Running From Tragedy

In his emotionally gripping and intensely personal memoir - Running from Tragedy, Michael Salsbury, a lifelong runner takes readers on a marathon run of a lifetime with his poignant journey of tragedy, loss, and triumph that defies every definition of unfathomable odds - that balances on the edge of believability.

It was a picture-perfect love story worthy of a Hollywood movie. Two contrasting childhoods both haunted with memories of sadness. The young American - an athletic marathon running Colorado mountain boy. A beautiful free-spirited Austrian girl. A whirlwind romance on an exotic Caribbean island. Successful careers. World travels. A story nearly cut short, the lone victims spared in a brutal armed robbery and killing spree. A fairytale Austrian "Sound of Music" wedding, and a bright future ahead full of love and adventure. But nothing in their wildest imaginations could have prepared them for what the future would hold.

The happy tale takes an unexpected and heart-wrenching turn as the couple descends into a decade-long odyssey of unimaginable grief surrounding the loss of not one - but three of their beautiful children to an unknown killer. All the while, in the background, in laboratories around the world, a scientific detective story was unfolding in a race to identify, name, and hopefully one day offer answers to an unknown disease that was one-by-one claiming their precious children. Years later scientific research around the globe eventually yielded answers that would hold worldwide implications - and change the Salsbury family forever.

With his haunting, at times whimsical and self-effacing style, Salsbury, throughout the unfolding saga weaves running, his lifelong passion, through the story offering brief yet welcome moments of comfort and solace in the darkest of times. Readers are introduced to the world of distance running and the close-knit community of ultrarunning where Salsbury takes refuge, blending it seamlessly into his story - tales of humorous and heroic feats of physical and mental endurance even non-runners will find irresistible. All the while Salsbury simultaneously runs two of his own personal distance races - toward a hopeful future...and from a heartbreaking past.

In the end it was running, three girls who gave their lives to science, a one in a million discovery, and one boy - a living breathing scientific miracle - that against all odds, brought closure and finally healed a bruised and battered family.