Flat Hills Road

A few weeks ago, I read Matt McCue’s An Honorable Run, which has had a lot of buzz this fall. McCue’s book is a memoir of his high school career in Iowa, his eventual decision to pass up a spot at Middlebury (where he would have been among the best on a relatively good Division 3 team) to try to walk on at the University of Colorado, and his relationship with both his coaches.

McCue makes no secret of his admiration for Chris Lear’s Running with the Buffaloes, a chronicle of Colorado’s 1998 season (was that really eleven years ago?) and that’s understandable; Buffaloes continues to fascinate and inspire high school and collegiate runners today, and to me its biggest mystery is why nobody has yet followed the path it blazed. (Someone needs to follow a women’s team, for example.) An Honorable Run reverently draws a lot of structure and voice from Lear’s book, but it’s not Running with the Buffaloes II.

For McCue, Colorado’s Mark Wetmore is largely quiet and off-stage, more like the Wizard of Oz than Vince Lombardi. For another thing, unlike the ensemble cast of Lear’s book, McCue’s journey is entirely his own, with the supporting characters literally just that. Only late in the book does a strong secondary character emerge.

It feels like self-absorption, but the reality is that McCue is pulling us along his own maturation process in the book, and the self-centered focus of the book is simply the way a teenaged boy thinks. The supporting characters crop up as McCue himself matures and starts recognizing them himself.

In the process he’s delivering a number of ideas which should be on the exam for kids who read Lear and want to be the next Adam Goucher. McCue underlines a point which should be obvious today, that it takes hardworking kids like Matt McCue to push talented stars like Jorge Torres and Dathan Ritzenhein to their best. (If you want more Meb Keflezghis and Ryan Halls, you need more Brian Sells and Scott Bauhses. If you want more Brian Sells, you need more Nate Jenkinses. And so on.)

In doing this, McCue provides a script for a life which may not lead to an Olympic medal, but still includes a meaningful running component. The idea of “an honorable run” is a direct echo of the idea of “fighting the long defeat” which Tracy Kidder ascribes to Dr. Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains.

And in the end, An Honorable Run is to Running with the Buffaloes what Matt McCue is to Jorge Torres: not as fast, not as glamorous, but different and just as worthwhile to read and consider.

This year’s TAFWA (Track and Field Writers of America) breakfast was the longest I’ve ever attended, but it included presentations from three top USATF officials, five of the six runners who made the 10,000m team for Berlin last night, and a few words from Alberto Salazar, not to mention the annual awards presentations. I’ll attempt to have a better report on tafwa.org soon, but there were two bits I found particularly interesting.

First, Doug Logan talking about the new Nike deal for USATF described the athlete support section in a way which reminded me strongly of Logan’s old job at MLS. Logan is (justifiably) unhappy with the dominant role of agents and shoe-company sponsors in the sport, and claims to have a long-term plan to change how sponsorship and athlete support work in the sport, at least in this country. This deal provides a clue, as USATF is wading in to bridging the gap between collegiate competition and competent, mature professional athletes.

It’s a great selling point, because post-collegiate support was a major complaint in the Project 30 report, but it’s also likely to disappoint the shoe companies and agents because it begins the process of having all athletes essentially sponsored by the federation. This is the MLS model, where all players are contracted and paid by the league, not the teams. It’s a little like socialism in that it suppresses the open sponsorship market for athletes, and it may undercut how much the top athletes get paid, but it may also spread the available sponsorship money across a broader base of athletes, and if it works in that way it might be worth the trouble.

(As an aside, there is widespread disappointment in Eugene that many of our sport’s stars aren’t running “their” events because they have byes through to Berlin. Bernard Lagat is at least putting on a show in the 800m, but Wariner in the 200m and Tyson Gay running just one round are both wet firecrackers. Those who complain about this largely blame the agents, not the athletes. I think the real problem is that stars like Wariner and Gay aren’t going to be competing inside the live television window.)

Interesting fragment #2 came when Alberto Salazar, usually one who shuns the spotlight, followed two of his athletes to the podium and delivered a brief, apparently unscripted minute of praise for his colleague, Jerry Schumacher, and a number of other coaches around the country (Terrence Mahon was also mentioned by name). As part of this, Salazar mentioned that he thought a coach could only develop and mentor six or seven top-level athletes at once, and that he wanted to continue to attract top-flight coaches like Schumacher to Portland, each coaching a small group of developing athletes under the Oregon Track Club umbrella and support structure, as long as he could persuade Nike to keep funding it. Considering the success he and Schumacher have been having in the last few years, I tend to think this is a good idea. Questions: who’s next?

(Full disclosure: I am a nominee to be Vice President of TAFWA starting next year; the elections are happening later this year, and so far as I know there are no other nominees. Join now if you want to vote against me.)

By now everyone’s heard that Shalane Flanagan is no longer coached by John Cook, the caustic impresario Nike coaxed out of retirement to bring her back from catastrophic injury in 2006. And probably, everybody has read the article from Sunday’s Washington Times in which Cook suggests that Flanagan and her husband, Steve Edwards, had been planning this coup for a while.

I don’t know anything more about the split than anyone else, and I don’t doubt that Steve Nearman, who wrote the article, got his facts and quotes right. (I’ve criticized Nearman before for his Alan Webb critiques and for his look at James Madison’s athletic downsizing.)

We’re not told how Cook was lined up to coach Flanagan in the first place. I’m guessing someone other than Flanagan was paying the bills at first. Cook’s jab about “loyalty is hard to find” ignores the possibility that Flanagan might just be more loyal to Erin Donohue, her teammate since 2000, than Cook, her coach since 2006. And while Cook may or may not be right about Donohue’s potential (she’s right to say if that’s how he thinks, he shouldn’t be her coach,) nobody has asked this coach “who has made friends and foes with his directness” whether he considered the effect dumping Donohue would have on his relationship with Flanagan.

I’m guessing yes. Other reporters have told me that in Beijing, Cook had nothing but good things to say about Edwards, but now he’s claiming “I was warned … to keep an eye on him.” So either the warning came after Beijing, or Cook is capable of being polite for the sake of politics. And maybe he just got tired of the situation, for whatever reason, and decided to light the fuse by cutting down Donohue.

Cook has been around the block a few times. I doubt there are any angels in this situation, but painting Cook as a sympathetic character is an interesting approach.

Update 2/10: I’ve removed some text from the original post, and clarified some pronouns where the edits made them unclear.

Also, to add about coaches’ pay: It’s more common for coaches of professionals, especially distance runners, to not be paid than for them to be paid by the athletes. Many coaches are still employed by college teams, others are funded through other paying athletes, and others are paid for by the athlete’s sponsors. (Coaches I know have been approached by sponsors specifically to protect the sponsor’s investment in a developing athlete.) I won’t argue whether this is right or not, and obviously it works better for some coaches than others, but I think it’s a red herring here. The danger of this split isn’t in who paid or didn’t pay who; it’s who is now going to be willing to join the Flanagan/Edwards team with Cook’s non-endorsement on the record, and for that matter, who’s going to be interested in working with Cook, although I’m guessing (again) that he’s not very worried about that.

Kara Goucher told us that Coach Bill Squires, who advised her coach, Alberto Salazar, as he trained for the Boston Marathon, came out to one of her workouts this week and was briefing her on the Boston course.

Knowing Coach Squires, I asked, “Did the workout start on time?”

“Well,” she admitted, “we may have been delayed a bit.”