Flashes of Panic

Preparing for the conditions

I’m reading a lot now about how various marathoners are preparing for the Olympics. Deena Kastor and Blake Russell have both talked about how they’re training for the heat and humidity of Beijing by overdressing in their relatively cool and dry training locations (Mammoth Lakes and Monterey, CA, respectively), and A reports that Lornah Kiplagat has dragged a stationary bike into the sauna at her training camp in order to do heat-acclimation workouts. (Kiplagat won the 2007 World Cross-Country title in the sweltering conditions in Mombasa, so she must know something about preparing to race in the heat.)

The overdressed Americans reminded me of Buddy Edelen, the winner of the 1964 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Edelen, who was the World Record holder at the time (his American record stood for another decade) knew that the Trials, which would be held at the Yonkers marathon that year, were likely to be hot and muggy, but unlike nearly all the other contenders, he decided to prepare for it. He was based in England, where he was employed as a teacher and could travel on weekends and holidays to the competitive European racing circuit. To prepare for the Trials, he trained in double and triple layers of clothing, weighing himself like a wrestler after his runs to observe how much fluid he was losing. Bear in mind that in those days, drinking during a race was often seen as a sign of weakness.

Sure enough, Yonkers was hot and humid. Edelen ran 2:24, about ten minutes off his world record. He also won the race by nearly twenty minutes as his closest competitors wilted in the heat.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that heat conditioning assures a medal. (Edelen wound up 6th in Tokyo.) But I think it’s fair to guess that anyone who doesn’t do heat conditioning of some sort will not win a medal.

Now Playing: Polar Bear from Some Friendly by The Charlatans

Technorati Tags: 1964, buddy edelen, heat, marathon, olympic trials, olympics

Posted by pjm at 10:42 AM | Comments (1)

Dorando Pietri, John Hayes, and the Olympic Marathon

The NY Times “Rings” blog has an entry today about the 100th anniversary of the 1908 London Olympic marathon, the one which started at Windsor Castle and established the 26.2-mile standard distance for the marathon. (And you thought it was 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens.)

I won’t rehash the details of the whole thing, but I will point out that Wayne Baker, mentioned as the advocate for John Hayes at the Dorando Pietri celebrations, may be more familiar to readers of my comments (or of his blog as “Scooter.”)

Now Playing: Trip On Love by Abra Moore

Technorati Tags: 1908, dorando pietri, johnhayes, london, marathon, olympics

Posted by pjm at 3:26 PM | Comments (1)

1936 on the reading list

I don’t have any illusions about the level of scrutiny the Chinese government is likely to give my visit to Beijing (that is, very little). I’m unlikely to revisit the experience one of my colleagues had, in 1980, of returning to his hotel room to find the KGB searching his suitcase. (He was asked to sit and wait while they finished, if I recall correctly.)

That said, I am trying to figure out what level of care to apply to my laptop, since it seems possible that my hard drive could be scanned, and I’m definitely paying attention to the books I bring. I’ve had some real liberal-thought bombshells suggested to me, but the two paperbacks I know will be in my bag are slightly more subtle; they both deal with the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The parallels between the two Games held by recently-reclusive powers using the Olympics as a coming-out party are not hard to see. (Though apparently the Germans made it more of a party than the Chinese are ready for.) Certainly there are plenty of differences between Germany 1936 and China 2008. But there are plenty of similarities. I’ve picked up Louis Zamperini’s biography (I mentioned him a few days ago) and in Portland the other week, in Powell’s, I picked up a copy of Jeremy Schaap’s book about Jesse Owens, Triumph.

They make a decent case against boycotts, standing together, but they also don’t paint the hosts in a rosy historic light. I’d love to see the PRC make their case for taking them away from me; they’re not directly critical or dangerous to them in any way, only in their oblique implications.

Any similar titles I should be picking up? Note that paperbacks are heavily favored for long plane rides.

Posted by pjm at 8:29 PM | Comments (3)

Getting priorities in line

How great is going for a run?

Well, I can leave thinking about proportional reactions to different degrees of crisis, and come back thinking about all the steps I would need to set up an SSH tunnel to an HTTP proxy; in other words, to bypass the Great Firewall of China, if it works.

(I’ll post the steps when I get back… if it works.)

Now Playing: Waiting from Inarticulate Nature Boy by Josh Clayton-Felt

Technorati Tags: china, firewall, running, security, ssh

Posted by pjm at 9:40 AM | Comments (1)

Trivia I never got to use

When it looked like Shalane Flanagan might have a shot at winning the 5,000m/10,000m double at the Olympic Trials (and you have to admit not many people would’ve picked Goucher to beat her until it happened—she is the AR holder, after all), I looked up previous winners of the “Woolworth Double” (five and dime—now there’s an obsolete figure of speech.) I never needed to use the research, so why not regurgitate it here?

Women have only been running the 5,000m since 1996, so there have only been four Trials including both distances. (I checked the 3,000m/10,000m doubles, just in case.) No women have done the double.

Only two men have done it: Don Lash in 1936 and Curt Stone in 1952. Lash, who was the world record holder at the time, actually tied in the 5,000m with Louis Zamperini.

Now Playing: Life On the Moon from We Will Become Like Birds by Erin McKeown

Posted by pjm at 3:22 PM | Comments (0)

How you use the storage space

At some point in Eugene, I was discussing with a colleague the differing approaches people take to popular culture. (One which came up, since I mentioned Mountains Beyond Mountains, was how Paul Farmer referred to People magazine as the “Journal of Popular Studies”, or JPS.)

At some point I asserted that since I have a head full of professional knowledge for my “real” job, my track-writing sideline occupied all the head space ordinary people filled with pop-culture trivia. I illustrated this by pointing out that I couldn’t name a single American Idol winner, but I could list the last 10 Olympic 10,000m gold medalists.

She then named all the American Idol winners, and I recited:

• Bekele (Athens)
• Gebrselassie (Sydney)
• Gebrselassie (Atlanta)
• Skah (over Chelimo, disputed) (Barcelona)
• Ngugi (Seoul)
• Cova (L.A.)
• Yifter (Moscow)
• Viren (Montreal)
• Viren (Munich)

…and blanked out on Mexico City. But Tokyo ‘64, of course, was Mills; I don’t have Rome or Melbourne, but Helsinki ‘52 and London ‘48, of course, were both Zatopek.

On doing some research, I blew Seoul, because that was Brahim Boutayeb. Ngugi won the 5,000m in Seoul. Mexico City was Naftali Temu of Kenya; Rome was Pyotr Bolotnikov and Melbourne Vladimir Kuts, both Soviets, which probably explains why their heroics were never imprinted on my brain.

(Yes, Now Playing is back—I have my offline editor speaking to my system once again.)

Now Playing: Bob Dylan’s 115th Nightmare by The Gay Blades

Posted by pjm at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

It's all about the backstretch

There was a lot to like about how Eugene hosted the Olympic Trials last week.

Part of it, of course, was the Fan Fest, which was basically a holiday street fair without the carnival rides and with big video screens where people (even, or perhaps especially, people without actual tickets to the stadium) could sit and watch the video feed from the competition. There were plans to give the awards out there, rather than in the stadium, but somehow the logistics of that didn’t work out; the athletes frequently got out there pretty quickly, though. The meet was a sellout, over 20,000 people for each of eight days, but if you were somehow able to count everyone who came in to the Fan Fest, the numbers would be even higher.

What’s more, it gave the meet a different attitude. In Sacramento, when the meet was over, everyone piled into their cars, the lights shut out, and the meet just diffused into the night. In Eugene, when the meet was over, the party was getting started outside the stadium.

Also, I’ve never been to a meet (short of a World Championship) where so many fans stayed to watch every lap of the distance races. Or, for that matter, where the fans watched the discus (qualifying rounds!) and other throwing events so attentively. Eugene has a distance-running aura, and the great U of O teams of the past were built around distance runners, but the fans left no event unloved.

All of which makes the logo they chose more significant. The icon of Hayward Field is the East Stand, a big barnlike structure recognizable to anyone who has been to a meet there or seen one on T.V. But though it was originally Hayward’s main stand, the homestretch is now overlooked by the West Stand, a massive thing with a gigantic cantilevered roof held up by the biggest laminated wood beams I’ve ever seen. The east side was the homestretch once upon a time, but all the pictures you’ve seen of Pre finishing races have the West Stand, the house that Bowerman built, in the background.

So the East Stand has a double resonance. First, of course, it’s what you see from the West Stand, with the Hendricks’ Park ridge in the background. (One of the best stadium backgrounds I’ve ever seen, personally.) Second, well, it’s where the serious fans sit. They can’t see the finish line as well, their seats may be a little cheaper, and the horizontal jump runways are clear across the field from them. But they’re the ones who carry the athletes around the rough part of each lap, the ones the athletes reach first on their victory laps. They’ll put up with the not-so-great seats so they can watch a great meet.

Posted by pjm at 8:15 PM | Comments (0)

Half-baked stories

Most of the ideas I’ve thought through while I’ve been here, I’ve tried to articulate on the Runner’s World site. (My favorite example, which I’m still convinced is a valid idea even if I seem to be the only one who gets it, is “Gabe Jennings and the ‘More Magic’ Switch”.) But I still have a bunch I haven’t been able to marinate long enough to write in a way that makes sense.

One is the retirees. On Friday, two different athletes (Ann Gaffigan in the women’s steeple and Kyle King in the men’s 1,500m) came through the mixed zone saying some variation of, “Well, that’s pretty much the end of the line for my career.” It’s jarring and saddening to read, particularly from Gaffigan who won this event in 2004, despite the fact that Nike has practically built a marketing campaign around the “top three or go home” idea. When the faces start getting put to the “go home” people, it stops being a philosophy and starts being people’s lives, sometimes people you feel an odd sort of kinship with, and it’s not quite as cute anymore. But I haven’t been able to spell that out in a readable column yet.

Another is another pass at Gabe Jennings. Why am I so fascinated with his reunion tour, this near-Quixotic quest? That’s exactly the question. In eight years, surely he’s changed, just like I have, just like we all do. He’s gone from being on the young side with the world in front of him to being on the old side of things, without many more chances. And yet he’s willing himself to recreate something from his relatively-distant past; to step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus might have it. That feels like the idea, but I haven’t been able to articulate it in more detail.

Posted by pjm at 3:58 PM | Comments (1)

In which I give unsolicited career advice

It may be time for Adam Goucher to become a house-husband.

There’s some curiosity about why Adam dropped out of the men’s 5,000m final with two laps to go on Monday night. The party line is that Goucher and his coach, Alberto Salazar, saw that the race was not going to be won in a time faster than the Olympic “A” standard, which meant that even if Goucher won—and it was clear by then that he wouldn’t—he wasn’t going to Beijing. So Salazar waved Goucher off the track to better save his energy for the 10,000m final on Friday evening.

Now, Goucher may actually have a better shot in the 10. I haven’t studied the start lists, but many of the athletes who should be able to beat him are banged up, already have marathon spots, or are otherwise showing their age. But he has two tasks in the 10, just like he did in the 5, and that’s both to make the top 3 (excluding the marathoners, who aren’t likely to go for the 10 the way Dan Browne did in ‘04) and to get the “A” standard. The second task is likely to be harder, no matter what the field, particularly if nobody else forces the pace and Goucher winds up being the mule for the field. (And I can’t imagine, given what Amby posted today, that anyone’s going to try to set up a Goucher-friendly race other than maybe Rupp or Rohatinsky, and they have priorities of their own.)

The fact is—and I hate to admit this, because he’s a few years younger than me—but Adam Goucher may be a bit old for the track. The dominant East Africans tend to be under 25. (Gebrselassie, a year or so older than me, is struggling to make the Ethiopian team in the 10,000m. Bekele is 23 or 24.) He may have a few years left in the marathon if that’s any good for him—conventional wisdom holds that elite marathoners peak around age 35—but the longer he hangs around, the harder it gets for him to find a race that plays to his strengths. He can’t keep entering the big races and hoping the door will open for him.

It may be time for him to admit that it’s his wife’s turn in the spotlight. (This has nothing to do with the fact that she’s better looking than he is.) There are loads of stories about Russian marathoners whose husbands give up competition and take over the support work, letting their wives train full-time; we inevitably hear the story after the wife has had a major breakthrough at a big international race. (Andrew Kastor might be a U.S. example, except that he was never national-class.)

It’s too bad Adam doesn’t do the cooking.

Posted by pjm at 7:09 PM | Comments (0)

The crime of the Trials

There’s been, rightly, a lot of attention focused on Amy Yoder Begley and her last-lap heroics to make the Olympic team in the 10,000m last night. Begley ran what may have been the race of her life.

But her story won’t appear in her home state’s newspaper. The reporter for the Indianapolis Star couldn’t convince his editors to send him to the meet, so he took vacation days and came anyway, on his own dime. Because he’s “on vacation,” the Star apparently can’t run anything he sends. (They are letting him blog, because “what you do with your vacation is your decision,” but no ink, apparently.)

I’ve seen a bunch of things here which I found frustrating or silly, but this one, so far, takes the cake. If Begley hadn’t run well, it wouldn’t have been a big loss, so to some degree the Star was making the “safe” decision. But she did, and now it’s glaringly obvious that they actually dropped the ball.

(I suppose if I was serious about this track writing thing, I would’ve asked about their policy on stringers and offered to file the story myself, but that probably wouldn’t have been fair to the folks who are paying me to work for them here.)

Posted by pjm at 11:21 AM | Comments (1)

Justin and Butch

In the breathless pause (or a breathy one: the moment when hundreds of pundits inhale before beginning to speak?) leading up to the clumsily-named U.S. Olympic Team Trials—Track and Field begin this Friday in Eugene, the “news” of the sport is being dominated by the worst sort of story: doping. Justin Gatlin, the disgraced former co-World-Record-holder and Athens 2004 gold medalist, is trying to litigate his way in to the Trials despite being under a doping ban. (As the gold medalist, Gatlin does not need a qualifying mark for the Trials, a commendable loophole in most cases.)

The story brings to mind 1992, when the 400m in New Orleans was shadowed by the eligibility (or not) of then World-Record Holder Butch Reynolds, who took the IAAF to the mat disputing an alleged positive test. (The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and because the IAAF was threatening to ban any athlete who competed against Reynolds, the 400m rounds were delayed four days.) Reynolds won his appeals, but failed to make the team.

Despite the surface similarities, Gatlin’s case is nowhere near as sympathetic at Reynolds’. Butch was fighting a doping positive convinced he was clean. Gatlin is no longer contesting the test which led to the ban he’s currently serving; in essence, he’s given up saying he didn’t do it.

What Gatlin is fighting is his first positive test. Back when he was running in the NCAA, Gatlin got busted for an ADD medication he claims he’d been taking since he was a child, and simply neglected to declare on his doping control forms: a costly but understandable error, the doping equivalent of getting pulled over when your driver’s license was sitting at home. That first positive test came back to haunt Gatlin when he was busted again, in 2006, because it meant the anti-doping agencies came down on him like a ton of bricks. Repeat offenders get bigger sentences.

So Gatlin’s argument goes like this: if it wasn’t for the first positive, the (presumably two-year) ban for the second one would be over by now. So let’s make the first positive go away, end the ban, and let him run. He’s arguing (now, seven or so years after the fact) that the first ban was illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that the second ban should therefore be reduced to a first-offender two years.

If Gatlin is expecting to play a Butch Reynolds-like sympathetic character for the Eugene crowd, he needs to return to reality. Reynolds was, at least from one side of the story, fighting the good fight, and even those who disagreed with him had to admit that it wasn’t very hard to see his side of the story. The legal gymnastics needed to get Gatline to the line, however will leave an even more sour taste than the news, two years ago, that yet another star sprinter had been disgraced. If he makes the team (and, in doing so, displaces another top sprinter) because he exploited the ADA—a law which was not exactly intended to protect professional athletes from rapacious doping testers—Gatlin should expect to be a pariah.

And if his grandstand play delays the 100m, and thereby complicates the efforts of Tyson Gay to qualify in both 100m and 200m, he’ll be a bit more than a pariah.

Posted by pjm at 2:42 PM | Comments (0)

Trivial sacrifice wasted

I’ve mentioned, I think, that I tend to pick up loose change when I see it lying around.

I have to remind myself not to do this at inappropriate times. During road races, for example. So this morning, I passed up a quarter (I think—it could’ve been a nickel, but I was moving quickly) and a penny in rapid succession.

In hindsight, I sort of wish I’d picked them up, because then I would have had at least some positive result from the race.

Posted by pjm at 9:54 PM | Comments (0)

Chicken? Or egg?

Given this story in today’s New York Times, about racing shoes with rice husks in the outsoles, and reports of rice rationing earlier this year, I have to wonder about the current price of rice. Is the cost of rice driving the cost of racing flats? Or is the increased demand for rice for running shoes driving up the price of rice, a la ethanol and corn?

See, the global economy really does touch everything.

Posted by pjm at 9:04 PM | Comments (0)

Wall-clock

I was standing on the front step, clearing the timer on my wristwatch, when the guy walking on the opposite sidewalk called over, “You don’t need that! You’re too quick!”

Off-balance–he was right, there was no real need for me to time that run–I replied, “It’s more of a habit.”

He said, “I need to find a watch first,” and indicated his bare wrist.

“Most of the time,” I observed, “the kitchen clock will do.”

Posted by pjm at 7:41 PM | Comments (1)

Why I think Usain Bolt is clean

I know, I know, nobody wants to hear anything more from me about the 100m World Record. Seeing a 1-in-1000 baseball game and a World Record in one month is bad enough, but I have to rub it in.

What I’m warmed up about today, though, is how quickly the track world went from “Wow, World Record!” to “He can’t possibly be clean.” It’s hard not to be suspicious; after all, of the six men to run faster than 9.84 (Donovan Bailey’s World Record from the ‘96 Olympics), three of them (Ben Johnson, Tim Montgomery, and Justin Gatlin) were busted for doping, and a fourth (Maurice Greene) has been implicated, though so far without confirmation or process. Of the six men who received gold medals for the 4x400m relay in Sydney (two ran in the rounds), four have confessed to some level of doping, enough to lead Michael Johnson, who has not been implicated, to return his medal. Most disturbing is that many of these athletes never failed a doping test; they were caught by other investigations.

So why should anyone think Bolt is clean, aside from the fact that he has never tested positive for anything?

Two things come in to play here: profile and limits. The first is easiest to explain, and I mentioned it a few weeks ago. It’s that there are two kinds of athletes who dope: those who have had success as clean athletes, but go on the juice to extend their careers, as Marion Jones supposedly did. Sometimes this makes their performances spike over the baseline they had established from years running clean, as Tim Montgomery’s did. The other type is the nobody who rides the drugs from obscurity; Ben Johnson fit this profile, as did Kelli White, the former World Champion who confessed everything when the BALCO scandal broke. Usain Bolt is neither of these; he’s only 21, and should be reaching the peak of his speed with no need for juice to keep him going. And he’s not emerging from nowhere; he was a silver medalist in the 200m last year in Osaka, and was winning junior world titles at the age of 15. He’s had a steady progression over six years in the longer event; he’s only a newcomer at the 100m.

The second argument against Bolt being dirty is the idea of limits. Let’s assume for a second that Bailey at 9.84 was clean. (This also happens to be Tyson Gay’s PR, which he has run twice.) Assuming anyone who runs faster than that “must be” doping means assuming (a) that Bailey ran a perfect race in Atlanta (which Gay and Canada’s Bruny Surin managed to duplicate on three other, later occasions), and (b) that Bailey, Gay and Surin represent the optimal body type and running style for the 100m, which cannot be improved upon.

These two assertions are absurd on their face. There’s always room for small improvements; nobody has yet run the perfect race over 100m. I haven’t studied Bailey’s Atlanta race, but I’m guessing his start was slightly flawed, maybe he had a stride off early in the race, who knows. Maybe his competition could have pushed him just a bit more, mentally. Any one of those factors could have improved him a little bit. Add that to the startling physical differences between the compact, muscular Bailey and the towering, rangy Bolt, and I have no trouble imagining that physical differences, and the different mechanical approach to the race which those dictate, could account for a difference of twelve hundredths of a second.

Do you know how little twelve hundredths of a second is? Try starting a stopwatch and stopping it again that fast. It’s such a tiny difference, much less than one of Bolt’s long strides. I can’t look at Bailey ‘96 vs. Bolt ‘08 and insist that the only possible reason for that microscopic difference is pharmaceutical.

It’s one of the tragedies of performance-enhancing drugs that it’s impossible to prove someone didn’t take them, only (sometimes) when someone did. For the time being, however, I prefer to assume Bolt didn’t.

Posted by pjm at 7:57 PM | Comments (0)

No prophet

I guess I should also add that while I expected Bolt vs. Gay to be a very fast race, I wouldn’t have predicted a world record—nor, for that matter, was I expecting Bolt to win, though in hindsight I should have.

I’m now hoping Gay’s defeat will make him less of a favorite to win in Beijing, opening my way to another 100m pool victory.

Posted by pjm at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)

A few more words about Bolt et al

I was in no condition to be writing when I filed my meet report early on Sunday morning (and the 3+ hour drive home was still waiting for me,) so I’m not terribly pleased with its quality.

I’m a little happier with today’s analysis, written after a few hours of sleep and incorporating quotes from a Thursday pre-meet press conference as well as the post-race face-time. And yet I still didn’t get all the ideas that were raised into print.

One of them, mentioned a few times over the weekend, was Bolt’s height. He’s 6’5”, extraordinarily tall for a sprinter, a fact Jere Longman of the Times noted at the meet (when the field is down in the blocks, Bolt’s legs are so long his butt sticks up significantly higher than anyone else’s, making him easy to pick out from beyond the finish line.) Longman’s article said, “Where shorter runners seem to explode out of the blocks, he seems to unfold.”

This is generally considered a disadvantage among sprinters, but Tyson Gay displayed his own scholarship of his event by saying, “Times change. Back in the day, there were some tall sprinters: [Linford] Christie, Carl [Lewis], they were tall. Then there was the Maurice Greene era, Jon Drummond, they were shorter. Now Bolt’s a lot taller.” Just a cycle, according to Gay, and maybe it has just been a matter, as Bolt’s coach seems to think, of figuring out the best way to get those long legs out of the blocks efficiently.

Posted by pjm at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)

All comers

In recent years, as world records have become harder to come by (and American records even harder) there’s been increased interest among the record-promoting community in all-comers records. In as much as I consider records an exciting part of the sport, I like the idea of all-comers records, but I have issues with the way they’re sometimes presented.

The concept is pretty simple, if hard to explain. A world record is the best mark in the world for a given event under a given set of rules. (This is why world records in the javelin had to be rewritten a decade or so ago when the weight of the spear was changed.) There’s a sort of implicit additional idea that the record must be set on Earth, that there might be some superset of interplanetary or universal records. In the other direction, there are continental (or area) records, and national records. (Look at the list of records Roger Bannister set in one race.)

These get complicated because they are tracked two ways, by citizenship or by venue. An American record is a national record; it could be set anywhere in the world, and the criteria is that it is set by a citizen of the USA. A U.S. all-comers record, however, may be set by anyone; the criteria is that it be run within the borders of the country. (There are Area records—Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, etc.—kept the same way.)

The problem I have is that announcers so often wax lyrical about the “fastest time on American soil!” Oh, come on. There’s no soil out there; it’s a few centimeters of synthetic fabric. A media rep I talked to last night agreed, but further noted that only track geeks understand the label, “all-comers record.”

“Why not just say, ‘Fastest time ever run in the US’?” she asked.

I happen to like the evocativeness of the phrase “all comers,” with its expansive implications beyond just the dry word “record,” but when it comes to using a definite phrase, why not?

Posted by pjm at 3:45 PM | Comments (1)

Usain Bolt 9.72

I’m not generally one to get all fired up about sprinters, but in recent years I’ve forced myself to take a professional interest. Which is why I was actually paying attention to witness my first 100m world record.

I asked one longtime track writer (also a former Olympian, as it happens, not that he would tell you) who was in the mixed zone with me when the record had last been set in the U.S. I answered my own question: Donovan Bailey at the ‘96 Olympics in Atlanta. He observed that he’d actually seen the record broken twice previously on that very site: once by Leroy Burrell in 1991, and once (“that might have been 110 yards”) in 1962.

Posted by pjm at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

Sponsorships, prize money, and appearance money

“Appearance fees” are a favorite bete noir of Toni Reavis, a well-known television commentator for road races. Toni’s theory is based on the “athletics would be more popular if the top pros were earning millions” theory I’ve discussed here, and postulates that because appearance fees, which are not public, make up such a large fraction of a top athlete’s income, they hold down (public) prize money, and thereby hold back the marketing of those athletes as high-earning pros.

I tend to agree with Toni on this score, but I think the situation is more complicated than this formula suggests, and for a few minutes I’d like to prick holes in it in the name of strengthening our ideas of what needs to improve in terms of marketing our athletes as professionals.

First, the basics: track athletes have three major income streams. Sponsorship contracts (which generally have a large performance-based component), appearance money (how much event organizers will pay them just to show up), and prize money. Athletes in the big team sports, as I’ve discussed before, also have the sponsorship contracts, though they’re not as large a part of their income; their largest income stream is their team, and that should be compared to the appearance money, because like appearance money, they get it whether they win or lose.

In the team sports, however, both parts of the income stream are relatively public and transparent. Fans know what kind of income the players are getting from the teams, and they don’t know, in general how much more or less the players earn if they win or lose. And the interesting part, to me, because it means that for the team sports, at least, how much the athletes are earning has little or nothing to do with how interested they are in the game.

Is it possible that by focusing on the money, we’re selling short the inherent excitement of the competition, the thing that made us all fall in love with the sport in the first place (assuming, of course, that you’re one of my readers who’s a track fan)?

So here’s my thought experiment. Instead of following Toni’s proposal and doing away with appearance money, let’s do away with prize money. Make it all appearance money, and put it on the table. Maybe a consortium (call them a “circuit”) of five or six races—a marathon and three or four lesser distances—puts together half a million dollars to get a commitment from Catherine Ndereba for all the races. If she runs well, they pony up again next year. Repeat for thirty or forty more pro athletes at all levels of the pay scale to build fields. Maybe you build some performance bonuses into the contract, but it’s not strict race-by-race “prize money.” The fans know they’re seeing expensive pro athletes. The athletes have both a predictable income for up days and down days—but also an incentive to perform to the best of their ability, because those who slack off won’t be invited back.

One advantage to this system is that it’s compatible with the existing system. A few road races could pursue this model while still being able to compete for the best athletes; alternative compensation models already exist in the system, like Wisconsin’s Bellin Run (no appearance money.) It’s not too far from the Japanese corporate model, except that it is postulated on the money coming from the races, not from sponsors.

That leads me to the two drawbacks of the system. One is track meets: too many events, too many athletes, and not all of them merit the same price tag. Certainly football linemen don’t make the same cash as star quarterbacks, but how do you balance discus throwers against hurdlers? Men against women? Making those distinctions public (because they’re already being made in private, in the athletes’ sponsorship contracts) might open a can of inequality worms.

And finally, where does the money come from? Would the current pool of prize money and appearance money be enough to fund an announced-appearance model? Do meets or races have enough revenue to make this work?

But before we follow a path of abolishing appearance money, maybe we should spend a little more time considering the opposite course: putting it on the table and taking away the prize money.

Posted by pjm at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

Speed merchants in New York

I have a preview up today of the weekend’s entertainment. Insert the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth over preview writing; I’ve already discovered one factual inaccuracy (a start-list change which happened after I filed), but it’s relatively minor and my evolving view of how to write these things now understands that by Sunday morning, nobody will care.

And now you know where to find me on Saturday evening: trading elbows with the Jamaican and Chinese press.

Posted by pjm at 8:31 PM | Comments (0)

Sprint matchup of the spring

There is a lot of justified anticipation surrounding the Tyson Gay vs. Usain Bolt (plus six other sprinters anxious to pull off an upset) 100m race in New York next week.

However, as of Monday evening I find myself wondering how Jacoby Ellsbury would stack up. Granted, 100m is about three times longer than Ellsbury is used to running without needing to turn a corner, but imagine what starting blocks—and not needing to slide into the finish line—could do for him! Maybe a 60m during the indoor season next spring? Boston Indoor Games?

Jon Drummond, meet Terry Francona. USATF, let’s get on this.

Posted by pjm at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

Return on investment

I was trying to imagine a run with a better return than the Rabbit Run, and I wasn’t really coming up with anything, even the prize pie table at the Close to the Coast 10K in Freeport. (That would be the “…and a bat” race.) The first time I ran, the prize bag included a liter bottle (square, and glass) of Quabbin maple syrup. This year, among other pieces, they contained custom mugs from Golden Egg Farm (“poultry and pottery”) with rabbits on them.

I ran faster this year, though not by a whole lot, and placed about where I could reasonably expect to place, so I was generally pleased. But the prize bag is definitely worth more than the entry fee ($20). Also in the bags were pounds of coffee from Dean’s Beans, orange cranberry bread from New Salem Tea Bread, and more bread, jam, and maple syrup from other sponsors without websites.

And with 28 finishers and 11 prize winners (at least one age group prize went unclaimed), the odds of going home with one of those bags were pretty good.

Of course, in order to play those odds, you had to climb a hill, making up most of the fifth mile, fondly known as “Horse Break Hill,” which slowed the winner (who averaged 5:41 per mile) to 7:00 pace. So maybe “cherry picking” isn’t really the word.

Posted by pjm at 8:41 PM | Comments (0)

The Runners' Cookbook

I doubt there are more than three people reading this who aren’t already aware that The Runner’s Cookbook was published last weekend. (I’ve placed the apostrophe differently in the title of this post for reasons which will become apparent.)

I’ve been a reluctant and grumpy consultant to this whole process, as A discovered that nine years of working in the publishing industry does not mean that I can provide an intelligent explanation of things like “bleed.” Mostly I tried to stay well out of the way. She’d been looking forward to the publishing date with the idea that once the book was produced and published, the work would be over, but instead the past week has been a whirlwind of email (to be expected when you send email to nearly everyone you know), a few telephone interviews, and all sorts of unanticipated questions. (This is not unlike her discovery that collecting all the recipes, which involved contacting about 250 top-level runners, was not in fact the hard part of the production process.)

How, for example, do you make the book available at running stores, who (a) don’t generally order books through “normal” channels (if everything goes well, the book will be available on Amazon one of these days, but running stores tend not to have accounts with Ingram), (b) want to buy the books at a discount (with the printer taking a fixed amount from every sale, whose share does that discount come from?) and/or (c) even while meaning well, can’t close the gap in knowledge between what A knows and what they know about how this could work?

I told her the other day that like any course you’d take in college, she’s learned some things through the process, but she’s also learned a slew of other things she never knew she didn’t know, and might not have wanted to bother with if she had.

Posted by pjm at 7:34 PM | Comments (0)

Packed racing schedule

There are four road races in Amherst over the nine days starting tomorrow. Three of them are fund-raising 5Ks at UMass.

• The Push Race 5K, Saturday the 26th
• The College Towne Classic 5-miler, Sunday the 27th
• The Run for Namawanga 5K, Saturday, May 3rd
• The “Amherst 5K”, Sunday, May 4th

There are maybe two other races in Amherst over the course of the rest of the year. Why can’t they spread them out more? They’d get more runners at all four races, and everyone would raise more money.

On the other hand, this makes finding a race to fit one’s schedule quite easy.

Now Playing: Tristesse from El Momento Descuidado by The Church

Technorati Tags: amherst, races, roadrace

Posted by pjm at 1:34 PM | Comments (1)

Marathon Trials on TV

The kind of work I do at most running events can’t really be watched in real time. However, my work from this past Sunday morning can probably be picked out decently well in a TV show airing this Sunday at noon.

MSNBC is running a series, every Sunday from now until August, on the Olympic Trials. More specifically, every Sunday at noon, they’re doing a one-hour show on some sport selecting its Olympic team. The first show, this week, will be the women’s marathon trials, with Ed Eyestone and Al Trautwig. The hour is cut down from the nearly-three-hour live webcast they did during the Trials, with the possible exception of some voice-overs added after the fact. During that race, David Monti of Race Results Weekly was sitting in front of Ed and Al, patched in to a conference call with me, and the two of us were feeding them all kinds of data on the race.

So every time you hear a mile split—that came from our team. Every time they discuss the gaps between the leaders—that came from the spotters. Almost every time you see a cyclist with a headset on (if they don’t get cut out), he’s talking to me. (I had the easy job, as you can see.) I didn’t feel like I did any better than in any of the previous years of doing this, but for some reason this year the team clicked more than it ever had before, and I’m really proud of what we contributed.

The race was pretty good, too. I’m concerned about how it will play on one-hour highlights; marathons are really more exciting when you watch the whole thing, gun to tape. But if you didn’t see it last Sunday, spare an hour this Sunday.

Now Playing: Don’t Get Your Back Up from You Were Here by Sarah Harmer

Technorati Tags: Boston, marathon, msnbc, olympic trials, olympics, television

Posted by pjm at 1:25 PM | Comments (1)

Weekend's work

Minus: Even though the finger generally feels better (a development curiously coinciding almost perfectly with the end of my supply of prescription-grade pain pills) it still hurts to type lots, so I can’t broadcast all the good stuff of this weekend. (I did get one story out yesterday with another coming from today. Pain enforced a somewhat more spare style than usual. I hear that worked for Chekhov, too.)

Plus: Not much time to write, anyway.

Posted by pjm at 9:46 PM | Comments (0)

Subject matter problems

I would write more about my finger, but (a) pretty near all the fingers on my right hand (or at least, all but the thumb and the pinky) hurt when I type. The ring finger doesn’t even have a good reason. And (b) I feel like I should have some kind of warning before going in to the gory details. (We took a picture which will probably never go online.)

Plus, I spend all my time either meeting people here for the Marathon (by the way, I’m in Boston along with the rest of the running world) or calling people to arrange to meet them. Tomorrow, actual marathons will be committed, and about time.

Technorati Tags: Boston, fingers, marathon, olympic trials, typing

Posted by pjm at 9:37 PM | Comments (0)

Bostonian's guide to the Olympic Marathon Trials

I meant to write a long post for Boston folks about the Olympic Trials marathon on Sunday. But my fingers hurt quite a lot. So here’s the roundup.

• Two marathons this year. Trials on Sunday. Usual BAA marathon (the crowds) on Monday.
• Top three in the Trials run for the USA at the Olympics this summer. Everyone else goes home. Simple and easy.
• Local interest: Kate O’Neill, with a good chance of making the team, is from Milton. Several others are local; look for the blue BAA uniforms, among other local teams.
• Best places to watch: Memorial Drive in Cambridge (fewer crowds, two or three passes per lap); between Boyleston and Comm Ave in Back Bay (close to the start and finish). (Check the map.)
• T stops: Kendall for the Memorial Drive spots; Park Street and the Boyleston Green Line stops for the Boston side. Back Bay on the Orange Line is close to the finish as well.
• Everyone ran faster than 2:47 to qualify, and nearly everyone should finish under 3:20 or so.
• Watch for Joanie.

Avoiding the race? Avoid Memorial Drive, Mass Ave, and Back Bay. Storrow should be as good as it ever is, whatever that means.

You’re not going to see Olympians decided this close to Boston again soon; the track Trials for ‘08 and ‘12 are in Eugene, Oregon. This is really a big deal. Get out and watch Sunday morning.

Technorati Tags: Boston, marathon, olympic trials

Posted by pjm at 9:09 PM | Comments (0)

I run because I'm lazy

“Is it normal for your pulse to be so low?” asked the ER nurse.

I’m a runner, so of course the answer is “yes,” but I wanted to hear the number, so I said, “Maybe, what is it?”

The answer was 46, which isn’t actually all that low for me. 42 is in the realm of normal; I’ve seen 36 before. (46 is about three beats to four seconds.)

I look at it this way. If you average 60 bpm (not unusual) for a day, that’s 86,400 heartbeats in a day.

If I spend an hour at 140 bpm and the rest of the day at 42, that’s 66,360 heartbeats in a day—over a 20% reduction. I get a day’s worth of spare heartbeats every week. See? I work hard because I’m lazy.

Technorati Tags: emergency room, fitness, heartrate, pulse, running

Posted by pjm at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

The experts pick Kastor

The “expert picks” article I mentioned a few days ago is out now, and it appears that pretty much everyone agreed that Deena Kastor is the overwhelming favorite (only one out of 31 of us didn’t pick her to win). There was near-unanimity, as well, that Blake Russell, Elva Dryer, and Kate O’Neill were the three strongest contenders for the other two spots. After that, consensus fell off rapidly.

That thirty-first person who picked someone other than Deena for the win isn’t as crazy as they may sound. Our best marathoners in Athens were not the ones who won the Trials; Kastor was 2nd in St. Louis. Weird things happen at the Trials, and there’s seldom such thing as a sure thing in a marathon. That said, picking Deena to win isn’t so much an expression of confidence in her victory as it is a lack of other options: if not Deena, who? And what makes us think she isn’t going to be in good shape?

Now Playing: Trip On Love by Abra Moore

Technorati Tags: Boston, deena kastor, marathon, olympic trials

Posted by pjm at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

Who dopes, and why

Eddie asked in a comment, why do sprinters and throwers get busted for doping more often than distance runners? Do they dope less, or just get caught less?

I’d say, “both.” First, the payoff from most doping agents is greater in the speed and power events than in the endurance events. This is a fancy way of saying that the limiting factor of how far you can throw a little iron ball is how strong you are, and the limiting factor of how quickly you can cover 100m is how fast you are (both top-end speed and acceleration) and both of those limiting factors can be directly affected by things like anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and/or testosterone. Distance running is limited by so many different factors, from subtleties in physiology to simple matters of how quickly you can transfer oxygen from the air to your muscles, that doping offers fewer clear payoffs.

Second, because of the complications of doping for endurance, it’s harder to detect the performance-enhancing agents. Most of the ones that address endurance directly simply mimic the effects of being well-trained; some athletes use the strength/power agents (steroids) to allow them to train harder and recover faster, arriving at competitions free of the direct signs of doping but carrying the benefits of pharmaceutically-enhanced training. This is why out-of-competition random testing was created, but it probably makes the potential downside (the odds of getting caught) lesser for distance runners.

(The former East German sports complex supposedly used steroids this way, and 1976-1980 marathon gold medalist Waldemar Cierpinski supposedly appears on their doping records. However, the IOC has been less willing to pursue and redistribute the medals won through the wholesale abuse of the G.D.R. than they have been those won by Marion Jones.)

Most of the performance-enhancing substances used by distance runners, such as EPO (on the rise since the ’90s) and blood doping (favored in the ’70s and ’80s) are essentially taking existing biology and making it more so. EPO, for example, is made to treat cancer patients whose red blood cells have been decimated by chemotherapy; in a healthy athlete, it allows the blood to carry more oxygen. Cycling has been plagued by these agents because, oddly enough, the bicycle itself is a leveling agent, a mechanical means to erase the mechanical differences which would make one runner more efficient than another one with the same oxygen-transfer capabilities. There are new blood tests for EPO, but it’s still tough, and the testing is supposedly still lagging behind the alleged abusers.

But I think the first factor is the more important one, because the fact that doping agents aren’t as direct in distance running means that the general state of competition isn’t as distorted by them even if they are used pervasively as it is in the speed and power events (or cycling).

Which brings us to “why.” The classical profile of a doping athlete goes in two bins: the mediocre performer who suddenly breaks through with fantastic performances (e.g. Tim Montgomery,) or the longtime top performer who uses doping to extend their career (e.g. Maurice Greene, allegedly, or Regina Jacobs.)

Laurel points out a relevant Scientific American article (via 3 Quarks) which applies game theory to doping, mostly in cycling. The premise is that as long as they payoff for doping is high and the penalties relatively low, it will be pervasive, but that federations have the power (with some bold steps) to change the game between dirty and clean such that avoiding performance-enhancing substances is the smart choice. This means making the penalties draconian (which requires bulletproof testing, unfortunately) and making it easier for athletes to believe they can compete without doping. (Read the article for a better explanation of these suggestions.) These are things track (and particularly distance running) is doing much better than cycling, but for all the reasons already discussed, the game theory tips much less in favor of the dirty athlete in endurance events.

Now Playing: The Wake-Up Bomb from New Adventures In Hi-Fi by R.E.M.

Technorati Tags: athletics, doping, marathon, maurice greene, olympics, sprinters, track and field

Posted by pjm at 2:27 PM | Comments (0)

Ryan Hall, London, and Beijing

Before I get too far along on the bad news, some better news.

For those who haven’t already read about this elsewhere, Ryan Hall, who won the men’s Olympic Marathon Trials last fall in New York City, was fifth today in London in a swift 2:06:17. This is (obviously) a PR for Hall, the best American male finish in London in ages (Deena Kastor won there in ‘06) and also happens to be the third-fastest marathon ever run by an American. The two faster marks, a 2:05:38 and 2:05:56, are both from Khalid Khannouchi, and the first, the standing American Record, was also a World Record at the time, and was the London CR until a minute or so before Hall finished.

This is good news, of course. Assuming Hall recovers well from this and is in similar condition come August, we can say something of him which we haven’t been able to say of American Olympic marathoners since the days of Shorter, Salazar, and Rodgers: he’s capable of running whatever pace is necessary to win the gold. Odds are excellent that all three medals will go much slower than 2:06; the Olympic Record is only 2:09:21, and Hall has yet to run that slowly in three marathons. So anyone can say with good reason, “A healthy Ryan Hall is a medal contender in the marathon.” There’s no US partisanship needed.

Saying Hall’s anything more than a medal contender, however, is a little tougher. 2:06:17 won’t scare the Kenyans, or many of the Ethiopians—but it will get their respect. There were four very good marathoners in front of Hall this morning in London, one of them a proven championship runner, and at least two (if not all four) of them will likely be in Beijing. (The question mark is the Kenyan team; the Kenyan federation has provided few signs of how they’ll select their Olympic trio.) Haile is still active, too, if he is convinced to run.

Here’s what Hall has proved, and I hope he and his coach take this approach going in to the Games: he has the wheels to put himself in medal contention. Once he’s there, it doesn’t matter where he finished in London or who holds the world record; it’s a foot race. And as Kara Goucher proved in Osaka, sometimes being there to grab the opportunity when it presents itself is the important part. There’s an element of luck in winning an Olympic medal, but there’s a very large element of hard work and talent in being able to seize that luck when it’s going your way, and that’s what Hall showed in London.

Now Playing: Take You To The Moon from Why The Long Face by Big Country

Technorati Tags: athletics, beijing, london, marathon, olympics, ryan hall

Posted by pjm at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

Suckered again?

Last month, I wrote:

Now that he’s retired, Greene has locked up a position as the fastest guy who’s never been busted, and that means something; the only retired sprinter with comparable credibility is Carl Lewis. Unlike some of his predecessors … Greene didn’t get caught in some bizarre late-career trying-to-hang-on doping. He was never implicated in the BALCO mess. … This doesn’t mean Greene was clean, but unlike many cynics, I’m willing to give him the benefit of belief; I do think people can run that fast without doping, and I don’t have reason to believe that Greene didn’t.

That should teach me. According to today’s NYT:

Among his clients, [the supplier] identified 12 Olympic medalists who had won a combined 26 Olympic medals and 21 world championships. … Eight of the 12 — notably, the sprinter Maurice Greene — have never been previously linked to performance-enhancing drugs.

The Times is careful to note that “The documents … are not definitive proof that any of these athletes took performance-enhancing drugs” but it’s clear that things are going to get uncomfortable for Mr. Greene and several others over the next few months.

And for someone as cynical as I am about so many things (I once told a financial planner to base a retirement plan for me on the assumption that I would receive no Social Security income) it’s becoming harder and harder for me to presume innocence on the part of any modern sprinter. The dealer in question defends himself with the same old canard about how “everyone else is doping, you have to do it to stay at the top,” an idea I’ve been dismissive of in the past. I may need to reconsider my position on that one, too.

Technorati Tags: athletics, doping, maurice greene, sprinters, track and field

Posted by pjm at 6:31 PM | Comments (2)

Picking the Trials

If you haven’t been reading the running news sites lately, you might not be aware that it’s only ten days until the “2008 Olympic Team Trials—Women’s Marathon”, the stumblingly inelegant name forced on an event most of us just call the Women’s Marathon Trials. Earlier this week, I was asked to come up with my picks for the top five, a similar survey to the one I missed for the men, and it took a bit of thinking.

Like the men’s Trials in November, the women’s Trials will precede by a day a major international marathon, in this case, the venerable and historic Boston. I suspect much of Boston is still unaware of this fact, so here’s the quick summary: there’s another marathon this year, on Sunday the 20th, on a different course downtown, and the first three women will go to the Olympics. So it’s a Big Deal.

Unlike the men’s Trials, where we selected a pretty astounding team even though none of the ‘04 trio—including the Athens silver medalist—made it, the women’s field is not terribly deep. Of the ‘04 team, only Deena Kastor is even running; Jen Rhines has decided, with some justification, that the marathon isn’t for her, and Colleen De Reuck pulled out earlier this week, citing lack of fitness. (At 43, De Reuck can be excused for not bouncing back from having her second child as she did from her first, and after a career like hers, it’s also understandable that she wouldn’t want to race a hard marathon unless she felt she could compete for a spot on the team.)

Even after that, there are missing names. Kate McGregor, one of the top 10,000m runners in recent years, has opted out of the marathon trials, following similar reasoning to Rhines’. Marla Runyan, a U.S. champion in 2006, and an Olympian twice already (at 1,500m in 2000 and 5,000m in 2004) has been plagued by injuries and also won’t compete.

Kastor is still one of the world’s best, but the hole behind her in the U.S. list is yawning.

This is not to say there aren’t good marathoners in there. Elva Dryer and Kate O’Neill have both had credible runs at Majors marathons in 2007, and Blake Russell, who was 4th in ‘04 and essentially made the race that day in St. Louis, is both tough and determined. Magdalena Lewy Boulet, who was 5th in ‘04, is also back.

But none of these women are the kind of reliable international competitor that Kastor (or, for that matter, Ryan Hall and Dathan Ritzenhein, the first two at the men’s Trials) is. There’s still a lot of room for a dedicated outsider, like Jenny Spangler in ‘96 or Christine Clark in ‘00, to show up and steal a spot on the team. This should actually make things more exciting; not only does it promise surprises, it puts pressure on the pros to settle the team spots early, which is extraordinarily difficult to do.

It’s also possible that one of these women will make the Trials their stage to make the step up to international class, the way Hall did last November in Central Park.

It’s also worth noting that Emily LeVan, who could reasonably be expected to get a top-20 finish at the Trials, is still over $7000 away from her goal at twotrials.org. One hopes that marathon hasn’t hit the wall.

More on the Trials next week, no doubt…

Now Playing: Slowly Sinking by Leeroy Stagger

Technorati Tags: Boston, deena kastor, marathon, olympic trials, olympics, predictions, two trials

Posted by pjm at 9:03 PM | Comments (0)

Not in Central Park

Over the last few years I’ve mentioned to several people how great it would be to have the World Cross Country Championships in Central Park in New York City. There’s a sort of knee-jerk reaction among the New York running crowd that hears “cross country” and immediately thinks “Van Cortlandt Park,” but if you’re going to bring the world’s most competitive non-marathon distance race to New York, why stick it out in the Bronx? Put it on center stage!

I’m not sure if Mary Wittenberg is one of the people I’ve nagged with this idea (I can’t imagine that I would’ve missed the chance) but it looks like she’s actually run the numbers on the idea and, for the time being, ruled it out, according to this story by my Osaka press-tribune neighbor, Doug Gillon:

“We’d love to do it ourselves, and have looked at Central Park and Meadowlands Race Course New Jersey, where it was held in 1984 but unlike other New York Marathon events, we don’t own the TV rights or title sponsorship. Without concessions we’d be looking at quite a healthy bill, perhaps more then $3m. So right now we’re not planning to bid…”

So I suppose I’ll have to move that idea from the “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” pile to the “It would be cool if it was possible” pile.

Now Playing: Relative Surplus Value from Reunion Tour by The Weakerthans

Technorati Tags: athletics, cross country, iaaf, New York City, world championships

Posted by pjm at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)

A starting point

I have 39:56 on my watch. The official results have me at 40:02. I saw the clock at 39:57 as I finished. I like to think I was under 40, thank you. Maybe, like Beach to Beacon last year, which I ran in almost exactly the same time, it’s a chip-time/gun-time discrepancy.

And now I’ve done the biggest race in Western Massachusetts. It’s not too bad, if you ignore the hundreds of people who have no idea that if you’re going to run 8:00 pace, you have no business being in the first three rows at the start.

Posted by pjm at 6:48 PM | Comments (0)

I got my entry in

Something reminded me, Saturday evening, to put in my registration for Beach to Beacon, since it had opened registration (online only) that morning. When I registered, they said they had 950 spots left (of 5,500) as of 6 PM, 12 hours after registration opened. By 8 AM on Sunday, apparently, they were full and closed. (N.B. you can still get an entry if you’re willing to raise money for one of several associated race beneficiaries.)

I’ve run B2B four times that I can think of, including the first two (‘98 and ‘99). I’ve generally managed a pretty good start position, appropriate to my pace, and consequently the numbers haven’t bothered me. (In ‘98 I had an elite number, for reasons which were never made entirely clear to me.) I like the course and I think it’s possible to run a good time there if you’re well trained, the conditions are good (not the muggy humidity we had last year) and you’re smart about how you distribute your effort.

I also just filled out entry forms for two nearby races in coming weeks. One of them has a $25 early-entry fee which expires by mail on Friday. Online, it lasts into next week, but online you pay a $3 fee, which to me says, “We don’t really want you to enter online.” The second race costs $10 pre-race, $15 race-day, and has no online entry.

B2B is expensive, but there’s no extra charge for online entry—in fact, it’s online-only for the first time this year, so there’s only one way to enter, in advance and online. The point of having different fees is to steer runners to the route you want them to use. If races want runners to sign up online, they shouldn’t charge extra for the convenience. If they can’t afford the fees charged by services like Active.com, they should use another service… or not offer online registration.

Now Playing: This Dreadful Life from Cherry Marmalade by Kay Hanley

Technorati Tags: active.com, beach to beacon, online race entry, races, running

Posted by pjm at 9:51 AM | Comments (0)

Ever Greene

I implied but never really detailed my hour or so (in two half-hour sessions) with Maurice Greene in Valencia. Greene, who was the dominant 100m sprinter from ‘97 to ‘02 or so (and still won the ‘04 U.S. Olympic Trials and a bronze medal in Athens) announced his retirement earlier this year, and is now part of the IAAF’s “Ambassadors” program.

Greene was always as fast with his mouth as with his feet (among other stunts, he stripped off his spikes within seconds of crossing a finish line in first place, then doused them with a fire extinguisher) and it’s hard to imagine him building a successful career as, say, a rocket scientist.

But I discovered in Valencia something I probably could have figured out if I’d been paying attention: Greene knows and loves his sport, and is capable of communicating that enthusiasm in a relatively articulate manner. And while I won’t count on being invited over to see his gold medals, I thought we got along pretty well for two people of similar ages with practically nothing but this sport in common.

In other words, he’s a great ambassador. I suppose, having met his training partner Ato Boldon in Boston this winter, that I shouldn’t be surprised; Boldon himself, who picked up one of the minor medals in the slipstream of Michael Johnson’s Beamonesque 200m in Atlanta, is among the nicest guys you’d ever want to watch a track meet with.

The more I think about him, though, the more I want to know. Now that he’s retired, Greene has locked up a position as the fastest guy who’s never been busted, and that means something; the only retired sprinter with comparable credibility is Carl Lewis. Unlike some of his predecessors (e.g. Dennis Mitchell or Linford Christie) Greene didn’t get caught in some bizarre late-career trying-to-hang-on doping. He was never implicated in the BALCO mess. And some of his aspiring successors (e.g. Tim Montgomery or Justin Gatlin) went down in flames before they could even reach Greene’s longevity in the sport. This doesn’t mean Greene was clean, but unlike many cynics, I’m willing to give him the benefit of belief; I do think people can run that fast without doping, and I don’t have reason to believe that Greene didn’t.

But what a position he must have been in! People he knew, people he trained with, went down the doping path and got busted. He must have stood in the same position they did, at some point, and made the choice between (let’s be dramatic for a second) the dark side and the light side. He must have looked down that dark path, at least, and seen it from a perspective most of us haven’t. I’d love to hear what he has to say about that, among other things.

Now Playing: Everything Must Go from Left and Leaving by The Weakerthans

Technorati Tags: doping, iaaf, maurice greene, running, spikes, sprinters, valencia, world championships

Posted by pjm at 9:34 AM | Comments (2)

A lost opportunity

Someone was leaving a good chunk of cash on the table at the World Indoor Championships. I went out on Sunday to try to find some kind of souvenir concession—t-shirts, hats, whatever. At the big meets I’ve attended in Japan in ‘06 and ‘07, Mizuno (an IAAF sponsor) had at least a tent at the venue with shirts; in Osaka, they had rented an entire store near the stadium which was full of gear. (And I dropped some cash there.)

In Valencia? Nothing. Mizuno had a tent, but it was just Mizuno gear, nothing event-specific. I don’t know if it should’ve been the LOC (which is international athletics jargon for the Local Organizing Committee, the hosts of the event,) the IAAF themselves via the LOC, or Mizuno (or even the Spanish federation,) but somebody could have picked up a few thousand euros selling shirts. The only things I saw with the event logo were the volunteers’ jackets and the backpacks handed out to the press.

Posted by pjm at 7:17 PM | Comments (0)

Running in the river

This morning I ran in the Jardines de Turia, a long park about 150m-200m wide which runs in a broad arc around the historic center of Valencia. It’s a pretty decent place for a run; I had expected the park to end, eventually, or to be constantly stopping to wait for lights at major road crossings. Instead I found paths which apparently run somewhat more than five miles (I didn’t reach the end) and largely pass under bridges at major roads. In fact, the whole thing was, oddly, ten or twenty feet below the rest of the city. A minor stream ran along the park, but it’s a domesticated thing with pools and, I imagined, pumps somewhere to keep it flowing.

I saw quite a few runners down there, many apparently running with groups. (I also spotted a few Kenyans in town for the meet, so I knew I was in the right place.) It’s mainly concrete paths, but there are some dirt paths of the sort which have been hammered into stone by the tread of however many hundreds opted to avoid the too-hard concrete. (In other words, not much improvement.)

I discovered later that the park was, in fact, the old bed of the River Turia, and that the river had been rerouted to the south of the city after a catastrophic 1957 flood and turned into a massive park, not unlike if Boston drained the Charles from, say, Watertown to the sea and turned it into a park (though narrower, I suspect.)

One of these days I plan to run over to the port where the America’s Cup bases are (with the Swiss winning again last year, the expectation is that the next Cup will be held here as well, so the bases haven’t been dismantled—though the shop at the Alinghi base was running a 60% off sale when I walked there yesterday.) My hotel is as far as they get from the meet venue, but as close to the sea as any of the official meet hotels, so I’m happy to ride a bus back and forth. You can enter the beach there, which also goes for miles, but today the wind was brisk enough that I might have been sandblasted had I tried to run there.

Now Playing: Singing In My Sleep from Feeling Strangely Fine by Semisonic

Technorati Tags: flood, parks, rivers, running, sailing, valencia

Posted by pjm at 6:21 PM | Comments (0)

Supply and demand

There’s a long-standing theory that athletics (aka “track and field”) would be more popular as a spectator sport if its athletes earned the same sort of staggering sums common among international football players (for nearly all varieties of “football”,) basketball players, baseball players, etc.

It’s a theory with some contradictions, particularly given the fascinated disgust with which fans sometimes view the top end of the salary scale for the team-sport pros. The undeniable upside is that we associate high monetary values with importance; if we value these athletes highly, along with their training and performance, people will pay more attention to them.

So why don’t we? I’ve talked about how professional runners get paid here before, and even how small our bonuses are. The problem is in supply and demand.

Let’s assume the supply of athletes is pretty much constant across sports. (It is: you can always go down the talent scale and find enough to meet demand. It’s only when you set specific standards for performance that supply fluctuates, and as the Boston Marathon experience proves, setting minimum standards will create an incentive for many athletes to raise their performance level to meet that standard.) In running, we always talk about supply, though: how many men ran marathons under 2:08 or 2:10 in a given year, how many women ran under 2:30, etc.

That’s because running goes all weird on the other side of the scale: demand. The reason professional team-sports athletes get paid as much as they do is because there is competition between teams for their services. Johnny Damon isn’t getting paid as much as he is because the Yankees are seeing that kind of value from his playing; he’s getting paid as much as he is because the Yankees were willing to offer more than the Red Sox.

There’s no analog to this in athletics. It is true that some top marathoners (Olympic gold medalists, world record setters, previous Majors winners) can benefit from competition among the major marathons, but if anything this situation where demand exceeds limited supply and produces monetary reward for some athletes highlights the problem; if there were more athletes running at that level, demand would not necessarily increase, and the same pot of money would be spread between more athletes.

How do we solve that problem? I can think of two other sports with rich athletes and no teams: golf and tennis. We can probably drop golf, because golf is awash in sponsorship cash from advertisers who want to reach the (presumably affluent) spectators for that sport. (Golf is live on television more consistently than athletics, and yet athletics gets better ratings when it is televised. Golf is on more frequently because there are more advertising dollars to make it profitable for the networks.)

I’m not sure how tennis pays its stars. Sponsorships, sure, but we’re doing that, too. Do tennis players get appearance fees for the big tournaments? Is the prize money comparable to marathons or GP track meets? How many pro tennis players are full-time and how many are juggling part-time jobs to subsidize their pro tennis “career”? I don’t know the answers to that, but finance models from outside athletics are likely to be useful when we’re talking about improving the situations of our professional runners.

Now Playing: Wilderness from Angels of Destruction! by Marah

Technorati Tags: athletics, economics, marathon, races, track and field

Posted by pjm at 10:26 AM | Comments (2)

And in good news...

…no stories about doping so far this year. And the reporter who was writing the “no doping stories this year” article a few years ago did a story about how the U.S. men are getting internationally competitive in distance running, i.e. a positive story. We’ll take ‘em where we get ‘em.

Technorati Tags: athletics, doping, reporting, track and field

Posted by pjm at 4:24 PM | Comments (1)

A bit more about newspapers and track writing

Having hinted that there’s more to say about the state of newspaper coverage of track, it may also be helpful to look back on this little grouch I wrote almost two years ago, because that covers a lot of what’s wrong. (Go ahead, I’ll still be here when you come back.)

The issue I faced, more specifically, last night was that newspapers in general don’t consider athletics worth column inches in most cases. This isn’t universal—the New York Times has Frank Litsky here—but Litsky came up on Amtrak from New York, he didn’t fly from Minneapolis. The other papers present are local.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the problem of how newspapers in general plan to stay relevant and, indeed, in business in the internet age. Certainly their available budget is a big motivator for the actions they’re taking, but for right now, we’ll consider the budget a black box and just think of them as geo-located producers of news which have a regional bias determined by their location.

They have decisions to make about which sports they cover and how they cover them. For the most part, they’re opting to hit the widest possible population in their market, which means covering local teams in the major pro sports (baseball, football, basketball, and sometimes hockey,) and local or regional high school sports, generally also focusing on those same team sports but sometimes adding, say, soccer.

There is no room left for Olympic sports unless there’s a doping scandal or an actual Olympics. (There was a discussion in the media tribune this morning about how many major papers now have “doping correspondents”.) In some cases this isn’t a major problem; many papers can run the USATF press release unchanged and do fine. What we’re losing isn’t one more general story about the meet; we’re losing the localized viewpoint those papers bring to the event. The Kansas City Star would devote more column inches to Maurice Greene than anyone else in the country, and in the Internet age, that meant you could go to the Star if you wanted to read more about Greene.

My strikeout with the Twin Cities papers highlights this: Jenelle Deatherage was a runner-up for a national title, and qualified for her first-ever international team, and barely anyone talked to her. Her story from this meet is pretty much unavailable, and that’s a real loss.

The Foot Locker national cross country championships used to do research the local papers for all the athletes who made Nationals, and after the meet they would have all the runners, regardless of place, come in to a media center in shifts. The Foot Locker media staff would call the sports desks of these papers, one by one, and say, “Here’s the athlete, here’s where they placed, want to talk to them?” And they used to get a phenomenal number of local-newspaper stories about their event and about the runners who competed. These athletes’ local areas learned who the local stars were and learned to follow their progress.

It’s not happening like that anymore, at any level. I don’t know if the problem is the sport not spoon-feeding the papers the way Foot Locker did, and making itself easy to cover, or if the problem is that the papers just keep saying “Thanks, but no thanks.” But either situation isn’t helping the sport.

Technorati Tags: athletics, newspaper, reporting, track and field

Posted by pjm at 4:00 PM | Comments (0)

Newspapers don't care about track

At the suggestion of a colleague, I tried to drum up a little extra work for myself tonight. Jenelle Deatherage, who is based in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota, took second in the 1,500m, punching her ticket for the World Indoor Championships. (Which are in Spain in two weeks; perhaps I’ve mentioned them.) “Nobody’s here from the Minnesota papers,” they told me. “Call the Star Tribune and see if they’ll take a story if you get it there before their Sunday deadline. If they don’t bite, try the St. Paul Pioneer Press.”

So I called the switchboard of the Star Tribune, got a voice-directed robot to transfer me to the sports desk, and made my pitch. “Interesting,” they said. “If you’ve got a press release, send it to…” I’m not offering a press release, I said. Well, they replied, we’ll probably just cut it down and run a paragraph in the “briefs” somewhere anyway. I said if that was all they needed, there was probably already a release at the USATF site. Thanks, they said.

So I called the Pioneer Press. One “press three for…” and I got the news desk, who sent me to sports, who sent me back to news, me making my pitch each time. “No,” they said, “we wouldn’t really give a freelance assignment on anything like that.” So I suggested the USATF press release again, and they thanked me for bringing it to their attention.

This, I suspect, is par for the course in newspaper sports desks. Area woman makes her first international team of any sort in years of trying, but area newspaper doesn’t care, even with no football or baseball to write about. (There is hockey there, of course, and probably loads of high school sports at this point.) And I, for once being a little proactive about marketing myself as a writer, instead wound up essentially doing volunteer publicity work for USATF. Not necessarily a bad thing for the sport, but not a terribly effective use of my time.

I have a lot more to say about this—it’s a telling little anecdote—but I have a sort-of press release to write, and this was really just the warm-up.

Posted by pjm at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

Spirit of the Marathon

Last night I went to the “encore presentation” of Spirit of the Marathon down in Hadley. I’ve read a lot of rave reviews of the movie, but I came in with a somewhat more skeptical viewpoint.

The positives are many. The characters followed in the movie are fantastic: Deena Kastor displaying her “relentlessly positive” nature, training for Chicago ‘05 through a stress fracture in her foot; Daniel Njenga, twice third and once second in Chicago; graduate student Lori O’Connor, who probably could have convinced theaters-full of spectators to run marathons just on her own; and several other less speedy runners whose marathons went somewhat less smoothly. (One didn’t even start the marathon.) I liked seeing many of my friends and colleagues up on the screen, talking about the things they know best. (I never realized that the founders of the Boston Marathon drew a parallel between the legendary Pheidippides and Paul Revere, the rationale behind the great race’s Patriots’ Day scheduling.) And the movie made Chicago itself look spectacular; it’s like an hour-and-a-half advertisement for the Chicago Marathon and should go a long way towards repairing the damage done by the disastrous 2007 edition.

The filmmakers do a very good job presenting the essence of a big-city marathon: the crowds of otherwise non-athletic people dedicating hours and months to training, the sweep of the thing (there’s a spectacular aerial shot of the race start which just keeps panning up and up, looking farther and farther back in the crowd, and the crowd - just - never - ends.) They capture the scale of the undertaking very, very well, right down to the joke I always make about how the people who run the marathon are swearing never to do another and the people who watch are promising they’ll run next time. And I liked picking out faces in the “crowd,” like the men running around Deena Kastor in the marathon.

My problem with Spirit is with the tag line they use, a direct quote from an interview with Dick Beardsley in the opening minutes. “Once you cross that line, no matter how fast or how slow, your life will change forever.” Maybe so. But I’ve crossed the finish lines of three marathons (and the start lines of five, for what it’s worth) and I think it’s fair to say that none of them have changed my life.

I think the reason for this is that I’m not really the target audience for this film. I don’t need to be sold on the marathon; I bought in a long time ago (and then bought out when I realized that marathons aren’t for me.) I bought in on many of these ideas back in junior high school, when I first started running cross country; they’ve been part of my way of thinking for twenty years. My life was changed forever some time in eighth grade when I realized that the longer the race was, the more likely I was to outrun the other kids my age; there was no change left for the marathon.

I think this is one of the problems with the way the movie has been marketed in the U.S. The pattern has been promotion through running publications, running websites, and the running community; the only non-runners or non-marathoners (the ones who will really be seeing something new to them) who see the movie are ones brought to the showings by runners. Maybe that’s fine, but it seems like the audience the film speaks to and the one which actually turned up in the theater are a bit different.

The theater was about half-full (A said when she went, last month, it was almost completely full) and only six or seven of us sat through the credits for the “extra” features at the end. I can’t say they missed very much, to be honest, although it was fun to see a bit more of the work that went in to making the film at all.

Technorati Tags: Boston, chicago, deena kastor, marathon, movie, running

Posted by pjm at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

Reminder band

It’s been a few years since everyone in Athens (or who wished they were in Athens) was wearing a $1 yellow rubber wristband with LIVESTRONG printed on it, and the yellow-bracelet fad has pretty much passed. The True Believers are the ones still wearing theirs, and you can get similar bands in nearly any color at the corner convenience store, sometimes as a fundraiser for something, sometimes not.

I’ve come by two in the last six months or so, despite having passed them up for nearly four years. I got an orange one when I registered for the fall foliage walk put on by Amherst’s A Better Chance chapter. (I ran the course in a bit more than two hours.) More recently, I got a purple one from Two Trials which I’ve been wearing nearly every day.

I’m not going to try to explain Two Trials in three sentences or less. Go read the story, and you’ll get the idea. I ran with Emily for a few miles during the 2000 Boston Marathon (that was before she got good, and I figured out that marathons are not for me), and she and her husband have been a real part of the Mid-coast Maine community in recent years. I made my contribution on the first day the site opened, Maddie’s fourth birthday.

The inside of the band has an url from the manufacturer—reminderband.com—and it doesn’t really lend itself to forgetting. It’s loose enough on my wrists that I sometimes wonder if I could get it around both wrists; it doesn’t stuff easily inside the cuffs of my shirts. Having it bumping around in there does remind me periodically to check in and see what kind of progress Emily and Maddie are making. They’re not quite halfway at this point, with two months to the Olympic Trials.

Now Playing: Providence from Acoustic & Intimate by Steve Kilbey

Technorati Tags: emily levan, Maine, marathon, two trials

Posted by pjm at 9:54 AM | Comments (0)

And the other ten percent?

Dave McGillivray, race director of the Boston Marathon and, this year, the Olympic Trials Women’s Marathon, is interviewed today on runnersworld.com. Talking about the Trials course which crosses the Charles on Massachusetts Avenue (the “Smoot bridge”), he says,

…I’ve run over that bridge and on Memorial Drive over 1,000 times. Eighty percent of the time, it’s the most enjoyable run I have all year. And then ten percent of the time, it can be windy.

I guess what Dave’s not saying is that the other ten percent of the time, it’s driving snow in his face.

Now Playing: The Deep Ache Mix from Parallel Universe by The Church

Technorati Tags: Boston, cambridge, marathon, olympics, weather

Posted by pjm at 9:24 AM | Comments (2)

Where are the women's movies?

I got sent a link today about Born to Run, which isn’t surprising given my known interests. However, it would probably be a surprise to the link sender to know that I finished watching the trailer feeling mildly annoyed.

Before I get started: Born to Run, based what I could work out from the trailer, is a film about several top-flight American distance runners training for the Olympic Trials Marathon held last November in New York City. It focuses on their training, their lives, and their backgrounds, tracing them up to the race itself. (It happens that one of their athletes, Ryan Hall, won the race.) The trailer is full of driving music at the interface of hip-hop and rock, lots of funky camera angles and shots out the windows of cars as the athletes go on their punishing training runs. It looks exciting; it looks like something that makes distance running, even marathoning, look kind of cool. So far, so good.

But this is where I apparently lose the plot. First, I had this feeling that I’d seen this film already, and within a minute I came up with not one, but two recent direct-to-DVD productions following the same path with different races: Five Thousand Meters (Nothing Comes Easy), about the men’s 5,000m final at the 2004 Olympic Track Trials (a curiously depressing film, since the athletes on screen spend so much time talking about how hard they work and how little return they see on that work), and last year’s Showdown, about the 2007 USATF cross-country championships.

Both movies followed the same pattern (apparently) that Born to Run appears to follow; I have to wonder if the different event (the marathon) is likely to make a notably different movie in any way. There’s the tantalizing offer of race footage from major races like the 10,000m at USATF Nationals in Indianapolis last June, but I honestly don’t have a whole lot of appetite, at this point in time, for more gaunt young men telling me how hard they’