Flat Hills Road

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.

The IAAF announced the five men and five women who are finalists for the Athletes of the Year this week. You’ll recall that voters were asked to nominate three names, with no restriction on which three (I could have nominated myself) and those were used to select the five finalists.

My male nominees did pretty well, with all three of them making the final five. I named Usain Bolt (how could anyone not?), Kenenisa Bekele, and Steven Hooker. I reasoned that I should limit the pool to Berlin champions and other World Champions (e.g. World Cross) and the major marathon winners. Bekele I named because of his 5,000m/10,000m double in Berlin, a difficult double to manage.

Hooker got the nod partly for the incredible drama of his win in Berlin, but there were other dramatic wins in Berlin. Hooker also had a very impressive indoor season, though, including near-World-Record winning vaults in New York and Boston, and to add to that he’s a great interview and very helpful to the press. Athletes take note: it does pay off.

(The other two finalists are Tyson Gay, who would have had the best 100m season in history if he hadn’t shared it with Usain Bolt, and javelin World Champion Andreas Thorkildsen.)

My nominees on the women’s side were less successful. Only one of my nominees, Poland’s World Record-setting World Champion hammer thrower Anita Wlodarczyk, was a finalist; the other four finalists are Yelena Isinbayeva (yawn), Sanya Richards, Valerie Vili and Blanka Vlasic.

I also nominated Allyson Felix, who like Gay had a very impressive season. Like Richards, Felix won an individual World Championship in Berlin (200m for Felix, 400m for Richards) plus a relay gold (both ran the 4×400m) but unlike Richards, Felix was winning her third consecutive World Championship, and I still think that counts for something.

I also went for a long shot and nominated Linet Masai. Masai’s 10,000m World Championship has been tainted by the bungled officiating at the start, but it was important just the same in breaking the near-total dominance the Ethiopian women have held over the long distance events in the last decade. Furthermore, Masai beat the world record holder in New York in May in an astounding race at Randall’s Island. Maybe she’ll have more chances to be Athlete of the Year, but I think we’ll be remembering 2009 as the year we met Linet Masai.

Now we’ll see how the final selection goes; it will be announced at the Gala next month. The winners will be selected by a much smaller pool of which I am not part, so I’ll know nothing until the press release arrives.

Due to my role for this year’s ING NYC Marathon (about which more later) I decided I needed to be able to extract more information from marathon splits as the marathon is actually happening. I remembered that for previous Boston Marathons, David Monti of Race Results Weekly, doing a similar job to what I’m doing, had a fancy-dan Excel spreadsheet to take splits and project times.

While it’s possible that David added some kind of course factor to his spreadsheet, it seems more likely that he did what I did recently: he made projections based on simple math. For example, they’ve reached ten miles in time X, they have sixteen and two-tenths to run. If they run 16.2 at the pace they ran the last mile, they’ll finish in time Y; if they run it at their average pace for the last ten, they’ll finish in time Z.

I did this for mile splits and for 5km splits, which are the numbers I expect to get in New York. I added some conditional formatting to show me if the leaders were speeding up or slowing down, and if they’re ahead or behind course record pace, using colors. (I suppose if I was really a spreadsheet champion I could use varying shades to indicate how far they were from course record pace.) Adding sheets for the wheelchair athletes will also happen before race day.

I had 5km splits for Robert K. Cheruiyot’s Boston Marathon course-record run handy, so I plugged those in and it worked like a champ.

A sheet which would take a finish time and place and calculate prize money with time bonuses would be pretty cool too, I guess, but it’s not quite as algorithmic–it’s more ahead-of-time data entry. New York does have a deep time bonus structure, and the total prize money package will vary widely depending on how fast the pack runs.

If you have any other ideas of useful and/or interesting on-the-fly calculations, take a look at the sheets and let me know what to add. I did the original work in OpenOffice.org Calc, and exported to Excel, so I haven’t tested the Excel version. (Here’s the original .ods version.) You are, of course, welcome to use these yourself during whatever marathon you’re watching; you can see the appropriate cell to change to set the course records.

I have a window here where I can mention my votes for the Jesse Owens award (and my reasoning) without being tempted to make it look like I voted for the winners (we don’t know them yet), or trying to change your minds about how to vote (because voting is now closed).

As I mentioned, I voted twice, once online like everyone else, and once in the journalists poll. (I’m still tickled to be asked to participate in these things, and a little distressed that our pool of “journalists” is so small they need to include me in order to get enough voters.) I used my online vote as a “sentimental” vote for the ones I liked most, or identified with most; the official vote went to the athletes I thought had best earned the award as it is described with their competitive results in 2009.

So that latter vote went to Tyson Gay and Allyson Felix. Felix was a tough choice over Sanya Richards; both athletes were double World Champions, winning individual events and running a leg on the 4×400m relay. Felix, however, delivered her third consecutive 200m championship, a truly historic accomplishment considering she was facing down two-time Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown. I might have considered Carmelita Jeter with those two had she won the World title as well as her undeniably fast late-season times, but Felix and Richards came through in the big show, and I still think that counts for a lot.

You’d think that would put me off Tyson Gay, particularly with Christian Cantwell and Trey Hardee on the nomination list, but I give Gay a tremendous amount of credit for attitude and American Records. Like Jeter, Gay ran phenomenal marks late in the season, but I really voted for Tyson because he never once used Usain Bolt as an excuse. He ran hurt, and still ran faster than anyone other than Bolt ever has. He faced off with the most dominant sprinter in history and gave the best he had to make the races real races and not walkovers for Bolt. I think that effort deserves to be rewarded.

On the website, I cast my women’s vote for Jenny Barringer. Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher are great athletes, and the runs they’ve had in the past three years have been tremendous, but I have a suspicion that Jenny Barringer is the second coming of Lynn Jennings. (Or, more likely, the first coming of Jenny Barringer; she may be completely without precedent.) Nominally a steeplechaser, she ran PRs from 1,500m to 5,000m (including becoming the first of three–THREE–American women sub-4 at the shorter distance this year), dismantled a series of quality fields in the NCAA track championships, and is probably going to dominate the NCAA cross country meet this fall in a way no American woman has since Flanagan… and Goucher. Get on the Barringer train now, because she’s acting like she’s just getting started.

I don’t actually remember how I used my online vote for men. It may have gone to Christian Cantwell, who took the shot put gold back for the USA in a thrilling competition in Berlin, but it may also have been Trey Hardee, who put together one of the most dominating decathlons I’ve seen from an American in Berlin, and made it look easy despite his relative inexperience. The story at the U.S. championships was that with Olympic champion Bryan Clay out, the U.S. team in Berlin would be weak, but coming out of Berlin it actually looks like the Hardee/Clay duel in 2011 may be more interesting than anything that happens in Daegu–unless, of course, they both arrive in Daegu healthy and can deliver the way they both did in the ‘08 and ‘09 global competitions.

So that’s how I voted. We’ll see in December if I voted with the majorities.

(I’m still interested in hearing thoughts on the Athlete of the Year balloting–assuming Usain Bolt gets one vote, who do the other two go to?)

Update, November 19: Gay won, Felix did not. Here’s the announcement.

The recent edition of the IAAF newsletter (N.B. that link is to a PDF file) included the following bald announcement under the heading “Women’s 10,000m Final – 15 August 2009 – 12^th IAAF World Championships in Athletics”, after the list of athletes sanctioned for doping offenses:

Nine runners starting in the outside stagger did not cover the entire race distance.  Therefore, while their times and placings will remain the same they are not eligible for statistical purposes including Personal Bests or Season’s Bests:

…and then follows a list of the names.

As I wrote at the time, the IAAF had no good options here; the officials should have marked the lane in the first place, and failing that, should have called the race back immediately when the lane violation took place. But the statisticians will not tolerate inaction on this front, and this is a sort of signal from the statisticians that while there may have been no official notice taken at the time, they know when 10,000m have been run and when they haven’t.

The unfortunate part, in my opinion, is that this still creates the appearance that it’s the athletes who screwed up. And while they contributed (they could have remained in their stagger even without the markings), final responsibility still has to go to the officials.

It looks like the IAAF is doing their Athlete of the Year selections a little differently this year. In the past, as I’ve noted, they presented a slate of athletes and asked their panel of judges (there are about 1,500 names on this list, of which mine is one) for male and female votes, and also solicited votes on their website; this narrowed the field to a group of three “finalists,” with a much smaller group selecting the actual winners.

This year, the process has changed in two ways. First, it appears there will be no internet vote. (N.B. there has been no announcement; it may be that the internet vote still hasn’t opened, or will be opened for the finalists only.) This is fine by me; the website results were sometimes bizarre and only counted for 30% of the weight anyway. Second, the panel has been asked to select three men and three women, but we have not been given a list to select from. We are free to nominate pretty nearly anyone we want.

I am just cynical enough to think this is the Usain Bolt effect on the Athlete of the Year. Given one vote for one male, anyone who has been paying attention would have to be insane not to vote Bolt, and competition for the other two finalists would be fierce. Given three votes, we can put one on Bolt and look for two other likely candidates. With those names in the finalists, we can say, hey, Sammy Wanjiru did win two fast marathons this year. Kenenisa Bekele did win the Woolworth Double in Berlin. Tyson Gay did retain some semblance of competition in a sprint landscape that includes Bolt.

The women’s list is much harder to come up with, not because the performances have been poor but because there have been so many good performances. Who would you nominate?

USATF is following the lead of the IAAF this year. The IAAF has for several years included an online voting component in its Athlete of the Year selection process, with the online component making up about 10% of the decision. (Ever the optimist, I think this is meant less to minimize the opinions of true fans and more to avoid the need to rigorously police the voting against the kinds of shenanigans which are easily mounted on the web, but in the end it does make the weight of any single web vote effectively nil.)

USATF is encouraging visitors to its website to cast their votes for the Jesse Owens Award, and like the IAAF, they are giving the internet vote 10% of the total weight.

For the second year, I’m a panel voter for the Owens Award, but I intend to vote on the website as well, and I encourage you to do the same.

I’m voting twice because I am, as I’ve often explained, a “fan with a notebook,” and this situation gives me the chance to vote both sides of that personality. I can cast a “fan vote” on the website for the athletes I identify with most, and then cast my “panel vote” as a more dispassionate judge, if such a thing actually exists. (As a runner, I have to be comfortable with the idea of striving for a perfection I know I can never reach.)

I should be working, but the IOC is monopolizing my head space right now. The 2016 Olympic host is supposed to be announced within the hour. The leading candidates, supposedly, are Chicago and Rio de Janeiro; Tokyo and Madrid are also in contention. I want to get these thoughts down before the host is actually announced.

I can’t figure out if I want Chicago to win or not, but I’ve seen a lot of silliness posted online recently about the Chicago bid. People are entitled to their opinions, but I think sometimes those opinions are based on incomplete or erroneous assumptions about the cities and the process.

The most common pattern I’ve seen is people thinking the vote is up or down on a given city. These people make the argument, “Chicago shouldn’t host the Olympics because…” and then go on to say something like, “They have better things to spend their money on” (possibly true and a strong argument, but one the proposal counters very well), or “Chicago isn’t safe.” The problem with this argument is, if it was accepted, it would mean the IOC would turn down one city (Chicago) because it wasn’t safe, and instead select… Rio? Is Rio safer than Chicago? Seriously? This isn’t a binary-choice situation; it’s choosing the best of the alternatives. (Conway Hill has an excellent exploration of the idea that Rio may have the best bid, and very strong arguments, because he focuses on positive reasons Rio is a better choice rather than negative reasons why “Chicago shouldn’t win.”)

There’s also the “Obama has better things to do than campaign for the Olympics.” This, also, may be true, but consider the alternative. Madrid’s PM, Brazil’s Lula, and I’m sure the Japanese PM, are all in Copenhagen for the decision. Conventional wisdom is that “personal diplomacy” from Russia’s Vladimir Putin is what won the 2014 winter Games for Russia. If Obama didn’t go to Copenhagen, it would be interpreted as a strong vote of “no confidence” in the Chicago bid, and would almost certainly mean Chicago would not win.

In other words, unlike the IOC’s decision, Obama’s situation was binary: positive support of the Chicago bid, or negative action against the bid. He did not have a neutral option. And whether or not I agree that Chicago is the best choice, I do think it’s appropriate that our President be a positive supporter of our bid. It certainly would be inappropriate for him to positively support another country’s bid in opposition to ours.

Selfishly, I’d love to see a Chicago win, because I bet I could get some good work out of it, and see another Olympics only a time zone away. (I’m assuming I’ll still be able to get a media credential, which is not a given, of course.) But really, if Rio or Madrid win, I won’t be terribly disappointed. (After Beijing 2008, I doubt Tokyo has a shot at bringing the Games back to Asia so soon. Madrid is too “safe” a choice in the face of Rio, I’m afraid. But can any of them afford the Games, really?)

(ETA: Chicago eliminated in the first round of voting. Tokyo goes out on the second round. The third round will decide.)

(ETA2: And it’s Rio. Good for the IOC for finally going to South America. I hope Brazil stages a competent games without going too deep into debt.)

I occasionally get email from a European outfit called “All-Athletics” which bills itself as “the most comprehensive athletics database.” I have to wonder what Mirko Jalava thinks of this tag line.

At any rate, their most recent email included a list of “competition rankings” among one-day events this year, and the top four ranked as listed in the title of this post: Zurich Weltklasse, Rome’s Golden Gala, Monaco’s Herculis, and Eugene’s Prefontaine Classic.

I’m not going to argue with their competition rankings; Pre was a great meet this year, and next year with the Diamond League in place it’s not going to suffer any. But looked at as a list of cities… well, one of these is different. Anyone? Anyone?