Flat Hills Road

A few notes on coming assignments while I struggle to find time to complete other thoughts:

• I’ll be at the Millrose Games a week from today, January 29th.
• I’ll also be at the Boston Indoor Games on the 6th of February.
• Capping that, I’ll be at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Doha in early March, including the IAAF council meeting immediately following. (Fear not, I am in no danger of being given any responsibilities not involving data.)

So far, I haven’t been able to justify the trip to Albuquerque for the USATF Indoor meet, and the NCAA indoor meet, while long a favorite of mine, conflicts with World Indoors.

I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to some things; I have convinced myself not to preserve, for example, printed results from most meets, but I do try to save my recordings from the mixed zone. My recorder does not come with Macintosh-compatible software, so I patiently play the recordings through 1/8″ audio cable into the microphone jack, re-recording them in Audacity and saving the files as MP3.

Some events produce dozens of short files, and the task is made more tedious by my distaste for listening to my own recorded voice. (“Who is that idiot asking the questions?”) Once I let go of the actual voices, however, I can listen to the rhythm of the meet and learn from the things which aren’t said.

For example, I’m clearing the 2008 Reebok Grand Prix now. I heard myself talking to Reese Hoffa while the crowd roared in the background; I could tell I was trying to show Hoffa that I was really interested in what he had to say, not what was happening on the track.

It’s also interesting to hear the tone of the interviews changing as the meet progresses. Early in a meet, the interviews are long and rambling, because nobody knows yet what the story of the meet will be, and the reporters want to cover all the bases just in case they wind up having to lead with the athlete standing in front of them. Later in the meet, we find one or two long press-conference type recordings which are The Story (can you say Usain Bolt?) and everything around them is brief and perfunctory. This becomes unfortunate when, for example, I dig back in the archives to find out what Linet Masai said after she beat Tirunesh Dibaba in 2009.

I hope this stuff turns out to be useful for someone someday, but right now its lessons for me are mostly secondary.

I have two pieces in the December 2009 Running Times: a profile of masters middle-distance ace Scott Hartley (not the first time I’ve shined the spotlight his direction) and a discussion of the new progress being made by American distance runners against the East African dominance in the track distances, as highlighted by the 2009 season and particularly the World Championships. It’s on your magazine racks if it hasn’t reached your mailbox.

A few weeks ago, I read Matt McCue’s An Honorable Run, which has had a lot of buzz this fall. McCue’s book is a memoir of his high school career in Iowa, his eventual decision to pass up a spot at Middlebury (where he would have been among the best on a relatively good Division 3 team) to try to walk on at the University of Colorado, and his relationship with both his coaches.

McCue makes no secret of his admiration for Chris Lear’s Running with the Buffaloes, a chronicle of Colorado’s 1998 season (was that really eleven years ago?) and that’s understandable; Buffaloes continues to fascinate and inspire high school and collegiate runners today, and to me its biggest mystery is why nobody has yet followed the path it blazed. (Someone needs to follow a women’s team, for example.) An Honorable Run reverently draws a lot of structure and voice from Lear’s book, but it’s not Running with the Buffaloes II.

For McCue, Colorado’s Mark Wetmore is largely quiet and off-stage, more like the Wizard of Oz than Vince Lombardi. For another thing, unlike the ensemble cast of Lear’s book, McCue’s journey is entirely his own, with the supporting characters literally just that. Only late in the book does a strong secondary character emerge.

It feels like self-absorption, but the reality is that McCue is pulling us along his own maturation process in the book, and the self-centered focus of the book is simply the way a teenaged boy thinks. The supporting characters crop up as McCue himself matures and starts recognizing them himself.

In the process he’s delivering a number of ideas which should be on the exam for kids who read Lear and want to be the next Adam Goucher. McCue underlines a point which should be obvious today, that it takes hardworking kids like Matt McCue to push talented stars like Jorge Torres and Dathan Ritzenhein to their best. (If you want more Meb Keflezghis and Ryan Halls, you need more Brian Sells and Scott Bauhses. If you want more Brian Sells, you need more Nate Jenkinses. And so on.)

In doing this, McCue provides a script for a life which may not lead to an Olympic medal, but still includes a meaningful running component. The idea of “an honorable run” is a direct echo of the idea of “fighting the long defeat” which Tracy Kidder ascribes to Dr. Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains.

And in the end, An Honorable Run is to Running with the Buffaloes what Matt McCue is to Jorge Torres: not as fast, not as glamorous, but different and just as worthwhile to read and consider.

I’ve been too busy recently to comment on the pre-Berlin news; in fact, I generally still am, even though I’m seeing some stuff I wish someone would pick up on. (For example, the IAAF sent a press release today about qualifying for the World Athletics Final in Greece, and I did a quick skim of the current rankings. The U.S. women are really getting it done in the middle distances; they’re all over the top 5 in the 800m and 1,500m, and Jen Rhines is #2 in the 5,000m.)

I hope to have more notes from Berlin, but be aware of these sites:

• I’ll be writing the “competition blog” on berlin.iaaf.org. Pre-meet discussion suggested that readers will be able to submit comments and questions for me to “promote” to the blog page as well, so if this is true it will be much more interactive than previous events.
• I will have articles on the distance events on the Running Times website.
• If there’s anything too short for here and too offbeat for other venues, it may wind up on Twitter. (The IAAF competition blog may also be bridged to Twitter, but I’m not sure how many of these plans are actually happening.)

Here’s my story about Day 1 of the USATF Championships. I’m hoping that was just warmup.

The IAAF.org report on the Reebok Grand Prix was posted this morning. I’ll be emptying out my notebook on Tyson Gay later today for a follow-up.

There were a lot of articulate and likeable women winning races last night. Another quote I haven’t (yet) seen in use, from Carmelita Jeter: “I’m doing better because I have a new coach, and I’m actually listening to him now. It’s not just in one ear, out the other, like it used to be.”

You can find my preview of Saturday’s Reebok Grand Prix on iaaf.org.

I’ve promised a few times to post the text of the story I wrote for the Boston Marathon program. With the marathon over and all the programs distributed, here’s the text. (Note that I’ve started with the copy I submitted, and may have missed some of the edits made between submission and publication. Also note that the copy deadline, in early March, meant that some of the details here are obsolete; the discussion about the 2012 Trials has progressed since the time of writing.)

Headline: Red, white, & blueprint
Subhead: When it came to staging the Olympic Trials, Boston put on a clinic

In 2008, the organizers of the Boston Marathon added something to the weekend program they had never tried before: another marathon.

The day before 35,000 runners made their way from Hopkinton to Boston, 150 women lined up for the 2008 Olympic Team Trials–Women’s Marathon. The first three finishers would represent the US and run the Olympic Marathon in Beijing in August. The race started in front of the Hynes Convention Center and, after a short loop around Beacon Hill, ran four laps of a 10-km loop which crossed over the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (and featured long segments on Memorial Drive in Cambridge) before returning to Boston. The finish line was the same as that for the traditional Patriots’ Day event.

“I never anticipated what it would be like to come down Boylston Street,” says Blake Russell, “with the church bells ringing and the crowd yelling like thunder.” Russell, who is coached by longtime Boston-area coach Bob Sevene and lived in the area for years before following Sevene to California, finished third in 2:32:40 and went on to place 27th in 2:33:13 in Beijing.

“Everyone was trying to out-yell the person next to them,” says Deena Kastor of Mammoth Lakes, CA, who won a bronze medal in the 2004 Athens Olympic Marathon and won the 2008 Trials in 2:29:35.

“We put those women on a whole different stage,” says Dave McGillivray, race director for both marathons.
(more…)

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.