Flat Hills Road

No doubt there’s been a lot of discussion about the runner whose 40th birthday present, featured in the New York Times Thursday, was a run (and lunch) with “world-class runner from Kenya” Richard Kiplagat.

Kiplagat was paid $400 to run with Chambers and have lunch with his family. A driver in a Lincoln Town Car picked him up at dawn at his home in New Milford, N.J., and returned him late in the afternoon.

Kiplagat is an Iona grad, and though he’s been a real competitor in international fields in American road races, he hasn’t been a factor in big international races… yet. He’s based in the States, which is not necessarily the cheapest training option for a Kenyan, so let’s just guess that Kiplagat is not one of the athletes who’s making himself wealthy from the sport. So the possibility of an additional income stream from this sort of “celebrity running partner” income is almost certainly a welcome one for Kiplagat.

It’s one that cuts to the heart of the real mystery of making a career as a professional runner, though. The reason is that like frequent road racing (a practice sometimes disparaged as “dash for cash”), too-frequent work of this sort might compromise a runner’s training. Kiplagat could probably schedule an easy day for his run with Michael Chambers, but there’s only so many recreationally-paced runs a professional can make in a given week. Still, $400 once a week every week, if the scheduling was practical and that “arbitrary figure” turned out to be an actual market rate, could pay the rent and groceries if an athlete was otherwise frugal.

There are a lot of details that aren’t mentioned by the Times, of course. For example, Kiplagat’s fee was probably much closer to $500, with his unnamed agent (Kiplagat is managed by KIMbia) taking anywhere from $40 to $100 off the top of whatever the Chambers paid. Though Kiplagat’s agent isn’t named, however, our friend Sam Grotewold at the NYRR is. (Sam probably didn’t get a cut, but you can bet he’s looking towards the day Kiplagat will be deciding between the Chicago and New York marathons.)

The question is, will this happen again? Have we opened a new market of celebrity training runs? Here’s the problem: like nearly every income stream for professional runners, this one is heavily tied to visibility and personal brand. Ann Gaffigan or Kyle King, for example, aren’t likely to salvage their bottom lines that way; despite being national-class athletes, they’re still just a stride ahead of the best club runners. (I used to run with a sub-15 5,000m runner on a weekly basis, just by being willing to be the workout rabbit.)

Kiplagat himself got the job largely because of what I’ll call “the Brand of Kenya,” the image of “The Kenyan” as a great runner. The Ethiopians, despite remarkable results in recent years, don’t have the brand power of the Kenyans yet. An American runner would need to be an Olympian to match that kind of brand–and American runners at that level don’t need to compromise their training for a day for a $400 run. (There is one exception to this: ZAP Fitness in North Carolina operates as a running camp as well, with one of the draws of the camp being that the staff are largely national-class athletes.) In effect, this kind of income is only available to Kenyans.

More power to Kiplagat, of course, but I wouldn’t count on celebrity training runs financing anyone’s training for next year’s World Championships.

There was a lot of discussion this week about the John Hancock announcement that Ryan Hall would be running the B.A.A. Boston Marathon in 2009.

Hopefully not lost in the shuffle was a short but very interesting piece Amby Burfoot put together for Runner’s World. Amby knew neither John Hancock nor Hall’s agent, Ray Flynn, would tell him what Ryan was getting as an “appearance fee” to run in Boston. Instead, he contacted a dozen or so people with knowledge of the market and asked them to guess.

By getting educated (or perhaps “experienced”) guesses about the figure, Amby was able to home in on a real number. He didn’t talk to scattershot observers of the sport like myself; the list of people he asked is populated with agents, elite athlete coordinators (the people who put together professional fields for the big races), and a few athletes of Hall’s stature. In other words, people with recent and relevant experience in the market. The composite of their replies suggests with a pretty high degree of certainty that Hall is earning more than $100,000, but less than $200,000, to run Boston in 2009.

There’s a lot to be written about why Hall should get that much merely for showing up, whether he’s worth it, and why Flynn, Hancock, and Hall can’t or won’t discuss the figure. With any luck I’ll get to that someday soon.

The interesting thing about that price tag isn’t even whether it’s precisely accurate (especially considering that Flynn will take a cut as well). Nobody really cares about the exact figure, unless they’re Hall, Flynn, or someone hoping to get Hall to run their marathon. Different runners would command different figures, based on their PRs, their championship history, and (let’s face it) their appearance. What’s interesting is that because Amby’s sources were in such close agreement, there’s confidence behind the guess. Now we know with some certainty that in today’s market, blond mid-twenties California kids can ask between $0.1 and $0.2 million to run Boston if they have a sub-2:07 PR. It sounds silly when I write it like that, but even that degree of knowledge is missing from current public awareness of professional running.