Runnerville

It’s a dog eat dog world out there. You’ve surely heard this famous expression coined by (I’m guessing) Rudyard Kipling, but have you ever stopped to consider exactly what it means? It means that everyone has enemies. That’s right Santa, even you. So as a runner, who are the dogs out there that are trying to eat you? Well, for starters… dogs.

11. Dogs

How many times have you been out for a run on your favorite bike path when you come across the lady with the two ankle-biters on what seems to be eight leashes? Sure she’s running off to the side of the path, but Cutsie and Wootsie are ranging all over the damn place and just when you think you’ve got a clear shot one of them darts under foot, making you lunge out of the way lest you get Pomeranian all over the bottom of your shoe. Even worse is when you’re on a trail and you come across some unleashed, overly friendly pony whose owner is trying to pass off as a “dog” and the beast chases you for three quarters of a mile before giving up to go knock down a small child.

10. New Running Shoes

They look so innocent, sitting there all white and clean, just begging to be run in. Don’t be fooled. There are few forces capable of making you run faster than you have any business running. They feel so soft and light, like the dreams of angels, and the next thing you know you’re slumped over your front steps dry heaving into the bushes. They’re sometimes accompanied by their henchmen Blisters and Sticker Shock. Read more…

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.

—

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?

—

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.

—

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.

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.

—
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.

Around this time every four years, I start to get this gnawing pit in my stomach. I experience a growing sense of unease every time I watch a track meet on ESPN. I’ll hear a snatch of a John Williams trumpet fanfare as I flip past a late night showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it’s like an icy finger running down my spine. Then one day it happens; I’m innocently watching Lipstick Jungle (what, you’re not?) and down in the corner of the screen is a five-ringed logo. The rough beast approaches; NBC’s run-up to their Olympic coverage has begun.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I’m the first person on this site to criticize mainstream broadcasting of track and field in this country. Far from it. I am however, the first person to do so using thematic elements from a Yeats poem (unless Mosher’s got a riff on here about “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner” that I overlooked). Please believe me when I say that I look at the approaching network coverage of the Olympics with a sense of dread. I can’t remember the last time I watched the summer Games without feeling irritated, annoyed and a bit let down. It was probably back when I was ten and was easily distracted by the bright colors. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I hate watching the Olympics on NBC.

It starts with the network’s endless promotion in the coming months. If they spent a fraction of their Olympic advertising budget on supporting show development maybe we wouldn’t see excellent series like Studio 60, Friday Night Lights and Bionic Woman getting canceled. Ok, maybe not Bionic Woman (how Ron Moore choked so tremendously I’ll never know, but that show blew on an epic scale). Instead, we’re going to be treated to various and endless montages of plucky gymnasts, powerhouse sprinters, Michael Jordan, the American flag, crying plucky gymnasts, and a shirtless Michael Phelps. They’ll be accompanied by stirring orchestral scores and the ubiquitous bird shaped rainbow. You know, in case we forgot what network was showing the Olympics in the 30 seconds since they reminded us last.

Read the rest of Outkicked! Read more…

In 2005 I zigged and zagged my way across the country, documenting the lifestyle and training of some of the top collegiate XC programs. chasingTRADITION was my first blogumentary, before I even knew what a blogumentary was. It was a lot of fun and - looking back - was probably the springboard to my career as a…whatever it is that I do.

chasingTRADITION was an experiment. I did some things well and some things poorly. I learned what worked and what didn’t. One thing that worked really well was giving Stamos an audience. Through his Outkicked! columns and Public Service Announcements, Stamos burst onto the scene. But his 15 minutes of fame expired with the NCAA XC Championships - also known as The End of chasingTRADITION. But Stamos and I stayed in touch. We wrote long letters. We sent text messages with smiley faces. We even clinked glassed at the LetsRun.com after party in New York City. And so it’s with great pride - and laughter - that I present to you:

The Return of Stamos! Read more…