Flat Hills Road

Peter Gambaccini's line about a 4 x mile record attempt in Oregon:

The world record of 15:49.08, set by Irishmen Eamonn Coghlan, Marcus O'Sullivan, Frank O'Mara, and Ray Flynn in Dublin in 1985, is not likely to be threatened.

You think? That wasn't exactly a team of scrubs, there. This leads to all kinds of questions. To break that record, four runners have to average 3:57 between them.

• Is there a contemporary American team (by which I mean, ignore sponsor commitments and possibly even injury status: our criteria is that they be active athletes with a blue passport) that could even come close to that? (The Oregon team is chasing the collegiate record of 16:04.5 and will only need to average 4:01.) Lagat-Webb-Manzano-Lomong? Anyone? Would you pull in 800m specialists?
• How about any nation? Morocco vs. Kenya vs. Ethiopia in a 4 x mile? Have Qatar or Bahrain bought enough depth? Even the Russians always seem to be able to run out of their minds for a good relay.
• Certainly an all-star international squad could do it. How would you build a team like that?

In the wake of last month’s World Cross Country Championships, held this year in Amman, Jordan, I’ve seen several different articles asking the question, “Whatever happened to World Cross?” (And, as usual, I’m late to the party.) Pat Butcher sums up the question best: World Cross used to be (ca. late 1970s, early 1980s) the single best distance-running event on the annual calendar. Now it’s not. Why?

Butcher (and, in a follow-up, Larry Eder) goes on to suggest a number of factors: Increased competition for attention and top athletes from spring marathons. Domination by East Africans (and the East Africans are aware that this is a problem, but like the lobstermen in my home town, they can’t figure out how to save their industry without also cutting off their own livelihood) (see also here and here). The loss of strong individual English-speaking personalities. The overall worldwide decline of the sport. IAAF mismanagement. (The specific form of this mismanagement is not detailed, but in this case simply failing to find the magic solution might count.) There is even a nod to my colleague Steven Downes’ argument that golf-course-like venues (“10,000m with one hill”) have had the unintended consequence of removing some unpredictability from the event’s results.

Despite my age, I have a lot of sympathy for World Cross nostalgia. As a budding track fan, my first brush with international competition was the last World Cross Country Championships held in North America, when Boston’s Franklin Park hosted the event in 1992. Every athletics fan remembers that year, even if, like myself, they weren’t actually there (my older brother was). Lynn Jennings won her third consecutive championship; John Ngugi won his fifth in astoundingly dominating fashion. The junior races included a entrants like Paula Radcliffe (who won her first international title) and Haile Gebrselassie. Runner’s World ran at least four pages of photos afterward. Yes, in print. Professionally, my post-runnersworld.com return to international events was at the 2006 World Cross in Fukuoka, Japan. (It was also my first visit to Asia.)

But I wonder if maybe the nostalgia isn’t making us ask the wrong question. Perhaps the question isn’t, “What happened to World Cross?” but “How has the world changed since World Cross was at its height?” Look, for example, at this year’s venue: Jordan wants to become an international sports destination, and World Cross is a sort of starter event for them. Leave aside what that idea (and the Times) implies about the event’s status and consider the changing global landscape. Of course World Cross isn’t what it used to be; the world isn’t what it used to be, and the athletics landscape no longer centers around Europe. That kind of change is going to create casualties, and World-Cross-as-it-was is one of those casualties.

Looked at this way, one can still blame the IAAF for not finding the magic formula to maintaining at least the appeal and importance of the event, if not the same face of it. But at least they’ve been trying. To see the bin World Cross might otherwise be headed for, look up the history of the International Peace Marathon in Kosice, Slovakia, which once rubbed shoulders with Fukuoka and Boston as one of the preeminent international marathons.

If we stop asking, “How can we make World Cross what it was?” and ask the harder question, “What should World Cross be in today’s athletics world?” we’re going to get a lot closer to a great event.

Among the many projects I’ve been working on recently, I’ve been helping Alison Wade bring content back to her site, eliterunning.com. Site hosting fees were making the site an economic drag, and I’ve been putting some spare time into building a more lightweight site structure which could be hosted less expensively. We’re still ironing out the kinks in the system, including bringing back the 80,000+ photos Alison posted on the old site from 2006-2008, but meanwhile the new site is open and ready to grow. If you bother reading this site, you’ll probably like that one.

Monday evening I was at an organizational meeting for the Boston Marathon press room. The marathon (or, as it’s spelled around here, The Marathon) was six weeks away, but there is plenty to do in that time for an event of that scale. Boston is also the next significant event on my calendar, so I’m looking forward to it.

This will be my seventh year in this particular job at Boston, and my fifteenth consecutive year at the marathon. (My first, in ‘95, I was just a spectator; since then I’ve been working in some capacity every year but 2000, when I attempted to run.) For someone my age, that seems like a long time, but almost without exception, the other team captains at Monday evening’s meeting had been associated with the race since the early ’90s, or in some cases the early ’80s. Even if I counted all my thirteen years in the press room and not just my seven years in this job, I would still be the new guy in the room.

This is a strength Boston has which is often overlooked. The longevity of the staff in the press room is echoed throughout the race’s structure. There are team captains running water stops who were there when Bill Rodgers was winning. The captains can count on teams which are largely the same year after year. Few, if any, races can claim that degree of cumulative experience, and to some degree that’s what makes the race work.

The marathon has changed, of course, and changes a little more every year, but for the veterans it has been an incremental change. They aren’t coming in on April 20 and facing 20,000 athletes for the first time. The race may no longer start at noon, but for the veterans that just means, “We do the same thing two hours earlier.”

There’s a page in the marathon press guide listing all the “streakers” who have run Boston annually for many years. If I recall correctly, you need more than 25 consecutive finishes to even make the list; these are people who made Boston an annual ritual before I was even a runner. It’s easier to keep a streak going on the volunteer side, of course, but I think it might be interesting to talk to some of the many volunteers with long “streaks” at Boston.

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’m not a fan of Will Ferrell’s movies, for the most part; it’s just not a kind of comedy which makes me laugh. But Steve Hooker, now the second-highest pole vaulter in the world, is a big fan. After the Olympics, when Ferrell and sometime-sidekick John C. Reilly were in Australia promoting a movie, they turned up on a talk show dressed like Hooker.

I was thinking recently that this was probably a good thing for Hooker when it came to dealing with his success and, to some degree, fame. When your favorite entertainment centers on self-ridicule and skewering the self-important, there’s some significant cognitive dissonance to overcome before becoming self-important.

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.

Rob Myers has never:

• won an NCAA title
• been ranked #1 in the USA in his event
• set a record beyond the state high school level
• made an Olympic team (he’s tried twice)
• advanced past the semifinal of a World Championship
• won an outdoor national title
• won a major open (i.e. European) race

Maybe that’s why he’s so often overlooked. for this year’s USATF Indoor Championships, most people picked him third with the competition expected to be between Alan Webb and Chris Lukezic at the front. (The latter has, to be fair, been having a great season.)

Last night in Boston, Rob Myers won his third USATF indoor championship in the 1,500m (or mile–the distance seems to go back and forth.) I don’t know how many he’s going to have to win before people take him seriously. The first two were often dismissed on the grounds of weak competition, and certainly his 2004 win would count as a “steal” considering how unknown he was at the time, but this year he took Webb to the line.

I’m not going to try to argue that Rob Myers is a world-beater, but he’s regularly beating guys who are supposed to be world-class. Isn’t it time we stopped being surprised when he wins national titles?

I feel a little bad about that headline, but there’s some truth behind it. Yesterday, I came to the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletics Center (RLTAC, an abbreviation often used and rarely explained) from Boston University, where the New England Intercollegiate Championships was being held. (Maybe some other time I’ll try to explain the meet I used to know as “Big New Englands.”) B.U.’s fieldhouse was packed with athletes, coaches, some parents, and miscellaneous fans like myself. Once the rounds were over and the afternoon session was in full swing, they were moving new races on to the track as soon as the previous race was over, not quite as quickly as Penn Relays but still pretty briskly. Every athlete in every race had a built-in fan base in their team, and no lap of any race went by in silence.

So going in to Reggie was quite a contrast. Sitting in the two-thirds-empty press risers, I discussed other results around the country–Kim Smith, Jenny Barringer, German Fernandez–with another reporter, who wondered out loud, “Do you ever think we’re at the wrong meet?” The press wasn’t there (many of them, wisely, preferring various NCAA conference meets,) the fans weren’t there, and even many of the athletes didn’t show up. (Only one of the men’s shot put’s “big three” will be putting this afternoon.)

It’s not Boston; the meet has actually improved dramatically since the days when an overly-optimistic contract doomed the event to several years of anonymous existence in Atlanta’s cavernous Georgia Dome. There was a lot of energy (but very little space) the year it was held in New York City’s Armory. But it’s really hard to go to the Boston Indoor Games at RLTAC and then come back three weeks later for a “national championship” meet which has less energy and enthusiasm than an essentially meaningless collegiate meet across town.

Larry Eder has a series of observations about what’s wrong with the USATF Indoor meet and constructive suggestions for improving them at RunBlogRun. I can’t speak to the quality of his suggestions, but he has more and more thoughtful ones than I do.

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.