Flat Hills Road

(My stories from Day Two and Day Three are online. It’s been busy here.)

The buzz in Eugene since yesterday evening has been about Nicole Bush. The runner-up at the NCAA women’s steeplechase, from Michigan State, Bush finished third in her heat on Friday evening and was visibly limping afterward. This wasn’t odd–several of the women were limping, and several including co-favorite Jenny Barringer told officials and reporters that the water barrier was at 36 inches (the men’s height), not 30 inches (the women’s height.)

Bush, when asked, told David Monti of Race Results Weekly that it “might be” an ankle injury. Turns out she broke her foot, which makes her both more impressive (she finished a steeplechase on a broken foot? And finished third?) and all the more tragic (a healthy Bush might have contended for the third spot on the World Championships team, and now she may not even be running again by Berlin).

It’s hard not to get a little frustrated about this. Earlier this season, there was an incident in the men’s 400m hurdles at Carson where the last women’s hurdle flight was left on the track, so the men found their last flight both lower and earlier than they expected it. Now we can’t get all the women’s steeple barriers the right height.

What’s more, it was obvious after the first round of the race, when the women came off the track, that there was a problem. Jenny Barringer hits those barriers every day; she could probably tell the difference between 35 inches and 36. So what is USATF to do? They could set the barrier correctly for the second heat, giving them a safer race but a clear advantage in qualifying and an utter mess for selecting the final. Or they could leave it as is, risking more injuries but giving both heats the same disadvantage. They apparently chose the latter (to be fair, they didn’t know Bush was injured at the time) but who knows if it was the right decision.

Doug Logan made some statements to the TAFWA breakfast on Friday about accountability, transparency, and ownership of issues. I’m not sure if this is a USATF issue or an Oregon issue, but I’m curious to see if, today, someone takes ownership of the issue and creates some transparency around those steeplechase rounds. It’s an unfortunate situation with lots of losers and no clear villians.

Update: The Register Guard is all over the story, of course. They say it’s a USATF issue, and Logan is in accept-and-apologize mode. And they quote Kara June on the same safety-or-fairness question. Well done, R-G.

My article about Masters middle-distance ace Scott Hartley is in the CrossFit Journal today. The Journal is a pay site, so I won’t be posting the text here. Hartley is a very interesting story in that he’s faced problems common to a lot of runners, but his solution to those problems (that problem) has been decidedly uncommon. It’s not clear to me whether his approach would work for true distance runners (10K and up) as well as it does for Scott as a middle-distance guy, but so far I haven’t heard of anyone at his level who has tried.

“…medicine is totally trial and error. And it is really time consuming trial and error because the body can take a long time to respond and long time to heal.” –a friend with medical problems far more serious than mine

I’ve been struggling since December with a round of Iliotibial Band Syndrome, or ITBS. It’s a well-known problem for runners at all levels (when I wrote a column about my last bout, six years ago, I got a sympathetic email from Craig Masback) and because the fundamental problem is tightness and inflammation, it takes a long time to go away.

After a winter of self-pity, weight gain, and runs of 20 to 30 minutes, I adopted a ritual of stretching and stability exercises which allowed me to extend out to about an hour pain-free–sometimes. That’s been in place for about a month and a half and I seemed to have reached a recovery plateau.

We have a theory here that some really stubborn injuries will only go away when faced with another injury. My last round of ITBS tagged off to plantar fasciitis (another familiar running ailment). I’ve retreated to the pool and resolved my running injuries by incurring overuse swimming injuries. I’ve known people whose running pains went away after they went skiing and broke an arm.

Sunday, I was on a trail run with a small group of dedicated psychotics. After a moderate “out” leg, we returned at a pretty brisk pace, and along the way I hooked a toe on one of the trail’s duckboards and went down hard among some roots. The bad part, I told them later, wasn’t the fall; it was the bounce and the slide which followed. I got up, caught my breath, inventoried all mission-critical parts and found them functioning, and we finished the run.

The total haul included some minor abrasions on my right hand and right quad, a more dramatic-looking scrape along the lower part of my breastbone, and another scrape and some very vivid bruises on my left forearm. 48 hours later, the scrapes are fading, but Sunday afternoon I was wondering if I had cracked a rib.

I’ve also done three runs totaling about 2:40 since then, and haven’t had even a tiny twinge of pain from the ITBS.