Flat Hills Road

Among the many projects I’ve been working on recently, I’ve been helping Alison Wade bring content back to her site, eliterunning.com. Site hosting fees were making the site an economic drag, and I’ve been putting some spare time into building a more lightweight site structure which could be hosted less expensively. We’re still ironing out the kinks in the system, including bringing back the 80,000+ photos Alison posted on the old site from 2006-2008, but meanwhile the new site is open and ready to grow. If you bother reading this site, you’ll probably like that one.

Monday evening I was at an organizational meeting for the Boston Marathon press room. The marathon (or, as it’s spelled around here, The Marathon) was six weeks away, but there is plenty to do in that time for an event of that scale. Boston is also the next significant event on my calendar, so I’m looking forward to it.

This will be my seventh year in this particular job at Boston, and my fifteenth consecutive year at the marathon. (My first, in ‘95, I was just a spectator; since then I’ve been working in some capacity every year but 2000, when I attempted to run.) For someone my age, that seems like a long time, but almost without exception, the other team captains at Monday evening’s meeting had been associated with the race since the early ’90s, or in some cases the early ’80s. Even if I counted all my thirteen years in the press room and not just my seven years in this job, I would still be the new guy in the room.

This is a strength Boston has which is often overlooked. The longevity of the staff in the press room is echoed throughout the race’s structure. There are team captains running water stops who were there when Bill Rodgers was winning. The captains can count on teams which are largely the same year after year. Few, if any, races can claim that degree of cumulative experience, and to some degree that’s what makes the race work.

The marathon has changed, of course, and changes a little more every year, but for the veterans it has been an incremental change. They aren’t coming in on April 20 and facing 20,000 athletes for the first time. The race may no longer start at noon, but for the veterans that just means, “We do the same thing two hours earlier.”

There’s a page in the marathon press guide listing all the “streakers” who have run Boston annually for many years. If I recall correctly, you need more than 25 consecutive finishes to even make the list; these are people who made Boston an annual ritual before I was even a runner. It’s easier to keep a streak going on the volunteer side, of course, but I think it might be interesting to talk to some of the many volunteers with long “streaks” at Boston.

I’m usually tickled to find a good joke (usually a pun) in a news story, and for some reason England’s Mohammed “Mo” Farah seems to bring up a lot of them.

Before the 3,000m final at this weekend’s European Championships, for example, Peter Gambaccini pointed out in runnersworld.com’s Racing News that Farah’s main competition was expected to be Spain’s Jesus Espana.

Yes, that’s right…it’s Mohammed vs. Jesus. Write the next line yourself.

Now that Farah has won, of course, it falls to the British press to hand out the lines, such as:

It was the first success story for the Britain team in Turin: Farah, from the madding crowd.

(Like many nationally-competitive distance runners in the USA these days, Farah was born in Somalia and emigrated at a young age to escape the chaos of that country. One wonders if Somalia might rank with Eritrea as a challenger to Ethiopian and Kenyan dominance if they were capable of developing athletes themselves. Think Abdi Bile.)

I’m not a fan of Will Ferrell’s movies, for the most part; it’s just not a kind of comedy which makes me laugh. But Steve Hooker, now the second-highest pole vaulter in the world, is a big fan. After the Olympics, when Ferrell and sometime-sidekick John C. Reilly were in Australia promoting a movie, they turned up on a talk show dressed like Hooker.

I was thinking recently that this was probably a good thing for Hooker when it came to dealing with his success and, to some degree, fame. When your favorite entertainment centers on self-ridicule and skewering the self-important, there’s some significant cognitive dissonance to overcome before becoming self-important.

I had actually considered not going to USATF Indoors, but I got an assignment. Here’s the result.

Running USA, of course, is only interested in distance runners. The schedule placed both men’s and women’s 3,000m finals and the men’s 1,500m on Saturday, and the women’s 1,500m on Sunday, for reasons beyond my understanding. This meant I made an extra trip from Amherst to Boston and back on Sunday to watch one race. I grumbled a bit about this to myself, but really the problem was the narrow scope of the assignment and nothing else.

(The trip wasn’t wasted, of course, because I did get to watch the 800m finals, which were pretty cool if not terribly competitive; I’m going to be interested to see what Katie Waits does in the outdoor season. And also, the men’s shot put final, which for the first time since I started paying attention to the event was won by someone not named Nelson, Godina, Hoffa or Cantwell. In fact, I think there’s a pretty decent corps of young putters out there ready to take over.)

I filed another story this weekend, a longer-term project for the Boston Marathon program. Due to its relatively-limited availability, I’ll post it here after the marathon in April.

Rob Myers has never:

• won an NCAA title
• been ranked #1 in the USA in his event
• set a record beyond the state high school level
• made an Olympic team (he’s tried twice)
• advanced past the semifinal of a World Championship
• won an outdoor national title
• won a major open (i.e. European) race

Maybe that’s why he’s so often overlooked. for this year’s USATF Indoor Championships, most people picked him third with the competition expected to be between Alan Webb and Chris Lukezic at the front. (The latter has, to be fair, been having a great season.)

Last night in Boston, Rob Myers won his third USATF indoor championship in the 1,500m (or mile–the distance seems to go back and forth.) I don’t know how many he’s going to have to win before people take him seriously. The first two were often dismissed on the grounds of weak competition, and certainly his 2004 win would count as a “steal” considering how unknown he was at the time, but this year he took Webb to the line.

I’m not going to try to argue that Rob Myers is a world-beater, but he’s regularly beating guys who are supposed to be world-class. Isn’t it time we stopped being surprised when he wins national titles?

I feel a little bad about that headline, but there’s some truth behind it. Yesterday, I came to the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletics Center (RLTAC, an abbreviation often used and rarely explained) from Boston University, where the New England Intercollegiate Championships was being held. (Maybe some other time I’ll try to explain the meet I used to know as “Big New Englands.”) B.U.’s fieldhouse was packed with athletes, coaches, some parents, and miscellaneous fans like myself. Once the rounds were over and the afternoon session was in full swing, they were moving new races on to the track as soon as the previous race was over, not quite as quickly as Penn Relays but still pretty briskly. Every athlete in every race had a built-in fan base in their team, and no lap of any race went by in silence.

So going in to Reggie was quite a contrast. Sitting in the two-thirds-empty press risers, I discussed other results around the country–Kim Smith, Jenny Barringer, German Fernandez–with another reporter, who wondered out loud, “Do you ever think we’re at the wrong meet?” The press wasn’t there (many of them, wisely, preferring various NCAA conference meets,) the fans weren’t there, and even many of the athletes didn’t show up. (Only one of the men’s shot put’s “big three” will be putting this afternoon.)

It’s not Boston; the meet has actually improved dramatically since the days when an overly-optimistic contract doomed the event to several years of anonymous existence in Atlanta’s cavernous Georgia Dome. There was a lot of energy (but very little space) the year it was held in New York City’s Armory. But it’s really hard to go to the Boston Indoor Games at RLTAC and then come back three weeks later for a “national championship” meet which has less energy and enthusiasm than an essentially meaningless collegiate meet across town.

Larry Eder has a series of observations about what’s wrong with the USATF Indoor meet and constructive suggestions for improving them at RunBlogRun. I can’t speak to the quality of his suggestions, but he has more and more thoughtful ones than I do.