I'm way to young to have this much nostalgia for 60s-70s running culture, but damn they looked so cool. And no such thing as a tech tee, hydration pack, or mass-participation marathon back then, either.

This is a really neat history of when an entire track was assembled in the middle of nowhere on the CA/NV border, at the same altitude as Mexico City, to select the team for the '68 Olympics. They set four world records in relative isolation from fans or fanfare, and stayed there two more months to train for a wildly successful--and politically charged--Olympics. As many track fans will insist, the US Olympic trials is the most hype meet out there--yes, more so than the Olympics themselves. I was happy to learn from this book that Dick Fosbury agrees: "in many ways, it is more intense than the Olympic games."