A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “Up and Running”

Authors: Jami Goldman and Andrea Cagan

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: $25

*

Goldman, a double amputee from Huntington Beach who became a competitive runner, is an amazing person with an amazing story. With Los Angeles writer Cagan, Goldman tells that story clearly in this 244-page book.

On Dec. 23, 1987, when Goldman was 19, she and a friend, Lisa Barzano, returning from a Colorado ski trip to Phoenix, took a wrong turn. They thought they were taking a shortcut but actually were turning onto a logging road that was closed for the winter.

They got stuck in the snow, and the next 11 days became a struggle for survival. The first eight chapters deal with those 11 days, and the reading is spellbinding.

Organized search teams were unsuccessful but a man and his 12-year-old son, riding snowmobiles, found and rescued Goldman and Barzano. Both suffered severe frostbite and Goldman eventually had to have both legs amputated five inches below the knee.

Goldman chronicles her recovery and how she dealt with her new life--with all its ups and downs. She writes candidly of relationships, the good ones and the bad ones, and of her family and the support she received.

Goldman was never one to go to a gym when she had her real legs. But she had to condition her upper body after her legs were amputated, and she eventually turned to running with special prostheses.

She called them her “cheetah legs.”

Although she set world disabled records in the 100-and 200-meter dashes, her goal of competing in the 2000 Paralympic Games at Sydney never came to fruition. However, other successes came Goldman’s way.

Besides her accomplishments as a runner, she earned a master’s degree in child development, graduating cum laude from Long Beach State in 1996. She also became a motivational speaker, gained some national fame from a commercial she did in 1999, got a part in a Steven Spielberg movie, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” and, as detailed in the epilogue, on April 28 of this year she married Beau Marseilles.