Amazing Racers: The Story of America's Greatest Running Team and its Revolutionary Coach

Coach Bill Aris and the boys and girls on his Fayetteville-Manlius Cross Country teams in upstate New York have had success that seems not just improbable but inconceivable. Starting in 2004, Nike has sponsored a National Championship Cross Country meet in Portland every year, with Regional qualifying meets earning the top 22 teams of each gender all-expense paid trips. In the 15 National Championship meets to date, the F-M boys have qualified 13 times, the most of any school, and have won once and been 2nd three times and in the top 5 7 times. That is mindboggling considering there are many thousands of high school teams which compete in Cross Country. And then there are the F-M girls. After failing to qualify the first two years, they have won 11 of the subsequent 13 National Championships and were 2nd and 4th in their non-winning years. And often when they won, the margin was almost incomprehensible. One year the F-M girls were almost a minute per athlete faster, on average, than the girls on the second best team in the country. And another year they totaled 27 points which means their top 5 girls would have beaten an all-star team comprised of the five best runners from all the other elite teams in the race.How is this possible? Marc Bloom, who has been THE authority on high school Cross Country for more than 50 years, does an excellent job of answering that question in this fascinating book. It seems clearly a labor of love for Bloom. As he points out at the start, there are no secrets in distance training methods. And F-M, unlike the legendary UCLA basketball teams of John Wooden that won ten NCAA Championships in 12 years, can't recruit great athletes from all over the country. His runners, as a rival girl runner stated, with wonderment, are just "regular girls" from the F-M school district. So the answer is much deeper than miles run and interval work-outs completed. It involves the total way the runners live their lives. It involves honesty and humility and selflessness and truth and caring for one another. As Bill Aris says, it involves building team unity, not through cookie bakes and sleepovers, but through suffering together. Accepting the hard pain of severe training and fierce racing because you are doing it with - and for - your teammates. Aris doesn't just wish or hope that high school kids want to live by high ideals and achieve high goals, he absolutely believes that, down deep, that is what they want for themselves. Bloom quotes one of his runners at the National Championships in Portland, who put it perfectly: "We act how we would want to see ourselves."

This is one of the best running books I have ever read, and I have a collection of about 300 other books on running. Marc Bloom is an amazingly gifted writer and there isn't another person in the world who could have captured the essence of Bill Aris and his teams of boys and girls who have achieved exceptional success in the sport of cross country.Bloom has inside knowledge on what it takes to be a great cross country coach and also has great depth in the history of the sport, so his book is fascinating, inspiring, and educational. His descriptive writing almost brought me directly into the scenes and I found myself concerned that mud and sweat might start splashing off the pages! Also the book was enhanced by Bloom's ability to connect up with current and past Fayetteville-Manlius runners to get honest and insightful input. His perseverance in reaching out to so many people, along with his wonderful interviewing skills are quite impressive. And I drooled with delight when I noticed an appendix with updates on all of the runners, as well as a bibliography section listing all of the books and articles used as resources. Wow! All in all, Marc Bloom wrote a masterpiece account of how Bill Aris was able to bring out the best in the hundreds of athletes he coached over many seasons. Runners, coaches of all sports, and anyone who needs to be inspired will find this to be a page-turning book.I am in the process of sorting out my own running library to contribute to a greater collection at a public university, however, I am keeping Amazing Racers for myself. I just can't let this amazing book go!Andriette

I read this book hoping Coach Aris would throw open his kimona (figuratively, not literally!) and explain the daily training that goes into making his teams great. There was precious little of that and that aspect of the book was disappointing, but not surprising - why should the most successful high school cross country coach ever tell us what it took him years of hard work to develop? I can't blame him for holding back on what his teams ran each day. As a high school cross country coach myself, I had to read a lot between the lines and grab onto tidbits of insight into their training here and there. Definitely not a blueprint for a training plan. That remains elusive and in Coach Aris's head.The reason I still give this book 5 stars is for the psychological insights into how Coach Aris, and then by extension, his runners, think, feel, and behave. That was fascinating, inspirational, and instructive. And that alone makes this a great book for anyone who wants to be inspired, or be a better coach of a high school athletic team in any sport. It also gave me a number of things to think about incorporating, in my own way, into the coaching of my own boys and girls HS cross country teams this fall.The continued incredible success of the FM cross country team is truly mind-boggling, especially their 2014 season. I thank Coach Aris for working with Marc Bloom and writing this highly entertaining and interesting book. IMHO, it is an instant classic so far as high school cross country is concerned.

I enjoyed this read, getting to know about a program that I'd only heard about. I enjoyed following their progress over the years and it's not often that a high school program gets a book written about them. As a high school cross country and track coach, I enjoyed following their mostly ups and downs and see how the program developed. It read as a great story and kept my attention. My only wish is that I could hear more details about the actual workouts they do to take some ideas away to use with my own program. What exactly are they doing that made them into this super program? What are the things they are doing that we aren't?