Beck of the Pack: bad puns, worse runs

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Quick! Before the UVA SID gets on it!

The same guy is evidently going to coach two D-I cross-country teams (this 'un and that 'un) this fall.

I guess if they're not in the same conference there's no conflict of interest, at least not until nationals. But that's a hell of a commute.

posted by kemibe at 11:59 PM 1 Comments

"To give anything more than the minimum is to scoff at having being shortchanged."

Steve Prefontaine's best-known quotation is "To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift." It's amusing that this has been embraced by so many people, because I don't think Pre meant exactly what his thousands of acolytes believe.

I reckon that Pre understood that he was unusually gifted at distance running was claiming that people given an unusual amount of natural ability at something were obligated to make the most of it. I'm not sure he meant that it was important for people who naturally pretty much suck to go out there and run themselves into the ground in an effort to improve. Similarly, Chris Carmichael's advice and comments about toughness aren't aimed, after all, at kids tottering around the neighborhood on bikes equipped with training wheels.

They wouldn't malign such a thing, of course, but I doubt the world-class athletes dispensing such homilies are supremely interested in the efforts of everyday yokels with families and real jobs. We all tend to operate within out own frameworks even when we don't realize it, and this rarely speak in universal terms even when we think we do.

That doesn't mean the advice of the greats is not applicable to the masses, and that it cannot help them in a manner similar to a placebo effect, but this is different territory. Therefore, I think Pre would have found the derivative quote in the title field more suitable for the masses.

I've run a lot of races at half-steam and have often castigated myself for it. But really, why? I was never good enough at running to make a difference. What I should be doing -- and I'm working on it -- is fuming over the things I may actually have some talent for, but have failed to pursue with any vigor.

Sorry if this strikes people as cynical, but I have always appreciated the frank insights of George Carlin and miss him already.

posted by kemibe at 1:33 PM 1 Comments

Monday, July 28, 2008

Jesus did a lot of walking

*But did he cross-train?

That's a lead-in to...well, nothing. I gotta say, however, that it's unusual to find a running-store manager who goes 6' 7" and 350 or more pounds -- as a vegan. The same guy played on Notre Dame's offensive line in the early 1980s, scored 2,700 points as a Philadelphia-area prep basketball center (and played in one of the first McDonald's All-America team games), was an alternate for the ultimately grounded 1980 U.S. Olympic Team in the hammer throw, has two masters degrees, and has run a 3:27 marathon. I know this sounds like a Bill Brasky skit, but I kid you not.

That's all I got. Well, it's not, but for once I'm going to resist the impulse to go into a blow-by-blow account of how someone in the rear-view mirror of my life and bearing an inexplicable grudge against me got a well-deserved blast of raw egg to the face today. Matter of fact, I won't mention it at all. And no, it's not me, it's you. But I love everybody so much it makes me want to cry, and long live little dabs of capsaicinoids that somehow taste like buttercream when consumed using neither hands nor utensils.

posted by kemibe at 11:57 PM 1 Comments

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Warming up for Vegas?

*If Raymond Babbitt ("Rain Man") had been a distance runner, he might have explained his odd behavior and intentions by telling people, "We're counting marks."

Every town worth its weight in oxygen has a paved path at least a mile long to run on, and in each case someone -- usually a bunch of someones acting independently -- has painted marks on the asphalt at regular intervals to allow runners to do speed or tempo sessions away from the track. I found one such ribbon of pavement today, and as usual once I noticed that the path was marked I started collecting my splits.

Of course, there was one set of marks in white a quarter of a mile apart extending 1 1/4 miles from a "S/F" line in one direction, a different set painted in orange and marking what may have been an out-and-back 6K course, and a third stuck in the middle and marked every 0.1 miles. None of these "courses" were coterminous, but I insisted on keeping track of as many split times as I could in my head, even though I knew I would simply keep losing track of earlier ones and wind up preserving none of this useful information. Wearing an iPod probably made this task incrementally harder. I did eke out a 5:40 mile in there somewhere, with splits of 90-88-83-79.

I wonder if developing such skills could make someone more fit for counting cards in blackjack and its variations. A good card counter can stay marginally ahead of the house if he doesn't get thrown out of the casino, which he will if he's caught because casino owners are crooked. I always root for those buildings to burn down.

Speaking of heat, it was supposedly 88 degrees or so when I was out there. It felt more like 80. I suppose this counts as a benefit of toiling in a blast furnace for the last few months, but I think one of my lifetime goals is to never go back to Florida. This can be managed easily by someone in my position.

posted by kemibe at 5:16 PM 0 Comments

Saturday, July 26, 2008

A different China syndrome

*Every Friday night in this fair burg, I am told, a quartet of lunatics nominally operating as "preachers" gathers at an outdoor mall to condemn Jews and homosexuals for the dubious benefit of diners, amblers, and beer drinkers. My host for the weekend fit the latter category, and in no small way at that. Once the yammerers got rolling he decided to combat them not in the usual fruitless way ("Shut up, freak! Take your hate someplace else!") but by standing right beside them and finishing their sentences for them. Like this:

"God everlasting wants you to offer you his grace--"

"--THROUGH THE HALE-BOPP COMET! AND NIKE SHOES!"

"God hates all sin and makes it punishable in Hell--"

"--WHICH IS WHY THE ONION CALLED 'AIRPLANE' THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE!"

Later, he encouraged four or five people to join him in a bawdy, round-style singing of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" that drowned out the preachers, who were plainly not accustomed to this type of trench-level warfare.

Anyway, your Olympics-related video for the weekend. Don't say I didn't try.

posted by kemibe at 11:00 PM 2 Comments

Friday, July 25, 2008

So there I was, with dirt underfoot and wearing dry shorts

*It's not that I wasn't aware before getting here that running on trails and in weather not set to BROIL could be so damned fun. It's that I had forced thoughts of such things out of my mind so that I wouldn't confront cognitive dissonance every time I crept out the door.

Yesterday I ran for about an hour and a half. Maybe two-thirds of this was on a single-track trail that was just technically challenging enough to have me more or less ambling in spots without feeling bad about it. The rest was in the middle of campus, including a token lap on the track for the heck of it. Interestingly, I had no wipe-outs on the trail (although I did strain the tendons across the top of my foot in a near-ankle roll), but managed to take a digger on a perfectly modern track. I espied a water fountain near the end of that token lap and was so thirsty that I darted right toward it before I could consciously react; I tripped over the inside rail, shouted something like "FORK!" (the half-dozen others out there wondered why I was yammering about kitchen utensils, I'm sure) and did a nice, smooth roll back to my feet. Hell, I don't think I even broke stride; I know I didn't slow down. Isn't it funny how most of us could probably break a femur out there but, out of sheer embarrassment, hop right up and continue running on the sumbitch until we were out of sight of pedestrians and motorists?

Tomorrow I'm going to run with someone who is planning to run the Leadville 100 in a few weeks and her sometimes training buddy, who just ran the steeplechase at the Trials. How I get myself into these precarious mood-altering situations I have no idea, but I prefer getting up too early to pitter-patter over hill and dale to various other forms of intemperance.

posted by kemibe at 10:42 PM 1 Comments

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Covering both ends of the coolness spectrum

*Scott Douglas has livened up the Running Times Web site in the last month by taking on the athletics-meets-administrative-corruption-and-incompetence zeitgeist (the alarming caprice of a superannuated USATF official or two, both at the recent Olympic Trials and at earlier meets) and doing an audio interview with Tera Moody.

Scott's a master of letting morons hang themselves with their own words, and true to form, rather than point and scream at John Chaplin's unapologetic and personality-disordered yammering, he brackets Chaplin's quotes with just the right amount of rhetorical eye-rolling to invite readers to regard Chaplin with the highest possible level of scorn, which is probably not nearly enough.

Moody, the fifth-place finisher at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, talks about her mid- and late-race thoughts as well as the elements that got her to the starting line in April ready to run close to 5:50 pace, not the least of which was overcoming some significant health issues that started in her freshman year of college. She's very frank -- not on a "they're all suddenly putting me on a pedestal, so this is how I'll respond" way, but in the manner of the runner next door sitting on your couch and chatting over coffee. It's a good listen.

posted by kemibe at 8:05 PM 0 Comments

BOMF going biped (or is it quadruped?)

Next year, Back On My Feet, the pioneering running program started in July 2007 for women and men living in Philadelphia city shelters, will reach its second U.S. location: Baltimore.

BOMF founder Anne Mahlum and Mike Solomon, the first BOMF participant to finish a marathon, made the announcement on local TV.

posted by kemibe at 4:51 PM 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

America's real bipolar disorder

It's been a while since I've been on a good-sized college campus, and I'm floored by the number of hominids, almost all of them young adults, I've seen out running. Part of this stems from using Sarasota as a baseline; the heat cuts into the absolute and per capita numbers of people who run, and on top of that the median age in Florida is about 73.85, so what few runners you do see are bound to be older on the basis of simple demographics alone.

But even in whatever constitutes a "typical" medium-sized American city -- and my hometown of Concord (population 43,000) probably serves as a decent example -- you just don't see nearly the number of runners as you will in a city with a big university. Even though it's summer and most of the students are away, I must have seen two dozen others out pounding pavement during the 40-odd minutes I was out there myself, and because my friend lives close to campus and the room I'm crashing in faces the street, I had to have seen a solid fifty others between eight and six or so. The fact that many of them might have only been doing 15- or 20-minute jaunts isn't the point; that they are exercising at all is.

I don't want to go looking for negatives here, but I was thinking that it would be useful to the country as a whole if those of us who have been running continually since we were high-energy teenagers or are only a few years removed from that stage of life could, through some burst of metaphysical whimsy, "donate" some of our running miles to the millions of people who are 35 or older, overweight, and have either never exercised or been away from it for too long to remember.

I usually balk at seeing things only in black and white terms, but it's evident that as things are, you basically have a population of Americans who fit in one of two categories: those who exercise a lot more than they need to for basic weight control and those who don't do squat and have the waistlines to prove it. It's as if the distribution of body weights in this country is not Gaussian but bimodal, with everyone either lean or obese and no one hovering around the median. (I know that's a crock, but it's a compelling illusion.)

Imagine what would happen if you could magically "sponsor" some poor soul who dreams of getting fit, but doesn't know where to start and associates moving around with considerable amounts of old-fashioned discomfort. I would gladly "donate" half of my running miles for the next four or more weeks to a sponsee, meaning that even though I'd be burning only 50 calories a mile or so for myself and getting half the usual aerobic and muscular refinements, some chosen individual would be enjoying the same benefits while not yet doing anything. That way, after a month, this person would be ready to start exercising without having to deal with the initial agony that tends to cripple the best of exercise intentions before they can really take off.

There are lots of people out there who assume running simply hurts by obligation and that people who keep at it don't really like it; that they just learn to put up with the burning lungs and the feeling of an impending blackout. The more people in America who could be taught that this is untrue, the less a snapshot of typical Americana would resemble a "save the manatees" poster.

On the other hand, who cares? You should see all of the good-looking girls here. Hundreds if not hundreds of thousands, all of them under 25. I saw one getting out of a beater car with a bumper sticker that said BORN OK THE FIRST TIME and almost begged her to marry me then and there.

posted by kemibe at 11:24 PM 1 Comments

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Only about 10,834 to go

*You've probably heard that Starbucks is closing 600 of its U.S. drug dealerships, or about 5% of its locations nationwide. Without delving into the lawyer joke this reminds me of or claiming karmic victories for those of us who think flash-fried beans don't make for the best coffee-drinking experience, I am not exactly weeping over this news, but I admit to having patronized one of these stores this morning (I was in a hurry and the preferred place was crowded as sin).

When I was there and diluting my beverage with enough cream and additives to subdue its ipecac-like properties I noticed a flyer for something called the Human Race 10K, scheduled for August 31. There was no mention of a specific event or series a la the Komen Race for the Cure or the Jingle Bell Run for Arthritis; all the flyer really said was "Join Team Starbucks" and "Join us for the Nike + Human Race." It also held the claim that training resources could be found at Starbucks.com. As I half-expected, the Starbucks home page contained no info of its own, only a link to Nike.com. The least Starbucks could have done as link directly to the Human Race page, but even this was too unwieldy, or something, but instead it took me several clicks to get to this.

Now, I didn't actually follow any links from that page to find out what the deal is. This is mainly because I don't care, but also because I became lost in an interesting memory. A number of years ago a very good Nike-sponsored runner tested positive ("A" sample) for a banned substance. This drug positive was honestly inexplicable to the athlete in question, so the athlete and the athlete's father began a laborious process of finding out how the presence of a banned drug the runner had not knowingly taken could have been detected.

As it turned out, Starbucks offered a product that could easily be demonstrated to result in erroneously flagged urine samples, and maybe still does offer it. What complicated this already problematic scenario is that the labs used by USATF at the time -- at least the ones this runner got to see -- appeared to have been manufactured during the Coolidge administration and not maintained since. This isn't something anyone would have heard about because at the time, "A" positives were not announced until confirmed by a positive "B" (and this youngster was exonerated by a clean "B" sample, although the accompanying, credible explanation couldn't have hurt).

All of this leads to an inescapable conclusion: Starbucks plans to take down the Human Race 10K from the inside. See, its profits are flagging, and Nike's never are, and there's the fact that the University of Oregon and the University of Washington are intense sports rivals.

Care to guess where Starbucks is based, folks? That's right. How about Nike? Right again.

You see, Starbucks' ongoing attempts to knock Nike athletes out of the box since the "coffee" chain's inception can be traced to machinations within the Huskies athletic department going back a long way. I mean, check this out: UW and WSU aren't exactly friendly either, and guess who was probably the best distance runner of all time to come out of Pullman? If you said Bernard Lagat, give yourself a shot of Seattle's Best espresso. And if you said Lagat runs for Nike and had a well-known drug positive (again, "A" sample only), give yourself another, plus an indwelling catheter.

Anyway, my own "without delving" comment reminds me of something. I hate to stray into non-running topics here, but I had a dream last night that a street mime in what looked like a college town had completely broken character and was holding forth for the benefit of a decent-sized crowd gathered on an otherwise quiet corner, focusing specifically on the form of intentional irony known as paralipsis. He was getting it completely wrong, and I wanted to run across the street while yelling "Not to call you a complete moron..." and provide a better explanation, but I couldn't move. I'm not sure why I was frozen in place, but this was one of my more coherent dreams in most ways -- I swear I can remember wanting to put into play those multiple levels of irony.

posted by kemibe at 1:04 PM 0 Comments

Monday, July 21, 2008

Oblogation

*I didn't Google that word, but I bet it's been used by at least a dozen independently lame bloggers.

It fits. I didn't have a lot of time to waste on this thing today, and I'm only chiming in to claim my junk-mileage asterisk. I'm visiting a friend for a few days, and they actually have hills here, lots of them, which I very quickly discovered after a medium-long day of travel is both exhilarating and tragic.

posted by kemibe at 11:27 PM 0 Comments

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Logan's running

*About a week ago, Pat, one of the owners of Fleet Feet, told me that she had helped an older customer, a small, well-put-together fellow approaching retirement age, select a new pair of running shoes. Throughout the conversation, the guy evidently dropped quite a few jokes and enough vague innuendo about his personal machinations to make Pat suspect that he wasn't just an everyday Sarasotan.

Sure enough, he confided in her that he was applying for the job of USATF president an CEO, a position Craig Masback recently vacated. Pat told me that he described having some sort of background in professional soccer administration, and asked me to embargo this information until USATF made its decision. I didn't know (or ask for) the guy's name and didn't really care, so keeping this promise was not difficult.

Well, Doug Logan got the job. In the press releases about his hiring and in his various interviews -- none of which mention his city of residence -- he comes across as someone interested in making something decent and harboring solid potential a lot better, like the editor of a book written by an extremely imaginative and vivid narrator with terminal ADD and poor spelling. He lives on Roberts Point and probably doesn't need the money, so in taking on this job at 64 he plainly feels he has unfinished business as a leader, which a lot of people would if more or less bribed to abandon his post as the commissioner of Major League Soccer.

The local rag, by the way, remains as oblivious to this development as it does to the fact that three U.S. Olympians are coached by someone who is practically Logan's neighbor. Only if one or both of them is summoned to start for the foundering Tampa Bay Rays -- and don't rule that out -- will the Herald-Tribune notice.

One last thing: Logan lived much of his early life in Cuba, and that's the same place Alberto Salazar was born. So I think it's safe to say that Nike and USATF are continuing to scheme and collaborate behind the scenes on some sort of communist plot aimed at ruining top-level track in America, and it only makes sense when you consider what a hippie haven the state of Oregon is. Wheels within wheels, folks.

posted by kemibe at 5:41 PM 1 Comments

I've never been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD

That's no trivial claim, since I can close my eyes, open the DSM-IV to a random page, point to a spot on the page, and stand an excellent chance of meeting the criteria for whatever disorder is being described. This is certainly an accomplishment of sorts, but tends to be negatively correlated with accomplishments in other areas.

Anyway, when I titled yesterday's post "Something I was saving for a sunny day," I meant to mention a specific event that took place during a run in light rain last week. I was in Cherokee Park, a very nice residential area, and a girl of maybe seven or eight was walking toward me on the other side of the street with someone who was either her mother or her older sister -- this is Florida and I really couldn't tell. Might have been the babysitter, actually, but that guess may just be my fantasies getting the better of me.

As I drew closer, the girl cupped her hand around her mouth and yelled: "MISTER, CAN I HAVE YOUR AUTOGRAPH, PLEASE?" Her mosistysitter smiled in the way people do when their children/sibs/sources of income yammer amicably, and I smiled. The girl continued: "I SEE YOU A LOT AND YOU'RE THE BEST RUNNER IN THE WHOLE WORLD!"

I was taken aback by her insight, and not because her assessment was dead on, but because she knew what a "runner" was. Seriously, did any of you know that word at that age? Obviously we learn early on what "running" is, and even that some people do it for "fun." But when I was a second-grader I didn't know it was a "sport" -- I may have had a vague idea about people sprinting for prizes, probably as a result of racing them on the playground -- and I certainly had no concept of distance running.

Now one is naturally obligated to pay back any well-meaning compliments he or she receives, so I cracked "Maybe someday!" or something like that. What's funny to me as I reflect on this vignette is that had the girl been alone, I might have simply agreed with her. With her mosistysitter there, I would have felt like an idiot saying "That's right! I rule!"

posted by kemibe at 8:12 AM 0 Comments

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Something I was saving for a sunny day

*Today's run was among the more miserable I've done this summer, and this had little or nothing to do with either my fitness level (I'm sure that I cannot run "fast" anymore but at 10 or more miles a day I'm not "out of shape") or an "off-day." I more or less had to run at 2 p.m. today, so there was no way around the sheer futility of laboring like an idiot along mostly unshaded streets while kids in cars, not at all cowed by the all-consuming sun, heckled away with their usual acne-amplified vigor. I hit a couple of water fountains and used these as excuses to walk for several minutes, resuming jogging only because I figured I was an obscenity to those I passed along the Marina.

About three miles in, I stopped at a CVS and headed right to the back of the store because I knew they had a free blood-pressure reader there. Sweating like I was in downtown Hell, I recorded a 114/73 with a pulse rate up at 84, a good 60 or so beats slower than a minute or two earlier. It's interesting from a hemodynamic standpoint how blood pressure rises during exercise, but not in proportion to pulse rate (which can triple) and not nearly in proportion to cardiac output (which can rise by a factor of around six, I think). Then again these metrics don't use remotely similar units, so I'm just yanking my mental crank at this point. The point is, though, that the flexible pipes of our vascular "trees" don't just loosen up to allow all that extra blood to hammer through the system. This might be counterintuitive to some. It may be of zero interest to anyone. Piss on you all, and to all a good piss.

I'm trying to minimize my complaining about the heat, because there can't be anything much lower in the running blogosphere than someone who willingly lives in Florida and bitches about how warm it is in mid-July, although using words like "blogosphere" might come close. But today was really, really nasty.

I had a new pair of shoes on, and it's been a while since this has been the case, so I had no idea I was going much faster than I would have guessed. With or without bouncy footwear, this is a tendency that, though paradoxical on its face, often arises in really hot weather, because in such conditions everything from a jog to 800-meter race pace feels more or less the same: like ass warmed over. Then again, a 6:09 "mile" on the Sarasota "Marathon" course might represent anything between 5:20 and 9:20 pace.

I had a SCAT driver inexplicably blow by me yesterday, not the first time this has happened. I didn't mind, because this gave me something to do today: write my first letter to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to make a critical (though jaunty) note of how many of the system's drivers appear mentally, socially, or mechanically challenged. I bet someone calls me to offer me a job, but I'll only take it if it involves the #5 route because then I can park the bus in my own front yard at night.

I'm thinking of opening up something called "Beloved Papa's Village." I may explain later.

posted by kemibe at 8:02 PM 0 Comments

Friday, July 18, 2008

Meeting Gaz de France Paris Saint-Denis

Webb and Rowbury in the 1500, Wariner vs, Merritt in the 400, et cetera (entry lists).

The webcast will begin, I believe, at or shortly before 2 p.m. Eastern (8 p.m. Paris time), since the first track event is at 8:05 lokel time. ESPN2 will begin coverage at 4 p.m. Eastern.

I think the women's 1500 goes off at 7:50 p.m., but it's not clear from the normally unimpeachable IAAF site. I'm going to avoid scanning the Internet for results and hope that ESPN shows the race in its entirety, since none of their coverage will be live anyway.