Flat Hills Road

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?

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?