Don Kardong

The toughest trail I ever ran was the Escarpment in the Catskills of New York State. This was an 18-mile race through Rip Van Winkle country, routed through boulder fields, across angular juttings of granite and along a path with an unrelenting barrage of roots, rocks and mud, all of it hidden under slick leaves and dangling nettles.

When an athlete has relegated the persistent rumors of cheating to the back room of the mind, he hasn't really forgotten them. And when he glances back to where rumors hunker in the darkness, he hopes with a savage heart that somehow, some day, those cheaters will be brought to justice.

I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.

In this beginner-friendly book, called 'Learn to Program with Minecraft,' you will learn how to do cool things in Minecraft using the Python programming language. No prior programming experience is needed.

Getting to Valle Nevado is half the fun. A serpentine road from Santiago wriggles up the spine of Andean peak for an hour, then traverses a valley and finally up again. The hotel is perched on a rugged mountain crag at 3,000m: no other sign of human development is visible from this spot, which is close to the Argentinean border.