Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Sports & Outdoors

In 11 seasons with the Buffalo Bills, the diminutive 5-foot-9, 175-pound Steve Tasker was a huge contributor as the Bills strung together an unprecedented four consecutive Super Bowl appearances in the early 1990s. Along the way, Tasker earned seven invitations to the Pro Bowl, and during the National Football League’s 75th anniversary celebration, he was named the greatest special-teams player of all time.

There comes a time in every competitive athlete's life when the cheering stops, and it's time to move on to other pursuits. Written by a former Division 1 football player and Academic All-American, The Way of the Athlete argues that sports prepares athletes for this transition by instilling qualities that contribute to academic, business, and personal success.

The audiobook will transfer the sport psychology strategies used to win Olympic gold and equip individuals with the psychological skills to pursue performance excellence in cycling and in daily life. For the last three Olympic Games the Great Britain Cycling Team has dominated the Velodrome events and is regarded as one of the most successful elite sporting setups in Olympic history. The emergence of sport psychology as a critical aspect of the Great Britain Cycling Team’s success has sparked wide interest in the psychological skills required to perform.

As Carl Safina's compelling natural-history adventure makes clear, the fate of the leatherback turtle is in our hands. The distressing decline of these ancient sea turtles in Pacific waters and their surprising recovery in the Atlantic illuminate the results - both positive and negative - of our interventions and the lessons that can be applied, globally, to restore the oceans and their creatures. We accompany award-winning natural-history expert Safina and his colleagues as they track leatherbacks across the world's oceans and onto remote beaches of every continent.

In 2015, an American hunter named Walter Palmer shot and killed a lion named Cecil. The lion was one of dozens slain each year in Zimbabwe, which legally licenses the hunting of big cats. But Cecil’s death sparked unprecedented global outrage, igniting thousands of media reports about the peculiar circumstances surrounding this hunt. At the center of the controversy was Dr. Andrew Loveridge, the zoologist who had studied Cecil for eight years. In Lion Hearted, Loveridge pieces together, for the first time, the fascinating life and murky details of this beloved lion’s slaying.

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.

Paul Falkowski looks "under the hood" of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built - and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.

In 1979, Ursula Westmacott impulsively left London and her modelling career to join her boyfriend Chris Crocker on board Spero, a 42-foot sailing boat built in 1909 and never modernized - no engine and just a sextant for navigation. The two intrepid sailors headed south for Gibraltar, then Africa, finally crossing the Atlantic to reach Brazil.

Why would a middle-aged businessman who had never even spent the night outdoors, attempt to hike the entire Appalachian Trail? Bill Walker, a former commodities trader in Chicago and London, and an avid walker, had developed a virtual obsession to hike this historic 2,175 mile footpath in one hiking season. In the spring of 2005 he set off from his home state of Georgia, hoping to make it to Mount Katahdin in northern Maine before the arrival of winter.

Known as the original "Snakemaster" from his various television shows, Austin Stevens is one of the most famous herpetologists in the world. From his show Austin Stevens: Snakemaster on Animal Planet to his many appearances in the media, Stevens is known as an incredibly smart, yet incredibly insane animal lover.

My Life on the Run chronicles the heatstroke and frostbite, heartache and triumphs he's experienced while competing in more than 1,000 competitive races on all seven continents. With the wit and wisdom of a seasoned insider, Yasso tells runners what they need to know to navigate the logistics of running in an unfamiliar country. He also offers practical guidance, such as 5-K, 10-K, half-marathon, and marathon training schedules, including his innovative technique known as the Yasso 800s for beginner, intermediate, and advanced runners.

Nate Jackson’s Slow Getting Up is an unvarnished and uncensored memoir of everyday life in the most popular sports league in America - and the most damaging to its players - the National Football League. After playing college ball at a tiny Division III school, Jackson, a receiver, signed as a free agent with the San Francisco 49ers, before moving to the Denver Broncos. For six seasons in the NFL as a Bronco, he alternated between the practice squad and the active roster, eventually winning a starting spot - a short, tenuous career emblematic of the average pro player.

Hell-Bent explores a fascinating, often surreal world at the extremes of American yoga. Benjamin Lorr walked into his first yoga studio on a whim, overweight and curious, and quickly found the yoga reinventing his life. He was studying Bikram Yoga (or “hot yoga”) when a run-in with a master and competitive yoga champion led him into an obsessive subculture—a group of yogis for whom eight hours of practice a day in 110- degree heat was just the beginning.

Emmy Award - winning filmmaker, writer, and naturalist Joe Hutto has done it again. Touching the Wild is the enchanting story about one man who has lived with a herd of mule deer in the Wind River mountains of Wyoming for almost seven years. Why, you may ask, would a person choose to do such a thing? His response: how could you not? For Joe Hutto, close proximity to wild things is irresistible. In Illumination in the Flatwoods he unveiled the secret lives of the wild turkey to great critical acclaim.

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins - dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes.

Bill Russell was not the first African American to play professional basketball, but he was its first Black superstar. From the moment he stepped onto the court of the Boston Garden in 1956, Russell began to transform the sport in a fundamental way, making him, more than any of his contemporaries, the Jackie Robinson of basketball. In King of the Court, Aram Goudsouzian provides a vivid and engrossing chronicle of the life and career of this brilliant champion and courageous racial pioneer. Russell's leaping, wide-ranging defense altered the game's texture.

Within the dark corners of America’s forests grow culinary treasures. Chefs pay top dollar to showcase these elusive and beguiling ingredients on their menus. Whether dressing up a filet mignon with smoky morels or shaving luxurious white truffles over pasta, the most elegant restaurants across the country now feature an abundance of wild mushrooms. Langdon Cook embeds himself in this shadowy subculture, reporting from both rural fringes and big-city eateries.

A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force. Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records, including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a quarter of a century earlier....

In an instant he became her hero. Then he became her lover and her friend. My name is Jaxon Hart. You watched me grow up. You watched me fight for my life. Now, I’m fighting for hers. From the second I laid eyes on Annika Leander, I wanted to help her. Protect her. Vindicate her. But she’s got baggage to get through. Hell, we both do. A funny thing happens, though, when you finally connect with someone in a different way than you ever have before. The baggage doesn’t seem so heavy. I suppose that’s really the only thing that matters when the heart gets involved.

The fascinating story of baseball's most legendary "Iron Men", Cal Ripken Jr. and Lou Gehrig, who each achieved the coveted and sometimes confounding record of most consecutive games played.