As a young professor in California, he crashed his car while racing a train, an accident that left his girlfriend unconscious.
Kayakers then won a race with a train carrying the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games mascot Clyde around Llyn Padarn.
It follows the success of Johnson's first Thoreau-inspired book, "Henry Hikes to Fitchburg," which was based on a section of "Walden" telling how Thoreau, on foot, raced a train-traveling friend to a Massachusetts town 25 miles away.
In 2007 Vinod Punmiya, an Indian businessman, made his name by racing against a train known as the "Deccan Queen" over the 140km between Pune and Mumbai.
Los Lobos took the stage with distorted blues-rock guitar riffs and -- inspired by Los Van Van's velocity -- speeded-up versions of songs from its recent albums, racing like a train downhill with iffy brakes.
Luria relates that Shereshevsky was capable of sitting in a chair and consciously modifying his heart rate from sixty-four beats per minute to a hundred by picturing himself either lying in bed or racing after a train just leaving the station, respectively.
I arrived in the Italian mountains intending to use the race as a training spin.
After breaking his collarbone two months ago, Armstrong, 37, has shifted his focus to use the race as a training ground for the Tour de France, which he has won seven times.
For beyond the outright suspense here -- and it is considerable, especially in a better-than-fiction episode involving a race to beat a train -- is a meditation on the very essence of crime.
Rosberg's team-mate Michael Schumacher was running second in the first stint of the race, holding up a train of cars as Rosberg built a lead, but he was forced into retirement when he was sent out of the pits before a mechanic had tightened his right front wheel.
