Flat Hills Road

What we really want to do is tell you how to understand what you’re going to see tomorrow, whether you’re watching it on TV or out on the course. I’ve been tossing around a bunch of ideas over the last day or two; some of them I’ve been talked out of, others I’m hanging on to.

A marathon, for a spectator, is a lot like reading a very long novel. In particular, like reading a very long novel which doesn’t appear to be strong in the plot department. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of apparently meaningless events and details which don’t seem to be approaching resolution, and then suddenly in fifty intense pages it’s all tied up neat in a bow. You’d think you could just tune in for the last 30 minutes of the race and get everything you need to enjoy it, but the fact is that those first two hours or so, before the fireworks start, are just as important. They’re building up all the characters and ideas and questions that will be resolved later. Just tuning in for the resolution means missing out to some degree.

Knowing the characters never hurts. One plot-line which has been suggested for this year’s men’s race goes like this: Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot is the protagonist. He was selected for the Kenyan Olympic team but withdrew due to injury, since healed. He’s run only one race since last year’s Boston, but the races run by his training partners in recent weeks suggest that he’s in phenomenal condition. He knows this course like nobody else running. He’ll wait for the hills, then try to bash everyone else to pieces on the climbs and cruise in to the city as the victor.

The spoilers in this scenario are a trio. His training partner, Evans Cheruiyot, is every bit as strong and has a faster PR. Evans knows Robert will work harder and run faster if pushed, so he will wait, shadow, and if he’s still in touch after the hills, make his move then.

Deriba Merga, the Ethiopian, is a wild card. He has the restraint of a compulsive gambler and the speed of a thoroughbred. His aggressive tactics have lost him more than one victory in the past (including a medal in Beijing) but his manager promises that he’ll do nothing but wait this year. His manager also admits that Merga is sometimes beyond controlling.

Finally we come to Ryan Hall, the American, the man who would be king. Hall has a mindset which is unfazed by pressure and expectations (he sees them as validations that he’s doing the right thing) and not crushed by them. He can run downhill as well as anybody. Where does he fit in all this? Is he Fifth Business, as he was in his PR run in London? Is he even a character? Does he wait, wait, wait until Kenmore and then try to crush everyone on a wave of crowd support? Or does he get chipped off the pack in the hills and passed by Brian Sell somewhere in Brookline?

There’s been a paradigm shift since Beijing. You can’t be just a strength runner or a speed runner anymore; you have to be able to deploy strength tactics at a speed pace. Sammy Wanjiru has the speed of a Tergat and the strategy of a Tanui. That’s the new standard. What happens when that hits the Boston course, which historically rewards patience and ruins hubris?

My article from yesterday’s press conference is posted as of this morning. I have to say, though, that I was frustrated with the amount of information I was able to gather at the press conference (little) and more than a little confused by the behavior of defending champion Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot.

I don’t want to make excuses for myself here; the situation, as I see it, is that Boston’s press conference setup is uniquely challenging and really requires a solo reporter to be on their “A” game, and I was not.

John Hancock sets up the press conference like an open market. After a welcoming statement from a JH official, the athletes are distributed to a dozen or so tables around the room, two or three runners per table. Reporters then go directly to the athletes they need. The advantage to this is that more athletes are available (twenty or thirty) than would be the case at a New York or Chicago pre-race, which brings in three or four athletes each for three or four press conferences. The disadvantage is that a solo reporter has to circulate around multiple previous champions and interesting contenders, asking the same questions half a dozen other reporters have already asked, in a noisy environment, often with sketchy interpreters.

Big outlets (Runner’s World, major newspapers) take a divide-and-conquer approach to the press conference, bringing four or five reporters and producing multiple stories. The setup works well for them. It worked less well for me, and I’m afraid the story shows it.

The other thing which threw me was four-time champion Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot. I didn’t know it when I approached him, but “the Mwafrika” is extremely reticent before races. He’s gracious, so he’ll respond politely to every question, but he’s not going to give you what you want. At least, not me. For a moment I wondered if he was actually in touch with reality, but I’m pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing; I just didn’t have the background to understand what was going on.

I’d really love it if John Hancock moved to a more organized press conference format in the future.

Ryan Hall and Kara Goucher, for the record, were mobbed.

I’m in Boston for the day. I’ll be back tomorrow to stay until after the race on Monday, and believe me, it’s going to be busy. There’s an immense amount of energy spent, before this race like no other I go to, on discussing the possibilities. Who might challenge? How might they do it?

I did a preview for the IAAF last night, and in the wake of this morning’s press conference I should have two more pieces up there in the next few days. (I’ll link them as they appear.) I have two copies of the program, which means I should be posting my feature (feature! I had a feature!) after the race is over.

And I’ll have dozens of bits and pieces which won’t make complete stories, which I will post here if I have time.

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.

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.”

An emailed press release today informed me that the PRRO circuit was “easing its bonus purse eligibility.”

I’m proud of them, I suppose, but I needed to read the whole release to figure out what the original bonus purse eligibility had been.

One of the common themes when carping about distance running’s relatively low profile in the American sports landscape is that Running Needs a Circuit. Or a league, or a tour, or something to compare with NASCAR or the PGA Tour or the NBA. All kinds of formats get proposed, but none of them ever happen, mostly because road races are independent organizations with no real national governance, and none of the formats offer the races much to make up for the degree of autonomy they would have to give up. Beyond that, distance running puts strains on athletes not found in car racing or golf; few runners are capable of racing at a high level for several weekends in a row.

The other reason they never happen is because two road racing circuits already exist, and very few people care.

When I was working at Runner’s World, there was a reader survey done which revealed that more Runner’s World readers claimed to read Running Times as well than Running Times claimed to have readers. This was probably due to sampling error (or, by now, my faulty memory) but it suggested to us that RW and RT had close to total audience duplication. The question was asked, “Should we just buy them and absorb them?” That idea was rejected, finally, because as long as RT existed, but remained relatively small, it was a disincentive for others to enter the running magazine business. After all, RT was trying to compete with RW already; surely there wasn’t much room left in the market, right? (Of course, RW did buy RT less than ten years later, but under different leadership with different ideas.)

This thinking was pretty attractive, but it relies on a leap of logic – that RT not winning significant market share from RW meant that competing in the running-magazine market would be an uphill fight – which isn’t necessarily true. RT’s existence only proved that there was limited room to compete with RW in the way RT was trying to compete. The question to ask of new running magazines was not, “Why do you think there’s a market for a new running magazine,” but “What are you doing which will give you a greater share of the market than RT has?”

So I’m not inclined to dismiss new running circuit ideas out of hand. But I do suggest that reasonable skepticism be applied, specifically this question: Why is this circuit going to be a greater success than the PRRO and USARC put together?

Neither of these circuits is a failure; if they were, they wouldn’t have survived as long as they have. However, they both have limited definitions of success. USARC is run by USATF and is essentially a circuit of national championship road races. As such, it focuses exclusively on American athletes. There is a point system for placing at series races, double points are awarded for the marathon championship, and the athlete with the most points at the end of the circuit wins an extra check, $6,000 in 2008. There are lesser checks for second and third. I’d be surprised to learn that any athlete earned more from the USARC itself than from prize money in the races necessary to win the USARC check, but it’s also worth noting that the athlete’s sponsorship contract may match all these winnings.

The PRRO may have been the incentive for the USARC. If you can think of a big road race, probably in the spring or summer, with a large field and about ten Kenyans in the lead, it’s probably a PRRO race. Boilermaker, Peachtree, Cherry Blossom, and Bloomsday, plus the World’s Best 10K in Puerto Rico, were the PRRO races in 2008. The PRRO offers a “bonus purse” (eligibility for which is the subject of the press release mentioned above) of $35,000, significantly higher than the USARC. However, the PRRO bonus has been won by runners from East Africa so consistently in the last two decades that relatively few people in the USA (probably fewer than a thousand) know or care who won last year. Aside from the size of the prize purse, the major division between the PRRO and USARC is that the former is all-comers, and the latter is for Americans only.

Now that I’ve laid out the pitfalls of the existing systems (which, I should add, work just fine for their own purposes,) we need to ask those who propose new circuits or schemes for team competition: why is this going to be more exciting and more involving than USARC and PRRO?

Those of you with long memories will remember that I once held a spot in a sixteen-writer rotation producing a weekday “Bell Lap” column for the “Daily News” section of the Runner’s World website. (The Daily News has now evolved into an excellent linkblog maintained by the incomparable Peter Gambaccini. The Bell Lap column was launched by Craig Masback in 1996, before he was the CEO of USATF, and lasted almost ten years under various authorial rotations.)

Late in 2003, I filed a column about the scheduling conflict between the men’s Olympic Trials marathon and the 2004 USATF cross country championships. The Bell Lap archives aren’t online any more (unless you do some serious research in the Internet Archive) so, having had my say about this year’s conflict between USATF cross country and the Boston Indoor Games, I thought I’d get an extra kick in by re-posting what I said in 2003. Re-reading it, I can see some changes I’d like to make, but I’ll post it as it ran on Thursday, October 30.

Lost in the Trials Shadow

A colleague of mine recently pointed out a scheduling convergence happening this winter. On February 7, USATF will– standards willing–select its Olympic team members for the men’s marathon in Birmingham, Alabama. On the same day, in Indianapolis, they will select half of their team for the World Cross-Country Championships, including the short-course men, long-course women, and junior girls, with the other half (including the long-course men) being selected the following day.

It is possible that a reasonably psychotic (and fast-recovering) marathoner might hop a flight out of Birmingham on Saturday night and try to make the long-course team on Sunday, but it is probably safe to say that this scheduling oversight has eliminated any marathon hopefuls from our selection pool for World Cross. (It will also erase any hope of American men in the 3,000m at Friday night’s Millrose Games, but let’s stick to areas where we have a hope.)

It’s hard to say how much rescheduling the meets would help. Pushing cross nationals earlier probably wouldn’t help, as few athletes would want to make that peak effort immediately before a marathon. Making cross nationals later might open things up, since a star having a bad marathon could drop out before he did much damage and come back two weeks later to work out his demons in the Indianapolis snowdrifts. (It’s February, folks. Forget the spikes; bring crampons.)

More of an issue is the national press. Admittedly the winter nationals seldom draw the sort of crowd we will see Sunday at the New York City Marathon, but certain organizations with limited human resources, such as this one, will probably send all their bodies to Birmingham.

This seems like a minor problem until you consider how few sources are regularly producing original reporting about our sport, and how many are relying entirely on repackaged press releases, wire stories and links to local newspapers with questionable perspective on the sport. The story from Indianapolis will probably be told almost entirely by USATF press releases. USATF’s media office, while capable, is hardly a completely objective source. Think of it as watching an entire meet with one eye shut.

It is, of course, too late to do anything about this now. The cities of Indianapolis and Birmingham have inked these events on their schedules and moving them would undoubtedly cause snarls back into 2008. Some overachievers already have their plane tickets and hotel reservations.

The point is that someone should have noticed this much earlier. Somebody in the national office could have looked at the dates before they were published and said, hey, this won’t work. There has to be a master calendar going several years into the future somewhere in Indianapolis.

I understand that USATF is a bit preoccupied these days with larger matters. But if anyone in Indianapolis is looking for ways to maximize the profile of our best athletes, making sure our best events don’t eclipse each other might be a good item for the list.

Parker Morse loves cross-country nationals, but Birmingham is just so much warmer than Indianapolis in February.