On to Eldoret

New Year’s Day is an eventful holiday in Kenya. The families travel back to their traditional homes to celebrate the day. In my case, I ended up joining a gentleman I met on the plane over. We touched base after we got settled, and Njuguna invited me to join him and his wife, Celia, on a trip into the Central Highlands. He promised me a potluck and a chance for me to learn a bit about the Kikuyu lands.

Roast goat, chapata, a Kenyan version of cole slaw, beans, potatoes, and more.

Njuguna was actually serious when he mentioned that it would be a potluck. At every house that we visited, the families offered us food. It is part of the cultural pattern throughout Kenya, where they treated guests as family, feeding them and offering tea.

Celia came to my rescue. She had taught her European students a phrase, ne meh she ba, (spelling phonetically here, folks. Could well have a different proper spelling.) The phrase means “I am now full.” I suspect that phrase, along with ‘thank you very much’—assante sana,—are going to be in my permanent repertoire. Po le, too. I’m sorry. It actually has a wide and varied meaning from I’m sorry I stepped on your foot to I’m sorry your car has a flat tire. The range of expression of this one word will appeal to my youngest daughter.

Kenyan gatherings, at least this one, are quiet relative to a comparable American party. I liked the difference as I’ve never been much for trying to shout over a group.

The next day, Saturday, marked my trip to Eldoret. Immediate impression – absolute relief at the breezes and the drop in humidity. Also, my allergies are fading which is great. Still a bit of a sniffle but that is fading fast.

Justin met me at the airport, and he drove us to his home, where I’ll be staying. He and his wife have been most welcoming, though I think they worry over me. They shouldn’t as I’m pretty adaptable. After settling in, Justin took me on a walk, pointing out the houses of Olympic gold medalists and other notaries. The views are expansive and I plan on getting out during dawn and dusk to capture some of the images. That will remain a work in progress for now but once I get them, I’ll put them up.

After the walk, we had dinner - traditional food that was very tasty, with Kenyan tea, and then sat talking. For Justin and I, it was a lot of about writing. Running periodically enters into the conversation, too. There are a couple of major races coming up, so I'll have a chance to watch outstanding runners as they go head to head.

Update: Sunday morning. Went for a four mile-ish run/walk with Justin. Still can process enough oxygen but that is something that time will take care of. The terrain reminds me a lot of home. Took a goodly number of pictures along the way.

Today, we’re headed out to Kapkeringon Village to visit Justin’s family.

Yes the gaps are big enough to fall through.

Justin Lagat, looking stylish.

Are the great running magazines dying?

News broke this week that Marathon and Beyond will cease publication after it issues its December 2015 edition. The magazine occupied an interesting niche in the marketplace, opting for long-form articles that delved more deeply into the subject matter - whether it was a particular marathon or training story - than the quick blurbs that appear elsewhere.  The reason editor Richard Benyo offered was the transition in the readership from a print-based clientele to the digital consumer. While they still maintained a core of people who loved the magazine, the total numbers eroded year-by-year to the point where the magazine was no longer a viable business concern.

They aren't alone in feeling the pinch. Last year,  Running Times, my favorite magazine, announced that they were cutting their offering from ten issues per year to six. Even Runner's World is cutting, going from twelve to eleven this year.

To anyone watching the state of American newspapers, or the rise of indie publishing, this comes as no real surprise, though it is sad. The magazines, as with the newspapers, have yet to figure out how to fully monetize their content. Indeed, by publishing their content to the websites, often within days of the print version arriving at the subscriber's home, they actively devalue their business.

“We feel its [Marathon and Beyond] decline can be attributed to the move (especially among younger runners) to digital formats while at the same time the traditional long attention span of the running demographic has been undermined by new media,” Banyo wrote to Runner's World.

The digital formats share several things in common. First, and most importantly to the readers, it is free. Why should they wait for a print copy that they eventually will throw away, when they can have the same information, plus save ten bucks a year? Efforts at establishing firewalls work only when the content is so unique that readers willingly pay for it. In the case of the running mags, they don't have that quality. Much of the material that they publish is regurgitated from past issues. Want to know how to run a faster 5K? Google it (or Bing, which is what I use) and you get 18 million results. The best nutrition for a runner? 8 million, with two of the top ten linking to Runner's World articles. Which leads us to the second problem . . .

The internet is forever. All those articles will be there long after the magazines fail. In fact, it's fun to compare articles from five years ago to today's - the similarities are striking. When the magazines turned over subscriber bases, they did so on about a two year cycle, making it advantageous to rerun the same types of articles because the newest readers would not recognize the repetition. That's no longer the case.

Another part of the M&B statement interested me: that the attention span of the newest readers degraded to 140 characters. This leads to quick 250 words bits of fluff that do little more than announce a study or give a headline. At the websites, you can see the transition to this in the manner that they lay out the articles. A picture, a headline, one sentence of information. I would love to know the click-through rates.

None of this is good news for the running magazines (and they aren't alone.) For books, though, the dynamic is different. The disintermediation that is taking place makes it more advantageous to write books, especially those that approach the subject from a different angle.

Thus, we see more memoirs of runners appearing, from Nick Symmond's Life Outside the Oval Office to Rand Mitzner's Thirty-three Years of Running in Circles to Dave Clark's Out There. In Running: A Long-distance Love Affair, Shawn Hacking added the sound track to follow the story. JOCK: a memoir of the counter-culture, by Robert Coe, puts the history of the sixties into the context of his running career at Stanford.

Jack Welch put together a collection of his work from Running Magazine in When Running Was Young and So Were We, as we take a look back at the golden era of American running.

 There's always been a wealth of how-to's in running, but I wonder how much longer they will continue without any real changes in the underlying science. Some will continue to proliferate, mostly on the basis of athlete celebrity, but with the same information available for free, the need for them diminishes by the day.

In the fiction category, we see a little movement, too. There are, of course, my two books and more on the way. Bill Kenley put out High School Runner: Freshman. John Parker put out the wonderful Racing the Rain to complete the Quenton Cassidy saga.

While it looks bleak for the magazines, the future seems bright for authors of longer works. I've queried a dozen magazine for articles from Kenya, with no replies. While it would be nice to have a paying gig while I'm there, the raw material for the articles (there were about four different takes on Kenya that I wanted to explore) can still be used for a book or two. Plus the fiction that I'll generate from the trip.

I'm sad to see M&B go, but the running world will still have its own literature. It might be tweet length and book length with little in-between, but as long as there are runners who are also creators, we'll find a way to communicate.

Racing the Rain is out

My three copies of Racing the Rain, John L. Parker's best book to date, arrived today.

Why three copies?

One for me, obviously. One for the XC team, so I don't lose my copy like I did (twice!) with Once A Runner. To be fair, I lost a copy or two to family members as well. The final one for the school library - that way, I can send the junior high kids down the hall with a recommendation on a book they'll love.

Below, the review I wrote back in May for the advance copy. Next time I see John, I'm getting my copy signed. Hopefully, that will be the Olympic Trials next year in Eugene.

Still envious of that cover . . .

For those that want to order a copy, feel free to use the link to the side. I'm an Amazon affiliate. Not much money is involved, but a latte a year isn't too much to ask, is it?

Run gently, friends - or curl up with a brand new book and head off for an adventure on Florida's Gold Coast.

---

Racing the Rain delivers the goods on young Quenton Cassidy with Parker’s flair for inspirational running scenes, an intriguing cast of characters, and a verdant setting above and below the surface of the Florida Gold Coast.

Parker opens the novel with scenes from an American childhood that will seem alien to most of his young readers, but that resonates with authenticity for the age; and, of course, there’s a race.

The boys in the story—Cassidy, his friends Stiggs and Randleman—roamed freely as the story unfolds, the early years touched on at the highlights, until Racing the Rain settles into the early teenage years when Cassidy turns serious about sports even as he searches for his identity.

For Cassidy, identity gets bound by the character of the Florida Gold Coast and by Trapper Nelson. Trapper, who as Cassidy thought of it, “. . . was supposedly bigger and stronger than Paul Bunyan, had more powers than Superman, knew more about animals than Tarzan . . .”  is the first to suggest that Cassidy pursue running, and was wise enough to wait for the seed to germinate. Trapper lives alone in the Everglades and the two form a relationship built on a mutual appreciation of each other and the Glades.

Parker’s ability to write a race scene that leaves your pulse pounding was the backbone of Once a Runner. In Racing the Rain, he adds a graceful skill in describing the natural world of Cassidy, whether describing a foray to capture bait fish amongst the cattails in the tide pools, scuba-diving in coral “so exotic they seemed not the product of the natural world, but of some schizophrenic jeweler,” or the feel of the oppressive summer heat as he works for Trapper maintaining an exotic menagerie. Parker’s affinity for Florida helps him paint the scenes with details that allow the richness of the place and time shine through.

As an author, Parker also added some misdirection to his repertoire as he gently builds a training program for young runners under the guise of telling the story. Gone are the sixty quarter miles, replaced by the guiding wisdom of Archie San Romani through Trapper, and later, from his coaches, especially Mr. Kamrad. The running is interspersed with basketball. It’s on the court that Cassidy first stars, learning the lessons of diligent practice and focus to reach beyond the barriers that had been applied to him.

Parker does a smooth job of bringing the previous book’s characters back to round out the scenes. Readers of Once a Runner will recognize many of the characters, not the least Mizner and a young Jack Nubbins and the race finale takes place at Southeastern University, the setting for Once a Runner.

Parker continues to blend in the science of training with his racing, but does so subtly. He sets basketball as the prestige sport, with cross country and track distant also-rans in the school hierarchy of popularity, not so different from the reality for most runners. As the plot develops, so does Cassidy’s character. The reader watches the writer deftly molding young Cassidy into the man that he will be in Once a Runner, the athlete with an almost visceral rejection of stupidity masquerading as authority. The tension builds through the second third of the novel as Cassidy is forced, by a combination of his own talents and decisions as well as the internal pressures of the sports programs with the prestige to decide on his future.

The result is less a one dimensional running book like Once a Runner and more a coming of age story for Quenton Cassidy, teenager. As such, it should have wider appeal to more readers. And yet, there’s that Parker touch, and the runners will recognize the magic that Parker brings to running fiction, that makes it special to all of us that once dreamed of being that runner.

_______________

Paul Duffau writes novels about running and works with junior high cross country runners part-time. His first novel, Finishing Kick, was recognized by Running Times in their Summer Reading list July, 2014. His newest novel, a high-octane adventure set in the mountains of Montana, is Trail of Second Chances. He blogs on the running life, running book, and interviews people that he finds interesting at www.paulduffau.com .

Racing the Rain: A Review of John L. Parker’s newest novel

Racing the Rain delivers the goods on young Quenton Cassidy with Parker’s flair for inspirational running scenes, an intriguing cast of characters, and a verdant setting above and below the surface of the Florida Gold Coast.

John L. Parker returns in Racing the Rain to flesh out the character of Cassidy, beginning with the young boy that would toe the line barefoot to run his first race, not against people, or even himself, but just to feel the wind and the joy of the act of running. Quenton Cassidy, the famed hero of Once a Runner, received the gifts of speed and the courage of a miler from the gods, but until those talents were nurtured by coaches and mentors, they lay quiescent.

Parker opens the novel with scenes from an American childhood that will seem alien to most of his young readers, but that resonates with authenticity for the age; and, of course, there’s a race.

The boys in the story—Cassidy, his friends Stiggs and Randleman—roamed freely as the story unfolds, the early years touched on at the highlights, until Racing the Rain settles into the early teenage years when Cassidy turns serious about sports even as he searches for his identity.

For Cassidy, identity gets bound by the character of the Florida Gold Coast and by Trapper Nelson. Trapper, who as Cassidy thought of it, “. . . was supposedly bigger and stronger than Paul Bunyan, had more powers than Superman, knew more about animals than Tarzan . . .”  is the first to suggest that Cassidy pursue running, and was wise enough to wait for the seed to germinate. Trapper lives alone in the Everglades and the two form a relationship built on a mutual appreciation of each other and the Glades.

Parker’s ability to write a race scene that leaves your pulse pounding was the backbone of Once a Runner. In Racing the Rain, he adds a graceful skill in describing the natural world of Cassidy, whether describing a foray to capture bait fish amongst the cattails in the tide pools, scuba-diving in coral “so exotic they seemed not the product of the natural world, but of some schizophrenic jeweler,” or the feel of the oppressive summer heat as he works for Trapper maintaining an exotic menagerie. Parker’s affinity for Florida helps him paint the scenes with details that allow the richness of the place and time shine through.

As an author, Parker also added some misdirection to his repertoire as he gently builds a training program for young runners under the guise of telling the story. Gone are the sixty quarter miles, replaced by the guiding wisdom of Archie San Romani through Trapper, and later, from his coaches, especially Mr. Kamrad. The running is interspersed with basketball. It’s on the court that Cassidy first stars, learning the lessons of diligent practice and focus to reach beyond the barriers that had been applied to him.

Parker does a smooth job of bringing the previous book’s characters back to round out the scenes. Readers of Once a Runner will recognize many of the characters, not the least Mizner and a young Jack Nubbins and the race finale takes place at Southeastern University, the setting for Once a Runner.

Parker continues to blend in the science of training with his racing, but does so subtly. He sets basketball as the prestige sport, with cross country and track distant also-rans in the school hierarchy of popularity, not so different from the reality for most runners. As the plot develops, so does Cassidy’s character. The reader watches the writer deftly molding young Cassidy into the man that he will be in Once a Runner, the athlete with an almost visceral rejection of stupidity masquerading as authority. The tension builds through the second third of the novel as Cassidy is forced, by a combination of his own talents and decisions as well as the internal pressures of the sports programs with the prestige to decide on his future.

The result is less a one dimensional running book like Once a Runner and more a coming of age story for Quenton Cassidy, teenager. As such, it should have wider appeal to more readers. And yet, there’s that Parker touch, and the runners will recognize the magic that Parker brings to running fiction, that makes it special to all of us that once dreamed of being that runner.

_______________

Paul Duffau writes novels about running and works with junior high cross country runners part-time. His first novel, Finishing Kick, was recognized by Running Times in their Summer Reading list July, 2014. His newest novel, a high-octane adventure set in the mountains of Montana, is Trail of Second Chances. He blogs on the running life, running book, and interviews people that he finds interesting at www.paulduffau.com .

Meeting Heroes and Friends

John L. Parker introduced me to Quentin Cassidy and, along the way, set the standard for running fiction. For two generations, Once a Runner has inspired runners seeking the answer to breaking through to the next level and Parker delivered it in Cassidy's story of commitment, sacrifice, and work, and then he delivered the dream in a racing scene that hasn't been equaled since. Now, in Racing the Rain, Parker is back to tell the story of the childhood Cassidy, before the track, when he flew barefoot ahead of the thunderclouds

Jack Welch sits down across from the great runners in history, and with a hint of the beatnik, teases out the real-life tales and puts them into a book so the rest of us can look them in the eyes and get their measure. Not just the immortals like Rodgers and Decker, but the rest of the greats like Patti Catalano and the elusive Gerry Lindgren. He put them all in When Running Was Young and So Were We and won the Track and Field Writers Association honors for best track book in 2014.

The Diamond League meet happens in less than a month at storied Hayward Field at what’s now known as Track Town, USA. The best in the world will step into the arena to measure themselves against each other and their most relentless opponents, the clock and tape.

A group of us will be there to watch, John and Jack among them.  Few other visiting writers, some of whom will be working to build an ambitious new history of Eugene. Hopefully, one will be Kenny Moore. Kenny Moore, author of Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, writes in a beguilingly smooth style that sits you down next to Bill and entertains you as he leads the exploration into America’s most famous track coach.

Don Kardong may make the trip, if organizing another successful Bloomsday didn't wear him out.

And me. I'll be there. Some of these folks are heroes. I can ask almost anyone for anything, but I couldn't bring myself to ask John Parker to read Finishing Kick. When I wrote the novel, I set it deliberately as the women's answer to Once a Runner and tried to make the racing as inspiring, the lessons hidden within story, and the joy of running flow off the page. I finally sent him a copy last month, after I read a review copy of Racing the Rain.

Some of them, like Jack, are becoming friends.

The Pre Classic won't be the only meet that I'll be attending this month that has heroes and friends, though. Tuesday I headed out to watch a junior high meet. I coached some of these kids in cross country and think the world of them. A couple of them came by to say "hi" before their race, and then stood around wondering what else to say. Me, too. It gets easier, I've discovered, as they get older and graduate. In the meantime, I get to be their biggest fan and cheer them on while I add to my happy memories.

The coach of the middle school team is a running buddy. He manages all the kids with a humor that more of us should emulate when life gets screwy. The coach of the high school, Tim Gundy, is also a friend, and a heck of a runner. I haven't seen him all season, but I'll catch up with him and the distance kids at the district meet.

Tim won't have time to chat - that will have to wait until the summer. For now, he's focused on his kids. It says something that the kids universally love him. Tim is much more than a track or cross country coach. I talked to Pat Tyson, the coach at Gonzaga University. The two of them share a lot of character traits, humility and compassion high on that list.

The high school coaching gig doesn't have the cache of coaching the Buffaloes and, with rare exceptions, most of the athletes won't see their names emblazoned on Running Times. It's here that the youngsters learn to dream and begin to believe. Some, a very few, will achieve great heights. All will care, and never more than during these years.

In the glitz of the Prefontaine Classic, it becomes easy to forget that all these athletes started someplace away from the glitz and media attention. It began with a passion, and probably a good coach, and a little luck. Most will have picked out a hero or two to inspire them and dream of reaching the Olympic oval or famous tracks of Europe, the Armory, or Eugene. For those that make it, stories will be told of their exploits, the daring tactics, or the incredible level of commitment. Writers will flock to them. Fans will cheer.

One or two of the high schoolers may make it to Eugene to race someday. Most won't even if they have the burning passion, the work ethic, the guts. Not all of my heroes sit in rarified heights - I'll be cheering for those kids and their coaches, and telling some of their stories, too.