We used to have to run laps in high school before and after practice. Does that count as a story?
Neat site. You have a lot of good stuff here.
I’ve always tried hard to avoid running. If I catch sight of a train at the bottom of a flight of stairs, or a bus a little way down the street, I’ll catch the next one.
That changed in an unusual way when I went to university. The main building on campus was a 26-storey tower, obscenely tall for the area (most of the surrounding buildings were no more than 2 storeys) and showing off ’70s architecture in all its glory.
This included the elevator system, which hadn’t really been designed with frequent use in mind. There were only a couple of cars, they never seemed to stop at whichever floor you were on, and they were painfully slow.
Beside the elevators was a stairwell that climbed the entire height of the building. Initially I – together with a few friends – would run up a few flights of stairs in the hope of catching an elevator on a different floor. Pretty soon this evolved into a race : one person would stand and wait for the elevator, the other would run up the stairs. All 26 floors of them.
Since leaving uni I haven’t been tempted to pursue a career in stair-running (although there are now a few major events for this). Quite why I took it up for those few years, I couldn’t say.
But it was fun.
I’m not actually entering for a chance, since I already have a copy of the book, but I thought I would write a story anyhow. One of my favorite running adventures is a simple one. One day in the summer after 4th grade, sometime in August my friend calls me up. He says to me that he is thinking about running track in the fall(little did we know it was cross country). I said, eh whatever, I’ll run track, that always sounded fun, and since this was the first year we were aloud to do it, I signed myself up. So we show up at pre-season practice, which was something like 3 days a week for an hour. It was a pretty quick realization that the only thing we were doing on the track was running strides, and that all our workouts were on the hills, but I stuck around. Although I didn’t stick with the same events, going from distance to sprints in high-school, and dropping cross country all together, I ended up with a dozen years of competitive running, and I have been seen at a race or two recently coming out of retirement, from time to time(although not too competitivly).
Little known to those I run with, I started my track career as a sprinter. My junior high days consisted of the 100m dash, the 110 low hurdles, and the 4x100m relay. Not until my crazy high school winter track coach with the hyena laugh realized I had no fast twitch muscles per se, did I start running these “distance” races (about 800-1200m at the time). For 10 years I had been a soccer player, but during this first winter of distance training following a sophomore season riding the pine on the JV soccer team, my “friend” talked me into running cross country next fall. So I trained like I never had before; running approximately 250 miles from mid june to late august(next to nothing to me now), and came in as a surprising third man on a xc team that had won the county meet the previous two seasons. I had what I considered a large amount of success my first season, and learned to push my physicsal boundaries farther than I had ever known I could, until I actually found my limit. The last meet of the high school season, the PIAA district 3 meet, I was running a mediocre race, but was still sitting 3rd on the team, I put on my homestretch burst down the 600m finishing straight and with the finish line only 200m away my leg gave out, I got up and tried to hop to the finish only to step on my leg again, see it bow out and fall again, now realizing my tibia had broken. I rolled off to the side and lost my breakfast. It was 6 months until I ran another race due to the recovery time, but I haven’t stopped racing since.
My running story started just January of 2006. I had been afraid of running most of my adult life because of the concentration it would take. As a walker for many years, I felt I needed to concentrate on not falling that I would not be able to enjoy the stuff going on around me. Well, my brother, who has been an off and on runner since childhood, entered a half marathon. I decided that I should train along with him. This coming weekend (May 6th) we will be running the Indianapolis Mini Marathon “together.” He will be running in cold Indy, and I will be running in the tropics of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Even though we won’t be together physically, we will be running together that day.
I have been blogging about the journey at: http://www.dpeach.com/blog and my favorite post so far has been this one: http://dpeach.com/blog/2006/03/10/dad-you-are-a-champion-runner/
The contest is over. Thank you everyone who participated. The winner will be announced tomorrow on this website.