Flat Hills Road

It’s official: Wilson Kipketer and I entered the same race, and I finished ahead.

They have a Media Race at the World Championships, usually an 800m. I gather this happens every time; this is only my fourth Worlds, and I don’t recall it happening in Seville, but I raced in Edmonton and Osaka. I had hoped to improve both my place and time over Osaka (9th and 2:18.8x, if I recall correctly) but I wondered about place when I realized how many sub-2:00 runners were entered here, including World Record holder Wilson Kipketer.

The field was indeed both larger (eight heats) and faster; I ran the fast heat in Osaka, but was in the second-best here. There were four men under 2:00 in the fast heat, with the winner in 1:55.19 (apparently a competitor at the French indoor championships last winter) and second in 1:55.67. Kipketer jogged.

Many of the same runners from my Osaka heat lined up with me this year. I had gone out too fast last time and vowed to follow a smarter strategy this time, so I held back a bit. I shouldn’t have. The leader went through 400m in 1:07.14 and split evenly to finish in 2:14.20. I sat 10th and passed four rivals in the third 200m, but the closing half-lap was very tough; I’d used too much making up ground after the bell. Four runners within a second of each other were like a wall in front of me, and I couldn’t close on them let alone find my way around. I wound up in 2:20.41. I’d say my tactics were OK, but my sense of pace needs work; a month ago, however, I wouldn’t have expected to run one 70-second lap, let alone two, so I’ll take what I can get.

In the composite results, I placed 13th overall, and the first American (again). Kipketer was 15th in 2:21.11.

John Powers of the Boston Globe has a pretty good column summing up the American performance in Boston. I don’t always agree with Powers but he nails this one:

For US marathoning, the challenge is not so much to get faster as to get deeper. While podium-level runners like Hall, Goucher, Deena Kastor, Shalane Flanagan, Meb Keflezighi, and Khalid Khannouchi can run with anybody on the planet, you still can fit most of the American contenders inside an airport courtesy van.

Ryan Hall had as good a chance as anyone to win on Monday, and despite post-race criticism of his tactics (unwarranted, I think), the fact remains that only one runner actually had perfect tactics. That’s the definition of a marathon champion, sometimes: the one runner whose strategy worked. The problem is that Ryan only had one roll of the dice. There were five or six guys in the field with a shot at winning, and one of them was American. What if two of them had been? What if we had two Ryan Halls entered? Maybe the one who actually ran still gets third or fourth, and the hypothetical one makes different bets and wins. Diversification isn’t just a good investment strategy.

Amby Burfoot discusses strategy in his blog, and even though Shira Springer disagrees with his analysis of the wind effect, Amby has a point: negative splits are the way to run Boston until someone proves otherwise. (Obviously they didn’t save Kara Goucher, though.) Here’s my challenge, though: the data is there. I’ve played with analyzing it before (albeit without much success). What questions do we ask in order to get some conclusions from that data?

In the wake of last month’s World Cross Country Championships, held this year in Amman, Jordan, I’ve seen several different articles asking the question, “Whatever happened to World Cross?” (And, as usual, I’m late to the party.) Pat Butcher sums up the question best: World Cross used to be (ca. late 1970s, early 1980s) the single best distance-running event on the annual calendar. Now it’s not. Why?

Butcher (and, in a follow-up, Larry Eder) goes on to suggest a number of factors: Increased competition for attention and top athletes from spring marathons. Domination by East Africans (and the East Africans are aware that this is a problem, but like the lobstermen in my home town, they can’t figure out how to save their industry without also cutting off their own livelihood) (see also here and here). The loss of strong individual English-speaking personalities. The overall worldwide decline of the sport. IAAF mismanagement. (The specific form of this mismanagement is not detailed, but in this case simply failing to find the magic solution might count.) There is even a nod to my colleague Steven Downes’ argument that golf-course-like venues (“10,000m with one hill”) have had the unintended consequence of removing some unpredictability from the event’s results.

Despite my age, I have a lot of sympathy for World Cross nostalgia. As a budding track fan, my first brush with international competition was the last World Cross Country Championships held in North America, when Boston’s Franklin Park hosted the event in 1992. Every athletics fan remembers that year, even if, like myself, they weren’t actually there (my older brother was). Lynn Jennings won her third consecutive championship; John Ngugi won his fifth in astoundingly dominating fashion. The junior races included a entrants like Paula Radcliffe (who won her first international title) and Haile Gebrselassie. Runner’s World ran at least four pages of photos afterward. Yes, in print. Professionally, my post-runnersworld.com return to international events was at the 2006 World Cross in Fukuoka, Japan. (It was also my first visit to Asia.)

But I wonder if maybe the nostalgia isn’t making us ask the wrong question. Perhaps the question isn’t, “What happened to World Cross?” but “How has the world changed since World Cross was at its height?” Look, for example, at this year’s venue: Jordan wants to become an international sports destination, and World Cross is a sort of starter event for them. Leave aside what that idea (and the Times) implies about the event’s status and consider the changing global landscape. Of course World Cross isn’t what it used to be; the world isn’t what it used to be, and the athletics landscape no longer centers around Europe. That kind of change is going to create casualties, and World-Cross-as-it-was is one of those casualties.

Looked at this way, one can still blame the IAAF for not finding the magic formula to maintaining at least the appeal and importance of the event, if not the same face of it. But at least they’ve been trying. To see the bin World Cross might otherwise be headed for, look up the history of the International Peace Marathon in Kosice, Slovakia, which once rubbed shoulders with Fukuoka and Boston as one of the preeminent international marathons.

If we stop asking, “How can we make World Cross what it was?” and ask the harder question, “What should World Cross be in today’s athletics world?” we’re going to get a lot closer to a great event.

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.

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?

It continues to amuse me that the Fluffy Bunny Track Club not only exists, but is expected to contend for a team title in one of the masters categories at the USATF Club Nationals this coming weekend.

It turns out that amusement is pretty much the point.

With a few minor exceptions, for the last dozen years or so I’ve used the Random House Complete Runner’s Day-By-Day Log and Calendar as my running log. This is nothing short of compulsive, given that any reasonably well laid out week-by-week organizer would suit my needs nowadays, but the last time I was running really, really well I charted over a dozen variables daily (or weekly, or bi-weekly, or on a four-week sliding window).

I stopped reading the monthly essays when John Jerome stopped being the credited author (R.I.P.) and was replaced by his son Marty, though a quick glance suggests Marty may be growing in to the job. (He did suggest in this year’s August essay that Abebe Bikila “won two consecutive Olympic marathons unshod” when any half-aware student of the sport knows Bikila wore shoes in Tokyo.)

The elder Jerome, of course, took over the franchise from an ink-stained wretch by the name of Jim Fixx. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

What I do still read are the quotes which appear at the head of each week. This week’s is a corker from the memorably named Jack Daniels, who labors in Runner’s World under the dubious label “World’s Best Coach“: “Most mistakes in a race are made in the first two minutes, perhaps in the very first minute.”

I’ve had this idea explained to me before, and it’s a good one. Road racers often don’t get objective feedback (in the form of a split) until the first mile, and a lot has happened between the gun and that data point. Most runners start too fast, for example, and Daniels’ theory is that the “too fast” segment is usually the first quarter mile, sometimes as much as a half mile. By the mile marker, the runner has already slowed naturally, but they compound their error by getting a too-fast first mile split and reacting to it by slowing still more. Then they wonder why their second mile is so slow, but the real error happened, as Daniels suggests, in the first minute.

Hold on to that thought, I’m coming back to it.

I love to race. It’s most fun when I’m in good shape, of course, but I’ve even had a lot of fun running races when I’m not at my best. I haven’t run a race for a few months now, I felt like I was in pretty good shape earlier this month, and so I picked out a 5K in Northampton for my next outing. I was pretty excited about it; the course goes through the downtown of a city I once lived in, on roads I used to run. Instead of Yet Another T-Shirt, runners get mugs with a logo by one of my favorite cartoonists – a local, like John Jerome was.

Thing is, earlier this week I came down with this cold. I use the guideline that as long as the symptoms are above the neck (stuffy nose, headaches, etc.) I can and probably should run; once the symptoms go below (cough) running may need to get cut back.

I was feeling pretty good on Friday morning. But by Friday evening I was starting to produce some good phlegmy coughs. This morning I was still coughing, and I could feel the tickly resistance when I took a deep breath.

So I pulled the plug on the race. I turned off the alarm and slept a half hour beyond the race’s start time.

Sure, I could’ve gone over and jogged it, covered the course and got the mug, but the point was that it was a race, and with this cough I wasn’t going to be really racing.

I also could’ve gone over to Northampton, put the hammer down for three miles, and spent the next week hacking my lungs out. I think we can agree now that that would have been stupid, but if you’re like me you know there was a voice in the back of my head all of Friday evening saying, “Hey, maybe you could still run if…”

If I had listened, Dr. Daniels would have the last laugh. (He gets that pretty often.) “Most mistakes in a race are made in the first two minutes, perhaps in the very first minute.” How about in the first step?