Flat Hills Road

I was trying to find an excuse to use the phrase, “Eugene’s Onegin” in a story, but I’ve realized that it’s (a) too mean a thing to say about a person, for the most part, and (b) too obscure an allusion to get away with.

My article about Masters middle-distance ace Scott Hartley is in the CrossFit Journal today. The Journal is a pay site, so I won’t be posting the text here. Hartley is a very interesting story in that he’s faced problems common to a lot of runners, but his solution to those problems (that problem) has been decidedly uncommon. It’s not clear to me whether his approach would work for true distance runners (10K and up) as well as it does for Scott as a middle-distance guy, but so far I haven’t heard of anyone at his level who has tried.

Could we get our numbers straight, please?

The Eugene Register-Guard says Jenny Barringer was the third American woman under 4:00 for 1500m. The USTFCCCA says she was the fourth.

USATF (and several others, including the IAAF) say Dwight Phillips had the longest long jump since 1991. The Register-Guard says since 1994.

I’m guessing the confusion in the jump is because Phillips actually tied a mark from 1994, so some writers are counting it and others aren’t. Understandable, but still confusing.

I’m at a bit of a loss to explain the Barringer discrepancy, though, at least without my annuals in front of me. The IAAF all-time list shows Mary Slaney and Suzy Favor Hamilton ahead of Barringer, as has been noted elsewhere; who is this mystery third person?

Again, without more documentation, I can only guess. One possibility involves the difference between performances and performers: Mary Slaney actually has two marks faster than Barringer’s, so Barringer may be the third performer with the fourth performance. Another possibility is that the IAAF has removed marks from their list due to doping suspensions, but there actually is a “drugs disqualification” section on that list, and there are no Americans on it (there’s only one name, in fact).

Later: Peter Gambaccini points out that the discrepancy is probably due to the third sub-4 ahead of Barringer’s being run indoors. (And, as I suspected, by an athlete who was later DQ’ed for doping, though the mark still stands as the indoor AR. Mr. Logan, tear down this record!) So some writers are counting it and others aren’t. I wish there was an agreed-upon convention for this, but I don’t see how we’d get everyone to agree upon it.

Last fall, I wrote a piece for New England Runner about the changing face of transponder (aka “chip”) timing, where long-dominant ChampionChip was seeing a new wave of competition from lighter, cheaper, and sometimes “disposable” new technology.

Even since publication, however, the chip world has moved on from the state of last fall. I’m told that ChampionChip is nearly out of the picture (you’ll still see them around, as timing companies which own ChampionChip equipment will keep using it) and the disposable chips are dominating. I haven’t heard if the waste issues raised by the disposables have been addressed, nor do I know if the “holy grail” of chip timing, a transponder which can be embedded in the bib number and worn without any extra work from the runner, is any closer.

With that said, here’s where things stood last September. This is as I submitted it, not as it eventually ran, so there may be errors and issues; bear in mind that “this year” means 2008. Hyperlinks, rather than coming up in the text, are all provided at the end of the story.

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Considering her far-from-in-form performance earlier this season, I’m far from the only one to be unsurprised at Pamela Jelimo’s underwhelming performance at the Prefontaine Classic this afternoon. She ran the first 600m like last year’s Jelimo, and then someone tossed her a fridge on the backstretch and that was the end of it: for whatever reason, she’s not in the condition she needs to be to run like she did last year.

The two things which were surprising in that race were:

One, Maggie Vessey. Sure, I’d heard her name before, but in this context she may as well have been dropped from Mars. Fortunately NBC showed (visually and audibly) that Vessey was just as surprised as the rest of us; she ran through the line like a pro, then her eyes went wide as she realized what she’d done. (Also: she was dead last in the field when Jelimo imploded. However weird a race it was, Vessey ran well and deserved the win.)

Second, the speechlessness of the NBC announcers at Jelimo’s collapse. They knew she’d run poorly so far this season–they mentioned it–but they were clearly still reading the 2008 script and hadn’t done any homework on anyone else in the field. They were almost silent during the most exciting (and, in their defense, most chaotic) part of the race. Sorry, guys, you got caught out on this one, and it made you look bad.

I’ve been fascinated recently by how finely sprinters are able to break down their races. I suppose it’s no more surprising than the 1/50 slicing needed to break a 10,000m race down into 200m segments, but I love hearing them talk about plans and goals for 20m segments of a race which lasts less than twenty seconds.

At any rate, there’s a lot of that in my Tyson Gay follow-up on IAAF.org today.

Also, Gay has to rate as one of the most polite athletes to give a press conference. I’ve seen him on-screen looking positively scared of the reporters (in Osaka, after winning) and while he had plenty to say and not much shyness on Saturday, he also started his answers to two different questions (completely sincerely) with “Yes, ma’am.”

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.”

The scene: a media work room in the bowels of Icahn Stadium in New York. Time: About an hour after the end of the Reebok Grand Prix. It is silent except for the sound of laptop keyboards.

The door opens, and TYSON GAY peers around the room. Quietly, he walks to the far wall and picks up a meet poster. He is halfway back to the door, when

REPORTER: Hey, do you have a credential for this room?

It was a week or two ago that two different stories caught my attention. They didn’t have an obvious link, but both referenced a place: Eugene, which hosted a spectacular Olympic Trials last summer and will host the USATF Nationals next month. (Yes, I’ll be there.)

Alan Abrahamson, in his “Open Letter to Doug Logan“, had this to say about Eugene:

Eugene, Ore., is a nice-enough place; Hayward Field there is rich with tradition. So what? You and I both know you’re not going to grow the sport from Eugene. Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to argue that going back time and again to Eugene – the Olympic Trials there last summer, the nationals there in a couple weeks and again in 2011, the Trials there again in 2012 – only reinforces the image of track and field as a niche sport in an eco-cute college town when what you need is instead an electrifying presence in New York, in Chicago and especially in L.A.

Earlier this month, Ron Bellamy at Eugene’s Register Guard quoted Pre Classic race director Tom Jordan:

“For a long time, rightly or wrongly, I had the feeling that the Pre Classic was kind of the last bastion of keeping the reputation of Eugene as a track capital going,” Jordan said. “And that’s no longer the feeling at all. It’s sort of like the engine’s firing on all cylinders and we have a great potential to create a whole new generation of track fans.”

With new leadership at USA Track & Field — CEO Doug Logan — Eugene can’t assume that what it’s been in the past, or what it became last year, will be immediately understood or appreciated. Or ignore the fact that there are track fans who want to see the Trials in larger cities after they return here in 2012.

The vision that came to mind was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the blast shelter in the Arctic permafrost created in an effort to store a sort of backup for biodiversity–samples of seeds from around the world, so species might be re-established if they are ever lost. I imagined Eugene as this sort of preserve for track, hiding away in Oregon as a shelter from which the sport might re-emerge if it’s lost elsewhere.

It’s a nice idea, but it suffers from the same problem as the seeds: if the species is lost due to a hostile environment in the outside world, don’t we need to fix the factors which caused it to die out before we try re-establishing it?

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