Flat Hills Road

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.

I’m usually tickled to find a good joke (usually a pun) in a news story, and for some reason England’s Mohammed “Mo” Farah seems to bring up a lot of them.

Before the 3,000m final at this weekend’s European Championships, for example, Peter Gambaccini pointed out in runnersworld.com’s Racing News that Farah’s main competition was expected to be Spain’s Jesus Espana.

Yes, that’s right…it’s Mohammed vs. Jesus. Write the next line yourself.

Now that Farah has won, of course, it falls to the British press to hand out the lines, such as:

It was the first success story for the Britain team in Turin: Farah, from the madding crowd.

(Like many nationally-competitive distance runners in the USA these days, Farah was born in Somalia and emigrated at a young age to escape the chaos of that country. One wonders if Somalia might rank with Eritrea as a challenger to Ethiopian and Kenyan dominance if they were capable of developing athletes themselves. Think Abdi Bile.)

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.

I’m spending most of my time on a pair of projects with short deadlines right now, but I wonder if many people read both Conway Hill’s anonymous open letter to Doug Logan, and my colleague Steven Downes’ post for Britain’s Sports Journalists Association, “The rate for the job: how cuts hit freelances“.

While it’s obvious that the second link was written by a professional writer and the first… wasn’t, they both have a common theme: skilled professionals hoping to make a living from their craft feel their work is not appropriately valued. The anonymous author of Hill’s letter argues, with some justification, that “elite” athletes are the engine from which all revenue in the sport springs, and that USATF’s structure loads the weight of any number of programs not directly related to professional athletics as drag on this engine. (There’s some merit to this argument: does the NBA carry the burden of grass-roots basketball development?)

I am less of a professional than any of the journalists Downes cites in his argument, but as such I’m an example of his argument: if newspapers, magazines, etc. were paying a better rate for more professional coverage, I’d be doing a lot less paid writing and a lot more rambling online for nothing. (I am the Wal-Mart of athletics writing, except without the market share or massive profits.) Instead we’re pinching reporters with decades of experience. (Granted, the papers themselves are taking a beating financially, but one wonders if compromised quality may have something to do with that.)

The bottom line is this: paychecks are more than tokens. They also represent a value placed on the recipient’s work, and if they see that work as valueless, they’re likely to produce lower-value work–or simply quit and find something else to do.

For those who haven’t had enough of me being opinionated, I have an analysis, with some commentary, of USATF’s Project 30 report posted on the Running Times site.

It’s a credit to the panel and their secretary that the report’s conclusions seem almost inevitable given their research. The important part of the report, I came to understand, is how it gives CEO Doug Logan an agenda, even a mandate, for change, without making that agenda part of his personality. (I suppose this is the role management consultants play when it’s time to fire people in big corporations.)

I hope it works; I’d like to see the relay impediments removed so we can see USA vs. Jamaica in both 4×100m relays in Berlin this summer. I’d also like to hope that USATF’s political sinkholes can be avoided, because they’re part of the problem.

Favorite part of this piece: I’ve been running low on sleep, and when I was reading the report at some point the only way I could come up with to describe the more wishful-thinking-heavy parts of the report was, “I want a pony.” It’s only a fraction of the report, but they’re so pitch-perfect for most of it that the unlikely parts look that much odder in context.

I really recommend that anyone sincerely interested in the future of the sport read the whole report. The background material, in particular, is an education.

My report from the Reebok Boston Indoor Games (thank heavens the title sponsor has given up that silly “RBK” affectation) is on iaaf.org.

I’ll have a “Brief Chat” with Shalane Flanagan post-race on Runner’s World’s Racing News blog soon (tomorrow or Tuesday) and a meet story in the next issue of New England Runner, as well.

Update: Added the link to the Brief Chat, which ran today (Monday).

My preview is online now at iaaf.org. I’ve complained about preview-writing before, but the plain fact is that writing previews lets me write meet reports, which is more fun. And the two in combination let me get paid for going to track meets, which is even more fun.

I’m missing the press conference today, which is too bad, because I had a market for a Shalane Flanagan interview. I haven’t forgotten about my Adam Nelson back-stock, but he’s not throwing this weekend, so my mind has been elsewhere.

About this preview specifically, it’s worth noting that a U.S. track fan might find more at this meet to be excited about than I have mentioned in this article. The gap lies in the fact that U.S. track fans, in addition to their interest in the top levels of professional competition, also have eyes on the best Americans, high school runners, and/or masters competitors, and internationally, these are fields that just don’t matter. The high school runners are “interesting” only in so far as their competitiveness internationally as Juniors (which is to say, historically not much, in this country). The best Americans are “interesting” only if they’re regularly making appearances in big internationals, so Alan Webb despite his uneven record is interesting. Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher with their medals are interesting. Nick Symmonds, who could probably run for Mayor of Eugene and win at this point, is… not all that interesting. Rob Myers, the most underappreciated miler in America today, is… not all that interesting from this point of view.

The advantage to this approach is that it allows me to mask my shallow knowledge of sprinters and field eventers.

I’ll also be writing a meet report to appear in New England Runner. It will probably mention many of the same performances, but it will also mention the masters milers and high school athletes like Omar Abdi, who have local connections. If Shalane Flanagan runs an AR at 5,000m, something the Global Athletics crew thinks is a real possibility, that will be huge for NER, but most interesting for the IAAF only if in doing so she manages to beat both the Ethiopians entered.

I’m writing up a preview of the Boston Indoor Games for iaaf.org (I’ll link it when it’s posted, never fear). I’ve used some playful leads for this in the past, but I don’t think I’d get away with the one I just considered. Specifically, I considered implying that I had been able to cut-and-paste the previous year’s preview for several years now, but I wouldn’t be able to get away with it this year.

I covered the Millrose Games last night.

Of note: a British journalist of my acquaintance commented on the headline’s use of “scare” with a world record as the subject. (I didn’t write the headline.) I don’t have a problem with the personification (anthropomorphization?) of records, myself; in the past I’ve had them celebrate birthdays and get drivers’ licenses to illustrate age.

Also, for those who didn’t read the USATF release word for word, Adam Nelson announced that next year, when his wife has finished law school, they’re moving back to Athens, Georgia to open a yogurt shop. I guess that’s what you do with an MBA and a law degree. The name of the shop will be “MoYo”, because Nelson’s nickname as a child was “Mo”. But the name works even if you don’t know that, and even if Nelson is pulling our collective legs.