Over the Weekend . . .

Deena Kastor, a favorite of mine, went out and broke the American Women’s marathon record, taking nearly a minute off of Colleen DeReuck’s ten-year-old standard with a sterling 2:27:47. More surprising, she was the first American female finisher. Makes you wonder what’s wrong with the ‘kids’.

I spent Saturday with the folks at the Spokane Marathon, hand-selling and signing books. Not a surprise, I sold a bunch. These are my people. The staff was fun to hang with and treat to talk to. I had a table next to Niki Sibley, who was handing out free coffee from Chamokane Creek Trading Company, a business that she owns with her husband.(Yes, I got some coffee. A Brazilian. Will sip and savor when I get a little down time, then report back.) Niki, an ultrarunner who’s run across the state of Washington, is an incredibly upbeat young lady. I learned a lot from chatting with her. She doubled as the RD of the 10K.

Pay attention! Here's some wonderful advice from Mel. The Spokane Marathon was his 453rd marathon!!!! He started competing in marathons in his 50's. #NoExcuses #AcceptTheChallenge

Posted by The Spokane Marathon on Sunday, October 11, 2015

A gentleman named Mel was the final finisher in Spokane. It was his 453rd marathon. His advice? “When the ol’ rocking chair’s got you, get up and go for a run.”

I met Lori Shauvin. She introduced herself as the "Grandmother of Spokane Cross Country." For more than two decades, she's been taking teams to the Footlocker Cross Country meet in San Diego. Lori's been so dedicated to the kids, and for so long, that she was inducted into the FootlockerXC Hall of Fame. If you don't think that's a big deal, go look at who else is in there. Very neat lady, very strong-willed. Behave or the 'Grandmother' will set you right.

Chicago ran without pacesetters. The reaction on the LetsRun board is mixed. Some love the racing, others think anything less than a world record (or at least the attempt) is worthless. Put me down in the "I love racing" category.

After spending so much time with the race staff and the competitors, I thinking that I should actually train for something. Just don't know what.

Run gently, friends, while I figure it out.

Some racing taking place in District 9 XC - And Chicago drops pacers

Once upon a time when running in the US was just starting to boom, they held races. By today's standards, they were odd little events. The participants numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands, and pacers were unheard-of.

That changed, first with Bannister's brilliant run to finally break the barrier of 4 minutes with the help of teammates Brashear and Caraway. From then, a steady evolution led to almost all major races having a pacer or a 'rabbit.'

In the opinion of many old-timers (who undoubtedly hate being called that), it's retarded the development of the sport, making it a boring affair of sit-and-kick. Gone from the racing world were the major breaks and tactical pace changes that forced the opposition to compensate.

This hit home last week as I watched the women's race at the Bulldog Invite, held at Big Cross in Pasco. For the second week in a row, I watched Emily Adams (Waitsburg-Prescott) hide for the first mile, before launching an attack and cracking open the front of the pack. The break she made at Pasco won the district race for her. Once she gained that lead, she never relinquished it. By the same token, she didn't increase it in the last mile.

Rather than sit-and-kick, Emily made a transition to a racer, broke the lead pack and dared them to match or catch her. Moves like that, reminiscent of the wild pace changes that Henry Reno used to utilized to break his competitors,  make for exciting racing. The Asotin girls are going to need to learn to cover that break out to be close enough at the end to challenge Emily.

Now Chicago is breaking with modern tradition and telling the lead pack they're on their own. It's their race, to win, to lose, on the strength of their legs, lungs, and tactics.

We'll see who still remembers how to really race.

Tuesday Mash-up

USATF - New Plan to Reward Athletes

The USATF came out with a plan to share with athletes. Color me unimpressed. U.S. track and field: a ‘monumental’ step forward Based on the numbers, the USAFT is sharing ten percent of the revenue it gets annually with the athletes. Compare that to basketball, where the split is 49 percent for the owners, 51 percent for the athletes.

The second issue is that the program is explicitly designed to reward the upper tier of athletes, plus offers bonuses for medals. You're an up-and-coming sprinter? Too bad, no money for you, but Justin Gatlin, sprinter, drug cheat, gets endorsements and USATF loot.

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Why Do Schools Abuse a Third of Their Students?

As an introvert myself, and with kids and grandkids that are introverts, this article read like a horror story. For all the talk in the education system of teaching to the child, the truth is that education is dogma-driven. The current dogma insists on open classrooms, group projects, and collaborative learning.

Shoot me now.

I like working by myself. For the ninnies who say the real world doesn't work like that, too bad. My world does, because that's the way I designed it.

The Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric states students must “forego passivity in favor of contribution and participation...students must overcome isolation in order to learn to write.” Want to see me forgo passivity? Interrupt me while I'm writing. Better, ask my girls what the reaction is.

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Adventure Deficit Disorder?

I like the term. I don't live it, but I can understand it. Stephanie Cohen asks whether the modern lifestyle has robbed people of their sense of adventure. Do We Suffer From Adventure Deficit Disorder?  A good and quick read on an interesting subject.

Personally, I think most people don't seek adventure. Adventures have a tendency to introduce risk into life and most people are hard-wired to avoid risk.

Some of us, though . . .

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I've moved my two novels over to Kindle Unlimited. If you have a membership, you can read them for free. It's a weird (but pleasant) experience to watch the page counts as people read the books.

Rhythms

A missed Skype session turned out to be exactly what I needed this week to improve my running consistency.

To beat the heat of summer, I had also shifted most of my runs to early morning hours - an experiment that worked better than expected. Lately, though, I started finding excuses to not go out the door.

Also, since cross country started, my schedule went a little out-of-kilter. Pretty normal as I adjust to the different time for the runs and the odd nature of running with youngsters, some of whom can kick my butt in a mile, who can't hang for three. I do believe I've mentioned previously I'm slow. I end up running shorter but faster than normal with them. Laughing a lot, too - yesterday we did a hill grinding session, wore them out. Until we told them they could, as a one-time-offer-good-for-today-only,  run up the thirty-foot high dirt mounds. Amazing how fast junior high kids recover as they laughed and shouted and climbed the loose rock and sand.

Anyhow, I was supposed to Skype on Monday with Jack Welch. Not the GE CEO guy. Jackdog. Awesome dude who's become a friend over the last couple of years. (Has a great book, too!) Got up a couple minutes before the main alarm - we use three alarms in the house. The first is the snuggle alarm, plays positive music. The second is the main alarm a raucous get-your-buns-out-of-bed alarm. That's the one my sweetie gets up to. The last is my alarm and the voice of Enya tries to coax me into the day.

Rose on the first alarm, set up the computer in the near-dark because the season is shifting and what was bright sunlight a month ago is pre-dawn now. Made coffee. Logged into Skype - and discovered their network was down. No chat that day for Paul and Jackdog. Sadness.

Standing there as the edge of the sky brightened, the change of season finally struck. Motivation for the morning run was getting hard, not because I was getting lazier, though that's a frequent possibility.

Nope, I was out of rhythm.

My best (and most creative) sleep comes in the hour before dawn. When I used to drive truck for a living, I'd have to pull over to nap or risk putting the trailer in a ditch. As soon as the sun was fully up, I'd shift gears and get back on the road.

I spent about an hour yesterday rearranging my schedule, tweaking the writing time, the work time, and deciding where running would find its place. Turns out, back in the evening after work. A consistent time every day and the variability of my courses will improve because I don't have to worry about getting back to the house on time for work.

I woke up today, and lollygagged. Made the coffee, and started writing. Right in rhythm.

Tonight, I have a six-miler planned and, instead of a gotta-run attitude, I'm looking forward to it with a get-to-run smile.

Now I just need to reschedule with the Jackdog.

Run gently, friends. Find your rhythm and go.

Fitness Advice from the 1 Percent

Occasionally I find myself annoyed by people who decide that they need to proselytize to the rest of us. In this case, it's an article that someone recently tweeted about from Time magazine. Before that, it showed up in Entrepreneur magazine. Here's the article: Why Exercising Is a Higher Priority Than My Business. Go read it, or just move onto my cantankerous take.

As with most reformed individuals, Josh Steimle starts with a "once I was fallen" paragraph, talking about the early days of building his business and how he fell into the trap of valuing it above other things, including his health. He then moves on to talk about how the changes he made, how much more effective he is now that he is exercising ten hours a week, and finishes about watching his employees fall into the same trap that he did.

What he leaves out of his narrative are two critical features. First, when you are building a business, it's an all-or-nothing proposition. If the business doesn't succeed, you don't eat. Your family doesn't eat. You end up sleeping in a Hugo in the warehouse district and listening to hobos singing around a fire in a barrel. Of course he worked like mad and ignored things not directly related to building his business.

No sensible person goes into business with an intention to fail. The ones that make it are single-mindedly focused on whatever legally, morally, and ethically it takes to reach their definition of success. (I separate out those that don't operate legally, morally, and ethically as they aren't businesspeople - they're crooks.)

The second point where Steimle takes a disingenuous tack occurs when he talks about setting up incentive programs for his employees. While he freely states that he'll put off a meeting with a major client to get a run in, he doesn't go so far to say that he'd permit his employees to do the same. Instead, they get an incentive program - which the cynical among us might suggest also lowers the insurance rates for his company.

The difference in the way he treats himself and the way that I suspect he treats his employees mirrors the difference in their relationship to work. He has full control of his schedule. Most people do not. If you are working at Arby's and tell the shift manager that you have to check out for an hour for your noon run, he or she will escort you to the time clock to bid you a firm and final adieu.

I'm not picking on Arby's. Teachers can't just bomb off the job for a trail run unless it lands on their lunch hour - assuming that they're not busy then, too. Factory work? The same. Construction? The same. The hospital? The same. Patients don't care for themselves.

Josh Steimle recognizes the value of exercise, so much so that he pays his employees to cover his absences. His advice, to place exercise above work, sounds great - if you are part of the five percent of the population that works for themselves or has reached the upper reaches of a company that allows you to dictate and delegate down to free your time. I'm fortunate enough to be in that category (working for myself) with Steimle. I schedule my runs and yes, they make me more productive and happier. I also recognize that I'm an outlier.

I'll agree with the mantra that all people control how they use their time, but offer these amendments. If you need to put food on the table, you acquiesce to the boss and work the hours demanded. A stay-at-home mom has a choice, and the control, between running and consoling a crying infant. Which is the higher calling, exercise or your responsibilities to others?

There are many events that justifiably move exercise down the priority ladder. It shouldn't be that hard to acknowledge them and, instead preaching down, find a way to lift up.

Run gently, friends.

If you're in Spokane at 7pm on October 9th, I'm doing a book reading at Auntie's Bookstore. It would be great to meet some of you in person. 

What Running, Burning Man, and WorldCon Have in Common

I read an article last week that the Burning Man event in Nevada now has a 50K race attached to it. A couple of synapses closed and an epiphany resulted.

I’m going to pick on a couple of different things, running among them. Running seems pretty self-evident, but let's focus on organized races. Specifically, I'm going to pick on the Boston Marathon, the once-meritorious race that had qualifying times.

Burning Man is an annual event held in the Black Rock Desert. It didn't start there, but in San Francisco in 1986 on a beach during the summer solstice. That was where the burning of a wooden man (and a dog) first occurred. Later, after a run-in with the park police who forbade the torching of the Man, the event shifted out to the Nevada desert, to join the Cacophony Society. It was pretty much a free-for-all until, according to rumor, Dr. Dre talked the organizers into charging an entry fee. Until 1996, it was a private event.

More later. Now it's time to trek over to WorldCon, home of the Hugo Awards. The location of the event moves around and is voted on by the various attendees to the Con. This year it plopped down in Spokane. The Hugo Awards are the most prestigious in the Science Fiction & Fantasy genre. The Campbell Award (won by Wes Chu this year) goes to the author with the best first novel for the year. The first WorldCon, depending on who you talk to, was either in the United States when Frederick Pohl traveled from New York to Philadelphia to meet with some other writers, or a year later (1937) when Arthur C. Clarke organized a more formal meeting that drew twenty people. The Hugos are supposed to be the ‘people’s choice’ awards for science fiction and fantasy.

So, now everybody should be on the same page, even if you're confused as to how these three events could possibly share anything.

As I said, the 50K at Burning Man was the key for me. Burning Man got its start as an artist's retreat, with a strong leave no trace behind element. It's grown from a small group of friends on a Bay area beach to 70,000 people in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Dadaists didn't strike me as the ultrarunning type. They didn't charge entry fees either (to be fair, the ultra doesn't either, but you have to purchase a ticket to Burning Man.)

That changed about the same time that attendance at Burning Man underwent a stunning growth curve, going from a private party of a few thousand die-hard artists to the 70,000 hangers-on who show up for random debauchery and drugs. The tickets for this year’s event was $390 per person, plus a fee for a vehicle. Officially sanctioned Burning Man events have showed up elsewhere as the concept franchises itself.

Boston used to be the race that proved you were good enough to rank among the best, at least by community standards. There's always been disagreement over the qualifying standards, but the acrimony really ratcheted up when you could fundraise to get an entry. When the 2010 marathon sold out in eight hours, the BAA adjusted the qualifying standards. They also granted preferences to faster runners. At the same time, they continued to admit 20 percent of the field that fundraised like champs but couldn't come close to a qualifying standard. Of course, it wasn't just any fundraisers, but sponsors of the marathon. Runners who qualified are no longer guaranteed an entry. Fees for Boston are approaching $200.

WorldCon managed to commit the double offense of disrespecting its fans and engaging in fratricidal behavior. Unlike the two examples above, the science fiction establishment eschewed money in favor of ideology. When one group organized to point out that many a fine story was left off the ballots, the blowback was ferocious, complete with charges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the end, the Hugos had a record five “No Awards” (matching the total for the preceding 70+ years) and a nearly white-bread slate of winners. So much for diversity.

In an effort to limit the hoi-polloi from getting notions of nominating verboten stories and authors, the fees for next year were raised 25 percent. I don’t anticipate a whole lot more diversity next year.

In the meantime, the fans just wanted a readable story. Based on the statistics, they haven’t been getting them, as the sci-fi and fantasy genres have taken a huge hit in sales over the last decade. Something is clearly out-of-kilter.

Each case above shares one similarity. They are sellouts.

Burning Man was about art and freedom and experience, not voyeurism at $390 a ticket.

Boston was striving to perform to a high level and seeing a reward for it. Now a shlub that isn’t within hailing distance of a qualifying standard gets in for raising money for the right charity. Boston can no longer lay claim to being a meritorious event. They’ve bollixed the entry system. The running companies in general and the directors of the major races seem to treat the runner as a sheep fit for shearing. Nike explores $200 shoes, races jack the entry fees, and races hand out medals to folks out for a saunter.

WorldCon can’t claim to represent the fans or the writers. The insurgents who advocated that story trumps politics were ostracized. The fans, per the major publisher, should pony up the dollars to buy stories that their betters have decided should be published for diversity or viewpoint. In the meantime, they raise the price of an ebook to stupid levels that hurt their own authors. The fans are deciding with their feet and leaving in droves.

It would be easy to say that these are outliers, cherry-picked for effect. They aren’t. The same thing is happening with almost every facet of society. Universities sell out their students, taking enormous sums of student loans knowing full well that the students will be indebted for most of their lives. Adding insult to injury, they allow far more students to matriculate into degrees than there is demand for in the real world.

American business is no better. I can’t do any better than this article by Clark Whelton – Lost in Krappetown.

At some point, people are going to start feeling like they’ve been taken for suckers. When that happens, the existing structures might well implode.

It’s happening in the publishing industry already.

Ominously for running, last year showed the first decline in decades in race participation, despite more races than ever.

It’s not too late to go back to first principles.

So, Anybody Ever Wanted to Run Across Ohio?

K.P. Kelly is running across the state of Ohio next week. While Ohio is one of the Mid-Western States, and a little on the smallish side compared to say, Montana, it’s still an impressive feat. A fast disclaimer – my longest ever run is 101.43 miles. K.P. is doing about 2.5 times that much.

Boggles your mind? Read on. He’s doing it for a pretty cool cause. (Interview was done electronically and I’m hoping that K.P. has time to add some new comments. Mine will get interjected in between.)

 1.     Let’s start with the big question – you’re about to run a ridiculous distance. How far and why? I will be running 250 miles, from the Ohio River in Cincinnati, OH to Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio.  Last year, I ran this same course, and did it over six days, stopping each night to sleep.  I ran last year to raise support for terminally ill children.  This year, I am running for Get Fit Ohio, a new organization I co-founded. Unlike last year, I am not stopping over-night.  I will run (and walk a bit) for 72 straight hours, without sleep, and with carrying all of my gear on my back.

(Yikes. I now officially feel like a slacker.)

2. What got you started on your non-profit journey?  My first nonprofit was Share 4 Kids. We grant and share wishes of terminally ill children. I’ve also served on the Board of Directors of several non-profits, and help to brand and market other non-profits.  I find my life has more meaning when the work I do and the way in which I spend my time has more meaning. Spending time working with non-profits is a way to utilize my skills, ability, and my passion, for a greater good.

(Married to someone working in the non-profit sector, I understand the motivations of the folks that work so hard for very few dollars – though great satisfaction.)

3. You’re also an entrepreneur. How do you balance your time? After all, none of these are easy tasks. That is always a challenge. People never believe this about me, but the truth is that I am not naturally an organized person nor someone that time management comes easily to.  I have had to work at it.  I experiment with different ways to be more efficient, find systems that work for me, then do the best I can to stick to them,  I am not sure if balance is ever achieved, and perhaps it is not meant to be achieved. We are always leaning one way or the other. I make sure to always put people first, and go from there. At the end of the day, if I just keep pushing forward, every task gets done.

(Oh good. I thought I might be the only one with time management issues and balance problems. Looks like we have the same first instinct—take care of people first.)

4. So how did you plan your training for your run? Honestly, I piece together my training here and there.  I am not a natural runner. I don’t have a strict plan.  There really is not a way to adequately train for something like this.  I could have trained a bit better. I could be in better shape. I wish I was a bit healthier. But in the end, nothing prepares for this.  I’ve done a lot of 30 mile runs. I’ve averaged over 100 miles per week the past 2 months.  My focus has been on training to do the first 100 miles as strong as I can, and then just hold on and survive after that.

 5. What kind of plans do you have for fueling, shoe changes, etc? Do you have a crew?  I don’t have a crew. I intended to have a crew following in an RV so that I had all my supplies, did not have to carry anything, and I could shower quickly and change frequently.  Plans for that fell through.

 What I will be doing is carrying about 20lbs with me. I will have a change of shoes, several pairs of socks, clothes, first aid, my food, and all the water I can carry. I will refuel anytime I come across a gas station or store and buy Gatorade. 

 I do have people coming out a few times on the run to change out my supplies.  Our Get Fit Ohio Nutritional Director, Mary, will be with me for a portion of the run, at night, driving alongside to allow me some time to run without carrying all the gear. That will be helpful. 

 I will change my socks every few hours, and rotate my shoes every 2-3 hours.  My food/fuel is being supplied by Great Race Nutrition. Most of my diet will be gels, but I will stop along my run to purchase some food.  It is a challenge to get in all of the calories. I need to be eating around 7,000 calories per day on the run.  It will be more of a challenge being alone for most of it and carrying my own gear, but I am actually looking forward to that; being self-dependent, just me and the road.

6. Last question. How do people go about supporting you? We will have our website up Monday, which will show the live updates along my run.  The best thing to do for now is to connect with our Facebook Page, http://www.facebook.com/GetFitOH We will be posting updates there and ways to support. Our GoFundMe is http://www.GoFundMe.com/FitCleRun   The donations have been much lower than anticipated so far, but the cause has been received tremendous attention and is being shared and talked about all over social media, which will ultimately help us in helping families in need.

Runners Aren't Solitary

The idea of the solitary runner, devoted to the sport like a monk to his order or committed to it like a convict, depending on whether you favor Once a Runner or The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, runs counter to the actual evidence.

Both stories, one American, one British, involve the isolation of the individual and the starkness of the decisions that they make as runners. That makes for compelling fiction but falls short in expressing the runners as actually exist. Mind you, this is not a complaint against either—fiction writing, by its nature, dramatizes and expands the human experience. These books did both outstandingly well by focusing on a single aspect, the solitariness of their paths and the determination to trod it in their own fashion.

That doesn’t describe the majority of us. For evidence, I point to the large number of running groups that gather weekly to run together, train together, and race together. The truth is that running is a communal activity, one that probably is hard-wired into our genes. In Born to Run, Chris McDougall recounts the stories of the African Bushmen on the hunt, the Tarahumara playing their running games, and the incredible sight of one of the best ultrarunners in the world, Scott Jurek, standing wrapped in a blanket to cheer on the last finisher.

Even Micah True, aka Caballo Blanco, the ultimate loner, jumped in to pace the Tarahumara at Leadville and later organized the races that would become famous in the book, not for himself, but for the villages in the Copper Canyons.

Less extreme examples make an appearance every weekend in a town close to you. If the local running group isn’t out for a training run, they’re out racing or helping organize a fundraiser of a race. After that comes the gathering for coffee, if not a full breakfast.

We don’t always run in packs, the way cyclists do, but we give each other encouragement on the trails, quick smiles or an honest “Great job!” on passing. We wave, and yes, we try to figure out who’s faster. It’s human nature.

This comes to mind because cross country practice has begun, and I have a new generation of kids that I’m coaching. Already I can see them starting to bond. For the returnees, the first day of practice is like stretching a muscle memory, remembering how this team, this community, practices and plays together.

Kids that I’ve heard slam each other with insults in the hallways unabashedly cheer on their teammates during the practices. Soon, they will do the same at the races. They also cheer on the other team, which I think is a unique feature of running. When Duke played Wisconsin for the NCAA Championship, I don’t think anyone cheered for both at the same time, yet I see people and runners do it all the time at local cross country races.

Someone once said, and I have unfortunately forgotten who, that English is a wonderful language because it has words for both alone and solitude. Running, cross country racing, is similar.

It’s a solitary activity that most people do with a group, a race that we want to win and want the other bloke to do well.

Run gently, friends. Give a shout out to the next runner you meet – he or she is part of your tribe, after all.

Does Running Have the Most Dysfunctional Governing Body in History?

Settle in, because I'm in a bit of a ranty mood.

I haven't comment on the doping scandals that popped in the news, first with the accusations against the Nike Oregon Project and, this past week, the IAAF data that got leaked. I hope the allegations are not true but fear that worse is still to come. Justin Lagat made a great point about the lack of names painting all elite runners with the same tarring brush. As he put it on Facebook, "From now henceforth, allegations with NUMBERS and NOT NAMES are a good as useless to me."

That said, running has a big problem with PEDs. The lack of names comes from the reluctance of the IAAF to enforce sensible rules to protect the honest athletes. Today, we get the news that the IAAF went back and found 28 athletes were using at the 2005 and 2007 World Championships. So far, no names have been made public.

Color me skeptical, but I don't think they would have gone back and looked at those results except for the data breach last week. The IAAF got embarrassed and is doing exactly what every entrenched bureaucracy does, throwing people under buses. Given an option, I think they'll do it by reputation and seek to avoid actually naming the individuals (as Justin pointed out). Much easier to smear (mostly retired) athletes by innuendo. Plus they get to point out how actively they pursue PEDs without doing anything about the current problems.

The various governing bodies need the spectacle of competition to drive revenues. World records also act to drive interest. It behooves them to treat the many questionable tests reported as outliers. An outrageous scenario? Look to Lance Armstrong and the International Cycling Union, whom Floyd Landis accused of protecting Armstrong.

Is it so hard to picture the same in running?

Now, on to Nick Symmonds.

USATF, in their usual immitigably tone-deaf manner, managed to bring back images of the bad-old-days of the AAU. As part of the agreement to be on the US team for Worlds, athletes are required to sign an agreement, part of which states that they will wear official Nike uniforms and gear at team events. The problem is that the term "team events" never gets defined. A good idea of what they meant can be inferred from a letter they sent along with the agreement, to wit: "Accordingly, please pack ONLY Team USA, Nike or unbranded apparel ..."

Man, it's almost like Nike hates real competition and uses the USATF as a bought-and-paid-for enforcement arm.

Remember the comment above about how bureaucracies react? Yep, they live down to that low standard. For starters, they questioned his honesty in bringing this up now when he had signed the agreement in the past. Of course, he was sponsored by Nike back then, so the point was irrelevant. Now he's sponsored by Brooks. He'd like to honor his contract by wearing Brooks gear at appropriate times. Hard to do when you're told to leave all your branded gear that doesn't have a swoosh on it at home.

According to Nick, he got hassled by USATF officials in a hotel lobby for wearing Brooks stuff. I am unclear on how coffee-drinking becomes a team event. Nick evidently had similar questions, hence the reluctance to sign the contract without a better definition of terms.

The USATF refused to define the term. When Symmonds didn't sign, they sent out him a nicely passive-aggressive email stating, "Without you having submitted a fully executed USATF Statement of Conditions for the 2015 IAAF World Championships, I am disappointed to have to inform you that you will not be named to the U.S. Team in the men's 800m event."

Yep, all Symmonds' fault and they are so disappointed, but not enough to go against Nike.

Now, in the aftermath, the attacks continue. Alan Abrahamson, noted Olympic writer, put forth an article that seeks to subtlety paint Symmonds as greedy and looking to enhance the Symmonds brand. Cueing Abrahamson, "Consider: This predicament is entirely of Symmonds’ own making." This piece of prejudicial writing comes early in the article, clearly to color everything that follows.

Later in the article you can nearly hear Abrahamson harrumphing as he writes, "That he said he made “several offers” to help USATF draft a new Statement of Conditions is misleading and unhelpful . . .  who is Symmonds to take it upon himself to undertake such an individualized effort?"

Abrahamson finishes with a nice piece of character assassination:

Oh, and if 1:44.53 is your season’s best in the 800, and you’re looking at a field in Beijing that is going to be dramatically better than it was in Moscow two years ago, and you’re at risk of not even making the finals, you might make the choice that it’s better for your brand not to go but, instead, cast yourself as a crusader in the vein of the saintly Steve Prefontaine against USATF.

The doping problems, the sponsorship strongarm, follows on the heels of the delegate mess earlier this year where the governing board of the USATF overrode the vote of the membership to place USATF President Stephanie Hightower onto the IAAF board instead of Bob Hersh. Willie Banks, former Olympian and Board member summed it up succinctly as "totally unforgivable." 

It's becoming quite apparent that the organizing bodies have no respect for the athletes they presume to govern. It's almost like the athletes exist to fund the USATF for the employees instead of representing the best interests of the sport.

Local Running around Asotin

Let's start with some fun news. The Seaport Striders held their annual fundraiser in Asotin Friday evening. The temperatures stayed up a bit, probably in the mid-80's, but that didn't stop Brady McKay from clocking a 16:30-ish time (I forgot the actual time, sorry). Brady's headed to LCSC later this month to run for Mike Collins and the Warriors. One of Coach Potter's kids from Lewiston was hot on his heels.

Mike Halverson organized the proceedings, with a major assist from Asotin coach Tim Gundy. They took an informal poll at the beginning of the race to see how many liked the evening race. About a third put up a hand. How many would prefer a Saturday morning race? Another third. How many didn't care? The rest. About average for a running group.

Tim Gundy set up the course for 3 miles, rather a full 5K. No one complained about the .1 difference, and most folks had a smile when they got to the finish. With the exception of some of the speedsters up front, the participants treated it as the fun run/walk it was.

I did not run. I timed, which makes me the lazy one for the event. Two of my daughters, my wife, and a couple of friends walked. The daughters pushed strollers with the little ones. I did pony up an entry fee, though. A good cause and the Striders match the entries and donate the proceeds to the three local high school programs. Not sure how much ultimately made its way to the schools, but every little bit helps.

Many thanks to the Striders!

Also on the good news front, I've had an article accepted by Like the Wind magazine. Not sure when it will come out, but tickled about the whole thing. For the runners out there, if you want a chance to publish an article, check out Like the Wind's contributor pages. They're open to a variety of writing styles and topics. Something to consider . . .

There's a whole lot of less cheery news on the running front. I think I'll tackle that on Tuesday, plus an update on the Kenyan adventure.

Catching up over the weekend.

Northwest Runner arrived just before the weekend, and for once, I had some time to settle in and read. One writer that I've been enjoying with each issue is Greg van Belle. This issue had his take on the trails versus roads debate. Quoting Greg, "I've done the math and trail running is 100 percent better than street running. You can't argue with math." The whole article is plenty fun. You can follow Greg on Twitter at @gregvanbelle. While you're at it, I'm there at @paulduffau.

Dana Richardson & Sarah Zentz have put together a documentary on the Tarahumara that won a prestigious Award of Merit from IndieFEST and the Golden Palm Award from the Mexico International Film Festival . The movie, Goshen: Places of Refuge for the Running People, explores the efforts of the Running People to maintain their way of life against the assaults of the modern world. For more info, you can head to GoshenFilms. The movie is available for sale - a reminder that if you want more running related stuff, you need to support the artists involved.

Finished reading a cultural guide to Kenya. The description of their driving habits convinces me that I should be hiring people rather than attempt transporting myself. Also, the advice never to get between the hippo and water seemed pretty obvious, but given the hippo is the deadliest critter (can something as big as a hippo be called a critter?), it probably needs repeating. Also, I've booked four days at the High Altitude Training Centre. I need to find out who was the slowest runner ever to stay there. I might be able to claim a somewhat dubious record.

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One disagreement I had with Scott Fishman was on the subject of setting a goal that I wanted to enjoy every run. Scott maintained that enjoying a run was not quantifiable and thus could not be used as a goal. He also maintained it wasn't realistic to expect to enjoy every run. He was wrong, at least on the first point. The second is open to debate and would depend on the individual.

To quantify the enjoyment factor on a run, we simply need to borrow the tools used by the medical profession with the perceived level of pain or the Borg scale of perceived effort for exercise. I now use a scale 1-5 to rate my running enjoyment with 1 representing 'it sucked' and 5 representing 'awesome'. The goal is to always stay at a 3 or above, and I adjust workouts to make that happen. If running in 105 degree heat will result in a 2, I find a different time to run or a cooler location.

Yesterday I was up before dawn and on the trails up North Asotin Creek as the sun broke, surprising a flock of turkeys - one momma and a half-dozen poults. Later I saw a pair of 3-point bucks. In between, I traversed from the grassy valley, raindrops that clinged to the taller stalks glistening in the rising sun and up the pine-scented canyon. I started creaky and finished feeling comfortably tired, exactly what I aimed for. That was a solid 4 on the pleasure scale.

By planning the runs around the pleasure scale, I've been much more consistent with the running and it's showing in my fitness. I'm also having more fun than ever. You might give it a try yourself.

Why Kids Should Not Train to Race Year Round

In youth sport after youth sport, the year-round club model is taking hold for children before they reach their tenth birthday. Indeed, making the club team for sports such as soccer and softball is more important than the local high school team for many athletes. The athletes that participate on the clubs often receive very high levels of coaching, though that is not a given. AAU basketball, for example, is more about showcasing talent for colleges than for skills development. 

The single sport emphasis of today's athletes arguably hurts their athletic development, and actually leads to more injuries. In a study presented by authors NA Jayanthi , C. Pinkham, and A. Luke, titled THE RISKS OF SPORTS SPECIALIZATION AND RAPID GROWTH IN YOUNG ATHLETES, they found a significant correlation towards specialized athletes and injury rates. Another study, done by the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM), supports the same conclusion, arguing that the increase in overuse injuries is reaching epidemic proportions.

In both studies, it was the level of organized activities that correlated most with injury rates. That organizational bent usually was the result of early specialization, which added time to the training activity on the assumption that more and early work would lead to improved skills. It also led to highly repetitive drills that created overuse injuries.

In recent NFL drafts, 80 percent of the players taken in the first round were multi-sport competitors in high school. I've talked with coaches, both at the D1 level and at high schools, most prefer athletes with a varied sports background. Rick Riley, in a conversation we had last year, suggested part of his success in running came from the varied activities - swimming, hiking, bucking hay - that he did as a youth. Each built different muscles and trained the nervous system to respond to new inputs and made the whole stronger in the process.

The legendary Dr. Jack Daniels concurred, writing in his book Daniel's Running Formula that "all runners can benefit from breaks in training." Bill Bowerman, as reported in Kenny Moore's excellent Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, despised indoor track, feeling that it interfered with the necessary base building activity that a runner need to engage in while recharging the system. After the Munich Olympics, he gave Steve Prefontaine months off, telling him to just keep moving until the fire came back.

Which leads us to a second concern about year-round training and racing. Along side of the injury issues are recurring stories of athletes burned out by the process. When the simple act of running becomes a constant grind of training, with each run measured by the success of the training stimulus and not the pleasure, it turns to work. For some, that hard work is it's own reward, but the number of individuals that can function on a constant diet of stress is minimal. Most kids break down, either physically or emotionally. We lose two-thirds of our athletes from junior high to high school this way.

There is a season for everything and every season has an end. For too many kids, the training begins to resemble the ordeal of Sisyphus, forever pushing a boulder up the mountain, but never destined to reach the top. At some point, the labors must be over and the hero gets both the rewards of the effort, and a chance to rest briefly on his or her laurels with the competitive fire banked until it's needed again. When it is, the passion will return and the athlete returns to the task renewed and stronger.

To quote Pat Tyson, head coach at Gonzaga, speaking of the goals for young runners, "Number one is just to gain a passion for running. To love the morning, to love the trail, to love the pace on the track. And if some kid gets really good at it, that's cool too."

It's a great quote and shows that Pat Tyson has his priorities solidly founded on bedrock principles. There's a reason he won multiple state championships at Mead High School and is beloved by his athletes. It's not my favorite quote, though. My favorite from Pat shows how uncomplicated it can be and simultaneously deep.

Love the run.

In Response to Yesterday's Post

Ask and ye shall receive. Jack Welch, author of When Running Was Young and So Were We, sent along the following link to a write-up of a very cool running program started for kids in South Carolina.

SOUTH CAROLINA COACH EXPANDING YOUTH RUNNING OPPORTUNITIES

Since I don't know if I'll be coaching junior high xc next season*, this might be an avenue for me to explore. Probably can't get busy with it until after the Kenya trip though.

 (*There was a coaching change as long-time JRHS coach Steve Cowdrey stepped down and JRHS track coach Mark Thummel steps up to take the helm. Mark's a great teacher and coach, and I've offered to help, so we'll see. The school admin may have some input as well, plus Mark already has a cadre of experienced assistants from the track team.)

By the way, Jack Welch has had quite a year. First, he won the TAFWA award for his book, and this month landed in the Summer Reading List in Running Times.

Why are we leaving kids behind?

Bill Bowerman wrote, in his 1967 book Jogging, that the system for sports in the United States discriminates against people over the age of thirty and even the young. He stated, quite bluntly, "Professionals unwittingly discriminate further in that they spend little time on the youngsters with small talent or with those who do not care to compete." Fifty years later, not much has changed.

We now have clubs sports for youngsters, but the presumption in the clubs is that the competition is the important feature. At the six year-old level, we have, as a country, decent participation rates. Somewhere around junior high school, though, we lose kids by the bushel, both boys and girls.

Two reason account for two-thirds of the loss. First, the smaller of the components, injury,  accounts for 27 percent of the drop for girls, 29 percent of the drop for boys. That's a quarter of our youth athletes, physically broken. I'm going to get to this later in the week, so stay tuned.

The primary reason though, as any follower of Coach Bruce Brown will attest to, is that the athletes are not having fun. His DVD presentation, The Proper Role of Parents in Athletics, is pure gold and hits at this exact point. For more documentation, we can go to EPSN magazine. They're infographic shows the same thing. 39 percent of boys, 38 percent of girls, say they quit sports because they weren't having fun.

It's not just sour grapes for the benchwarmers. Most kids are not going to win a college scholarship and they know this probably fairly early in their sports careers, so their sole motivation is the pleasure they derive from the activity. I've watched too many cross country races with the kids at the back trying just as hard as the kids in the front to believe that it's about winning for the kids.

What I see are kids who are having fun, working hard, and have people around them - fellow athletes and adults - who respect their effort. At the end of those high school careers, they lose that support to a large extent. They leave the team and the coach to go to college. Even for the ones that stay close, they lose the connection to the team, looking on as an outsider. I suspect that the idea that running is an activity to be enjoyed gets obscured by the chase to the finish line.

And those are the ones that stayed in the sports pipeline. It doesn't take into account the large numbers that drop out from first grade to high school. (I'm disregarding, for the moment, the socio-economic issues that surround sports participation.)

For the running community, this presents both a challenge and a great opportunity. The opportunity is to create systems that will encourage those kids (and it wouldn't hurt to get the parents moving, either!) to stick with the sport, and by doing so, grow the base of the sport. Ideally this effort would start long before organized sports and work around and enhance the usual activities of growing up.

The challenge is that we continue to view running through the lens of sport, and not activity. In the words of Vince Lombardi, "Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” That's the essence of professional sports, except we as a nation have decreed that all sports shall be treated as professional sports, even when the athletes are 12 year-olds.

This message was reinforced recently by a new track club in the area, the Confluence Elite. The team was set up by Mike Collins, the coach for the LCSC Warriors. Coach Collins is a tremendous positive force in the community, and not just the running community. The Confluence Elite is a USATF team, and the focus is on training and improving for competition. The coaches associated with it are top-notch and, in talking to a couple of the runners, the kids are having fun. The purpose of the club is well-defined and I'm a big supporter of both it and the coaches involved.

Still, I think that this might represent a missed opportunity. One of the clubs that I follow is the Alice Springs Running Walking Club. Located in the middle of the outback, the town has a history of participation in sports, at all ages. Their constitution makes it clear:

A. to promote and encourage running and walking as sports, as a means of healthy exercise and the improvement of community fitness for individuals of all ages and abilities;

It's not until the fourth point on the statement of objectives do you find the development of talent.

They follow along the Lydiard model for a club. Arthur Lydiard was the inspiration for Bowerman's jogging program in Eugene. Designed to be inclusive of all, it was less sports oriented than activity based. The distinction is important. Sports ultimately are about winning, against yourself and the competition. Activities are open to all and the competition gets replaced by camaraderie.

The group of ultrarunners I hung out with in San Diego exemplified this. We'd head out for group runs in the Cuyamaca Mountains or out to the desert. We didn't run for good health and none of us were going to win much more than an age group medal. Instead, we shared the experiences, and had some fun while we covered miles.

People do those things that give them pleasure. I'd like to see clubs that applied more attention to the act of running as a way of doing something fun rather than see people, kids or adults, in constant training cycles. Some of the local running clubs come close, but are adult based, and most of the chatter is directed at training for races. 

There seems to be a gap there, one that I think would be important to fill, if someone knew how. I sure don't. Maybe it's time to create a different type of club, one that takes the approach that running, in and of itself, can be fun and encourages the kids to use the running as a component of play.

That, frankly, is a daunting thought.

A fair number of you read and never comment, but I would really like to hear your opinions on this, so please, use the comments or send me an email.