Geoff Williams

Among the runners of C. C. Pyle's First Annual International 
Transcontinental Foot Race were an assortment of underdogs, including 
twenty-year-old Oklahoman and part Cherokee Andy Payne, who wanted to 
win over the girl of his dreams and pay off the mortgage on his family's
 farm; Paul "Hardrock" Simpson, who was in over his head but couldn't 
let down his North Carolina hometown; Mike Kelly, a luckless boxer from 
Indiana; Seattle's Ed Gardner, one of four black runners who encountered
 bigotry; Charles Hart, a sixty-three-year-old Englishman hoping his 
best days weren't behind him; and Frank Johnson, a middle-aged husband, 
father, and steelworker from St. Louis who broke away from his humdrum 
life and dared to do something different.

Newspaper and magazine journalist Geoff Williams details this historic 
event and the colorful cast of characters involved, based on firsthand 
accounts of those who were there and interviews from many living 
descendants. C. C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race is a classic American story so astonishing and surreal that you have to hear it to believe it.