Runnerville

A note of explanation: I wrote this piece in the summer of 2006 when Taylor was working on getting a different iteration of runnerville off the ground. The site didn’t come together, and this column never ran. Well, I found it knocking around in one of the dark corners of my computer and figured the central message still rang true even though the sports references are horribly, and to some extent hilariously, dated.

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How did I get here?

My head (well, most of my upper body really) is in a trashcan. One of those big thirty gallon jobs; grey, with Roughneck written on the side. It’s the middle of the summer and schools are out, so the trashcan is more or less empty. I guess that makes me lucky. It smells like hot plastic and spilled sports drink and dust.

How did I get here?

I’m not wondering how I ended up in the trashcan- that part is easy. I walked across the track and leaned over it because I thought I was going to puke. I’ve decided, however, that I won’t puke. That would be one indignity too many. I’ve already checked off “running like absolute ass” and “letting them see me hurt” but I’m determined that “puking in front of kids a decade younger than me” will be saved for another day. No, what I’m wondering is how did I get here, to this moment. To this night, this local all-comers race on a high school track in the Valley.

“How did I get here?” I mumble to a half empty bottle of Gatorade (Fierce Grape from the looks of things) which was probably tossed there by one of the aging weekend warriors that competed in tonight’s race with me. I’m 24 years old, not yet at my athletic prime, but here I am in the track and field equivalent of the Carolina League (assuming of course that the Carolina League let middle-aged fat guys in spandex speedsuits play right field and bat cleanup). I just ran a time slower than anything I’ve run since high school. So much for the first race of my comeback.

The Olympic Trials finals were exactly two years ago to the day, practically to the hour. Exactly two years since I raced in a packed stadium with immortality on the line. Seven hundred and thirty days since the proudest moment of my career and what I thought was the launching pad for fame, success and glory. Not to mention women and money, but mostly the fame and glory part. If only I had the slightest clue about what had happened between then and now.

How did I get here?

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Success is a funny thing. When you’re having it, it feels so natural that you can’t imagine things going any other way. When you’re not having it, you wonder if you’ll ever experience it again. This is true for life in general, but it seems to particularly apply to the sporting world. Baseball players, for example, live in constant fear of slumps. Take A-Rod: he’s practically being run out of New York because of the funk he’s in. We’re not talking about some journeyman middle-infielder that the Yankees got a couple years ago as a throw-in when they swapped relievers with the D-Rays; we’re talking about the highest paid player in baseball. This is a man that, from an economic standpoint, is supposedly the best player in the game. A player who on his own, is paid more than the Pirates entire lineup (I invented that little factoid, but it sounds true). Yet the fact remains that A-Rod is in a slump. What is he doing wrong? God (and Bill James) only knows, but let’s assume that it’s something unconscious, otherwise he’d make a correction. Slumps are often inexplicable and unexpected. It’s not just baseball either. Shooters go cold, receivers hear footsteps every time a ball comes their way and soccer players start finding the crossbar instead of the back of the net. In any sport a struggling athlete is often mystified as to why he suddenly went from being Dirk Nowitzki to Kwame Brown.

The saving grace for many slumping athletes is that they’re on a team. A-Rod is stinking it up, but as of this writing, the Yankees just massacred the Red Sox in a five game series in Boston and stretched their lead in the AL East to nearly six games. You can go out there and boot grounders and wave in futility at breaking balls, but as long as the team wins, all is more or less forgiven. Athletes in individual sports don’t have this safety net. In track and field, when you’re struggling, you’re hung out there naked for all the world to see. This compounds the question of success even further. Well actually, by “compounds” I mean to say “simplifies”, because it is in fact simple- it’s all on you. You can’t blame a bad race on crappy relief pitching or sloppy passing. On one hand, this has its advantages because technically you control your own destiny. You can get out there and put the work in and mentally visualize your race and do all things that we as runners do and there is no one other than yourself that can screw it up for you. But when it does get screwed up (and invariably it will), what then? It’s hard to look at yourself and wonder whether you worked out enough or made a move too soon or should have stopped after the first case of Busch Light. Not succeeding in track can be a confusing and demoralizing process, a process often lacking definitive answers.

So what do we as runners do when we’re catching bad beat after bad beat? Nothing. We do absolutely nothing. We keep training. We keep doing interval workouts. We run repeat quarters on an empty track at twilight. We go on easy runs and picture the home straight of some stadium in Europe, the field stretched out behind us and the crowd on its feet. We feel that surge of adrenaline and know that next time… next time things will go differently. And the truth is, sooner or later they will. Sooner or later, we all get back in shape, sooner or later we all improve our PR or at least run well enough to forget our last bad race. Track offers infinite chances for redemption. Every race is a blank slate, a chance to just feel it with 300 to go and tear one off. Ultimately, it’s tough to have the weight of success on your shoulders alone, but personally I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I don’t know if this column has a moral or even a point. But one thing it does have is an epilogue. The epilogue is that I pulled myself out of the trashcan and stopped feeling sorry for myself. I looked around and laughed about getting worked up over running poorly in a meaningless race that I ran as a workout. I watched a ten-year old kid run towards his parents sitting in the stands, beaming in pride of the race he just ran. That ten-year old didn’t realize it, but he had as good an understanding of success as he’ll have for the rest of his life. Success is relative and momentary. The moment will always pass, yet will unfailingly bring another moment of limitless possibility. It’s true- I don’t know how I got here, but I do know where I’m going.

I’m going back to work.

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Afterword: So let’s recap. The D-Rays aren’t called that anymore, A-Rod had a monster season for the Yankees last year and there’s no way Dirk would be currently be my first choice for an example of a stud NBA player, especially not with his busted ankle. At least Kwame still blows. On a personal level, that epilogue rings kind of hollow. I moved back to DC from LA a couple months after I wrote that piece, had surgery to repair a sports hernia, and never really got back in the swing of training. Competitive track is 20 pounds behind me (thankfully that’s easier to hide when you’re 6’6”), but never far from my thoughts.

Stamos is a runnerville.com contributing writer. He enjoys self-indulgent navel-gazing almost as much as he enjoys watching Battlestar Galactica.

Fiyori Meb Russom was born on Monday at 5:45 pm. She came in (or out) at 7 lbs. 10 ounces, and was 19 inches tall. Meb’s brother and agent, Merhawi, reports that “Everyone is doing well.”

Congratulations Meb and Yordanos.

American Alan Webb Highlights 23rd Annual Carlsbad 5000 on April 6, 2008
Opportunity stands to take down American road 5k record prior to U.S. Olympic Team Trials

by: Elite Racing
March 27, 2008

CARLSBAD, Calif., (March 27, 2008) — After breaking Steve Scott’s quarter-century old American mile record last summer in Brasschaat, Belgium, 25-year-old Alan Webb will have an opportunity to take down San Diego native Marc Davis’ 1996 American road 5k record of 13:24, also set at the Carlsbad 5000. Webb has chosen to open his 2008 Spring campaign in Carlsbad as he prepares for an Olympic bid. The Southern California race, set for Sunday, April 6, 2008, was made famous by Scott 23 years ago as both the course designer and champion of the first three events.

“I’m really looking forward to my first trip out to Carlsbad,” said Webb, a Reston, Virginia native. “I’ve always heard about what a great course and event it is, and how fast people have run there. Plus, Steve Scott has been something of a mentor to me over the years, and to run on a course he designed and won on three times just makes it that much more special.”

In this Olympic year Webb is gearing toward the U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Track & Field set for Eugene, Oregon in June, and the early season road 5k will plays well into his Olympic timing.

“I’m in good form,” Webb confirmed. “Carlsbad fits my schedule perfectly this year.”

Webb first gained national acclaim when he smashed Jim Ryun’s legendary 36-year-old American high school mile record in 2001 (3:53.43). Since then he has steadily moved up the ranks of the world’s top middle distance runners. In 2006, Webb ran the fastest-ever debut by an American at 10,000 meters (27:34.72), winning at the Payton Jordan Cardinal Invitational at Stanford University. For calendar year 2007, Webb ran the fastest mile (3:46.91), fastest 1500 meters (3:30:54), and second best 800 meters (1:43.84) in the world.

Click to read the rest of this article. Read more…

And so the long known, but never scientifically backed, feeling known as “the runner’s high” has at long last been proven. In a story in today’s New York Times, ‘researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.’

They call running the “positive addiction”, and those who get hooked understand why. The feelings of contentment and well-being, the sense of communion with all else beneath the sun and stars, the ability to eat and drink whatever one pleases, these are the inducements that provoke a powerful enticement to daily dosing. Read more…

To celebrate our 10th episode we ask you to join us on the podcast. Submit your segment - anywhere from 1-2 minutes - by calling 206-888-0346 and recording after the beep, or by recording an mp3 and emailing it to comments (at) runnerville (dot) com.

In this episode:

Chris Lear hands out plaudits for the unsung heroes of the Indoor NCAA Championship.

Amby Burfoot jumps on the political bandwagon…and confesses deep, dark secrets.

Jeremy Mosher loves World XC because of the team vibe, but goes a step too far suggesting a office World XC poll during March Madness.

Toni Reavis delivers the first Runnerville Scoop - Alan Webb to run the Carlsbad 5K on April 6th. Webb will chase Marc Davis’s American Road 5K Record of 13:24.

Brett Larner watches Tokyo-based Kenyan Gideon Ngatunyi prepare for World XC, and dissects the Japanese chances in Scotland.

Matt Taylor wants you to join the podcast. Submit your segment to the comment line (206-888-0346) or as an mp3 to comments (at) runnerville (dot) com. The best segment will be played in Episode 11.

[Music is “Cigarette” by Graham Colton Band.]

From coast to coast in the middle of march madness, episode #7 brings:

The Ryan Shay toxicology report.

The decline of American marathon running is drastic. Bring back dodgeball.

Meb out of London. Are the Olympics next?

The World’s Greatest Track & Field Meet. Zurich? Penn Relays? Rome? Nope, a high school meet in Kingston, Jamaica. No joke.

Is Haile the greatest ever? Would Olympic Marathon gold solidify his spot?

Should athletes take a stand against the Olympics? Toni says yes.

IAAF report says only 0.3% of drug tests were positive. We say, “Who cares? Save your money. Stop testing. Start researching.”

Boston Marathon puts together a solid field despite London’s deep pockets. Go Baba!

Russ Stewart calls in from Baghdad, Iraq. A recent 5K and a move to Tikrit on the agenda.

Special guest Don Janicki joins on the show. Don was a World Championship team member and multi-time marathon winner (2:11:16 PR); now he’s the pro athlete recruiter for the Bolder Boulder. We discuss the course change, the history, and who might make up the US contingent for the International Challenge. (Hint: they’ve already punched their tickets to Beijing.)

Join our conversation. Call the comment line at 206-888-0346.

At 10:33 this past Sunday night, America’s greatest television show was gunned down on a Baltimore street corner. Gone are the re-ups and the rippin’ and runnin’. Gone are the shouts of “pandemic!” and “WMD!” and “spiderbags!”. Gone are the Title III’s and Fuzzy Dunlops. Gone forever is Omar. The Wire was only five seasons old, snatched away from us before its time. There was a life that didn’t need to be snatched, yet snatched away it was.

The Wire was not a cop show, though had it been it would have been one of the finest examples of the genre ever aired. No, The Wire was more than that. It was a social novel, unfolding one chapter at a time, which examined the decay of urban life in this country (with a fictional Baltimore standing in for what could have been any number of cities) and our failure to combat the forces driving this collapse.

Using a palette of only shades of grey, David Simon painted a vibrantly colorful portrait of life in an American city at the dawn of this new century. Bleak? Yes. Depressing? Sometimes. But worth saving, worth fighting for? Absolutely. There were few black hats or white hats in Simon’s Baltimore. We saw conscientious drug dealers, noble stickup boys, misguided cops, and predatory civil servants. Everyone was flawed. Everyone was good and bad. Yet we came to love these characters. Their struggle was our struggle and we were riveted by their rise and fall. How else can you explain the popularity of a sociopathic lesbian drug assassin that talked like she had a mouth full of marbles? Or our complete devotion to a corner crew-chief that gunned down one of his close friends in cold blood early in the series?

If The Wire had a central message it would be this; while the system is ultimately flawed and beyond salvation, individuals are capable of redemption. So even as we see that Bubbles cleaned himself up, Cutty walked away from the game, and Namond made it off the corner that he was never meant for, we also see that the stat-juking cops still get promoted, the politicians abandon their promises to pursue the next election and the drug kingpins walk free.

You might be wondering when I’m going to bring this all back around to a discussion of track and field (honestly, I’m tempted to go on about The Wire for another 5,000 words but I’m guessing you’d stop reading). The connection between the two is pretty simple; The Wire is a perfect parallel for the state of track and field in our country right now. We have individual successes but the system is failing. For every Alan Webb, there is pathetic television coverage of meets. For each Breaux Greer and Deena Kastor, there is poor grassroots support and an arrogant and callous governing body. We tout these individual successes as a sign that things are moving in the right direction yet ignore the underlying problems that will continue to prevent our athletes from having long and rewarding careers in the sport. How many of us have struggled to train while working part-time jobs to support ourselves? How many NCAA champions get offered $20,000 contracts to keep competing while their less talented teammates take finance jobs making $70,000 a year? It’s not to say that the ends aren’t worth the means for those that try to make it in this sport, but it’s hard to enjoy the journey when you’re stressed beyond belief about making your next rent payment or digging yourself deeper into debt.

While The Wire went to that great DVD boxed set in the sky promising no hope for our cities, I don’t think that is ultimately the case of our sport. The Baltimore of the small screen was broken beyond repair, but there is hope yet for us. I don’t think it’s too late to turn things around, to fix the big problems facing track while still appreciating the individual successes. Start by taking the financial power away from the agents and shoe companies and giving it back to the athletes. In talking to my friend Pat the other day he pointed out how absurd it would be for LeBron to try and go to the bargaining table with no idea of what a guy like Kobe was making. Track has nothing resembling a collective bargaining agreement or union and it ultimately hurts everyone’s chance to make a living doing what they love. On the media side, there are some people creating amazing product on a small scale that should be given the chance to have wider exposure and mainstream legitimacy. There are still those out there that love and support the sport and want to make it better. It starts with each of us and our refusal to settle for what we know is less than the best.

It’s true, the game be the game, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try and change the rules.

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Stamos is a runnerville.com contributing writer. He might not be natural po-lice, but he smokes Newports from a soft pack and knows that a man’s got to have a code.

Assembled in Jamrock, aka Kingston, Jamaica.

In this episode:

Matt Taylor attends the greatest track & field meet in the world (and sips Red Bull and Guinness with Usain Bolt).

Amby Burfoot likes Alan Webb.

Robert Johnson explains why it’s hard to be a fan. And he’s right.

Toni Reavis on an Olympic Boycott: It might be good for the sport; think about it.

Jeremy Mosher dispenses kudos (with mini M&Ms) to the media department at NYRR (aka, “nerr”).

Let us know what you think. Call in your comments to 206-888-0346.

[Music is “Jammin” by reggae legend and Jamaican icon Bob Marley.]

Many have written on the struggles — financial and otherwise — of breaking into professional track and field, but I find it especially eye-opening to hear of struggles (”barely getting by”) from the runner’s own mouth (or blog). Such is the case with Brianna Glenn in her most recent post on her blog, which she calls “My so-called FABULOUS Life.” Brianna tells the story of how she became an elite runner, including the financial struggles, the “forgetting how to run and jump,” and her strategy to get back into shape. Now, she’s seeking a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in either the LJ or 200m. (she has PBs of 21-11 and 22.91, respectively). Here’s hoping she fulfills her dream.

Brianna’s story is important for a number of reasons. One, because it dispels the myth that all elite track and field athletes immediately strike gold when they get a sponsor or begin competing professionally. Brianna was competing every weekend under an Adidas sponsorship and claims she “barely got by.” This is the former PAC-10 Athlete of the Year we’re talking about here!

Two, her story underscores the uniqueness of our sport. If you play basketball well, you’ll have scores of people helping you along the way, offering wise counsel on big decisions, giving tips for improvement. For many elite runners, the only ones watching out for them are themselves and a coach, maybe. Oh, and their mom and dad. This has been said before (on this blog, I think), but track is one of the only sports that doesn’t reward athletes financially based on the potential for success. In track, your paycheck is determinant on your placing well — preferably first — at big meets. And any sponsorships are determinant on, well … the same thing.

Being an elite runner might be the most difficult profession in sports. No knock against LeBron James, but he doesn’t have to schedule his own games, book his own travel, or convince Nike that he is definitely going to score 30 in order to keep his contract or get a paycheck. His celebrity was set in stone before he even graduated high school.

Is a world championship without the world’s best, truly a championship?  This is the question posed by the NY Times in their coverage of Valencia 2K8.com — in an editorial, I might add.  (Now that’s some serious ink.)  And, if you ask me, it’s a pretty fair question.   Championships are held to weed out the riff-raff and allow the very best in a sport to elevate themselves.  They are the centrifuge of life, and the champions are the yield of this, this…. reverse emulsion!  (The athletes even provide their own centripetal acceleration!)

So, if you hold the World Championships and Jeremy Wariner isn’t running the 400, and Kenny Bekele isn’t running the 3k, what do you have?

Read more…