Flat Hills Road

The Boston Indoor Games announced their date earlier this month. It will be later than usual: February 7. If that date looks familiar, that’s because it’s also the date of the USATF cross country championships, to be held in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Adding another line to the unusual spring schedule is the Millrose Games, scheduled for Friday evening, January 30.

I call this “unusual” because normally those three meets are spread over three weeks: first Boston, then Millrose the following weekend (though there have been years, earlier this decade when Millrose was Friday night and the Boston Indoor Games followed on Saturday evening). Cross country would be the third weekend, usually overlapping with the Tyson Invitational indoor meet in Arkansas (though in 2004, cross country overlapped with the men’s Olympic Marathon Trials).

It’s pretty easy to guess at why this happened. USATF scheduled their cross country meet ages ago, and date-wise, they’re not too far from where they usually are; if anything, a week early.

Millrose and the Boston Indoor Games, both put on by Mark Wetmore’s Global Athletics and Marketing group, probably had a tougher time. Global likes to dodge the NFL playoffs in order to get the full attention of the Boston sports press, but they also had to schedule Millrose in Madison Square Garden around the Knicks and the Rangers. Friday, February 6th is a Knicks game (hosting the Boston Celtics, of all teams) and Global needs time to set up and break down the Garden’s track. So January 30 it had to be, and the track will be going up in a hurry after a Kings of Leon concert in the Garden on Thursday night. (The Knicks won’t take the floor back until Monday the 2nd.)

That leaves three options for the Boston Indoor Games, none of them terribly good. They could go early, and run on January 24th; they could follow Millrose immediately on Saturday the 31st, and they could conflict with USATF on February 7th.

I’m guessing January 31st was vetoed immediately by the Global staff, considering that the consecutive-weeks schedule has been tough enough for them since Global added Millrose to their portfolio. The Reggie Lewis Center is booked for the MSTCA Relays meet from 9:30 to 3 on the 24th; this nominally leaves the evening for the Boston Indoor Games, which usually starts at 5, but two hours isn’t enough to set up for the meet, so assuming that was previously scheduled, February 7th was the only option left.

The interesting problem is what this means for the fields at the Boston Indoor Games. While the middle-distance and sprint events are unlikely to be affected, the backbone of the BIG in recent years has been record attempts at the 3,000m, 5,000m and two-mile distances by various international (often Ethiopian) stars. These athletes will be available, of course (and Commonwealth stars like Nick Willis and Steve Hooker have already been announced), but the field has generally been filled by Americans hoping to get a quick clocking in the Ethiopian slipstream. (Indeed, Shalane Flanagan’s 2007 3,000m AR was set here, signifying the start of a big year for an athlete who was known to much of the crowd from when she was an in-state high school star.)

With no World Indoor Championships this year, most distance runners will be emphasizing cross country over indoor track, vying for a spot on the U.S. team for World Cross in Amman, Jordan in March. This will probably mean a big hit for the distance fields in Boston–if not in front, then in 3rd through 6th. And possibly in crowd interest.

(For the curious, I’ll be at the Boston Indoor Games for certain, and possibly also the Millrose Games.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under boston, cross country, indoor track, millrose games, usatf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.