Book Review: Escape from Lucania

Escape from Lucania: An Epic Struggle for Survival by David Roberts

This was a book I just grabbed off of the shelf because I tend to enjoy reading about real life events, and especially about struggles and accomplishments. Escape from Lucania follows two young men on a trip to the Arctic in order to conquer North America's tallest unclimbed mountain at the time. They had spent the previous year in the area developoing maps of the uncharted territory (it was the 1930's) and surveying the mountain. The seemed to have everything worked out, but the next summer was plaguedd with warm weather which prevented their pilot from making but one trip, dropping them off in the wilderness. From there, the boys struggled up the slopes of Lucania, leaving everything behind that they didn't need including one of their sleeping bags and a huge square cut out from the bottom of their tent. After summiting Lucania, their real struggle began as they found themselves unexpectedly short on food and 100 miles from the nearest help.

Like I said before, I really enjoy the true account type books, and this like any other really caught and held my attention. Everything seemed real and the author really covered his bases interviewing all types of people for the book including most importantly the two men themselves. I enjoyed worrying and struggling with them boys as they made their way out of the mountains. I give the book a rating of 2.5/3 Enjoy it.

The Giro 2009

Hello people, It's been a while since I have posted on this blog, but to see some of the posts I have made on our family blog you can visit superselins.blogspot.com. I'm going to probably bore some of you out there. (Out of the 5 people who check this blog, on a good month) Recently UniversalSports.com has shown every stage of the 21 stage road race live online. On a side note, Universal Sports seems like a cool website, and they routinely show live sporting events of olympic sports like swimming, cycling, track and field, etc.

I was able to watch a few stages of the race and follow the standings througout. Lance Armstrong ended up in 12th place overall. Pretty good out of the hundreds of riders. Levi Leipheimer finished 6th. The top five were all very capable and decorated racers, including the 2008 Tour De France winner, Carlos Sastre.

The final stage was an individual time trial, everyone riding alone, which I usually like to watch, but it was raining and the riders were taking it easy so as not to slip. The race was led by Dennis Menchov of Russia by 31 seconds going into the final stage. As he approached the finish (only about 3 minutes away) this happened: (sorry it's small and you can't see well because of the trees)

There is an even better video on Universal Sports, but I couldn't embed it. The other video is pretty wicked, and it looks like it hurt a lot. He had a big wound on his leg I think too. Anyway, It's really amazing to me, and kind of funny too, how from the second he hits the ground he's maneuvering to get up. And once he gets up, he's running to his bike. It's also crazy how quickly the guy jumps out of his car and gives him a new bike.


All in all, it's only about 10 seconds from when he crashes to when he's on a new bike riding again. In the end, Menchov finished 41 seconds ahead of the 2nd place finisher in the general classification. So, he preserved his victory of the Giro. Another pretty amazing thing is how far he slides on the wet cobblestone. He was going about 50 km/hr when he fell (31 mph). If he had fallen any differently, he could have broken a number of bones. Lucky guy.

Anyway, it was a pretty exciting finish to the race. This man has guts...and a sore hip.