playthink

Be sure to give yourself 20 minutes to read “No Finish Line” by Alexander Wolff, a Sports Illustrated profile of former marathon world-record holder Alberto Salazar. It’s a fascinating story about a great athlete who, after suffering a heart attack, is forced to come to grips with the fact that “life is the only long run that really matters.”

The opening paragraph paints a vivid picture about the The Agony of Victory:

Death is one of those things Alberto Salazar used to run into. He’d finish a race and all but perish, as likely from fire as from ice. In 1978, at the end of the 7.1-mile Falmouth (Mass.) Road Race, he was read the last rites after collapsing with a body temperature of 108°. After he won the 1982 Boston Marathon, paramedics had to give him six liters of saline solution in an IV drip when his temperature dropped to 88°.

When done reading the SI article, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s blog post about Kenyan runners. Gladwell, citing Salazar’s observations about and experiences with the sport of running, makes a case for “put[ting] the genetic argument about Kenyan running dominance to rest.”

The genetic versus cultural debate does not die, however, as evidence by the string of lively, heated, passionate responses in the comments section of Gladwell’s blog.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood 

Another great article by the NYT’s Gina Kolata, this one about the proliferation of cheating — not while running the Boston Marathon a-la Rosie Ruiz, but simply to toe the starting line at Boston. Excerpts from “Cheating Starts Before the Race Does“:

The Boston Marathon requires athletes to have run a marathon in the past year with a time that is adjusted for age and gender. Most find the race’s strict standards all but impossible to meet. All this helps make the Boston Marathon unique and makes running it a dream for many athletes.

It also raises two questions: Why does the Boston Marathon make it so hard to enter? And how often do runners sneak in by trading or buying one another’s entries?

People try to cheat to get into the Boston Marathon every year, said Marc Chalufour, a spokesman for the Boston Athletic Association, which sponsors the race. And this year’s race, which was run on Monday, was no exception. The B.A.A. finds cheaters by checking sites like eBay and Craigslist, and hopes that if it misses some, other runners will turn in any cheaters.

The reason for the qualifying times, Mr. Chalufour said, is the peculiar logistics of that race. The Boston Marathon is the only big-city marathon that starts on a narrow road in a small town, Hopkinton, Mass. There is just not room for a huge field.

Qualifying times emerged in the late 1970’s when the running boom was starting and the Boston Marathon became overwhelmed with applicants.

“The goal wasn’t to challenge runners,” Mr. Chalufour said. “That was a byproduct.”

But soon the byproduct became the goal. There are runners who have spent decades as marathoners trying in vain to qualify for the Boston Marathon. There are marathons that have become popular largely because of their flat or, in the case of Steamtown Marathon in northeastern Pennsylvania, largely downhill courses allow contestants to run fast times, increasing their chances of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.

In order to deduce how many marathoners could have qualified in 2006 and 2007, Jim Fortner, 69, a runner from Pasadena, Md., analyzed published statistics on marathons in the United States (mysite.verizon.net/jim2wr/id202.html). He limited himself to certified marathon courses that enabled runners to qualify for Boston if they ran fast enough.

The analysis included more than 740,000 marathon times and included more than 90 percent of marathon finishers in those two years. Only about 10 percent of those runners had times that were good enough for Boston.

As I noted in my last post about my personal Boston Marathon experience this year, qualifying, for me, was the finish line; running Boston was my victory lap. Hearing of these desperate runners who enter the race illegally, I wonder if they are able to outrun their conscience.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

I just arrived in Boston to run the 112th Boston Marathon on Monday, the most historic and famous footrace in the world. With the marathon just a few days around the corner, it seems an appropriate occasion to revisit the opportunity to enlist the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as your new marathon coach…

Last year, PBS’ NOVA documentary series aired a fascinating program, aptly titled Marathon Challenge, that “explores what it takes, physically and mentally, for novice runners to make it through a classic test of endurance [a marathon].”

And not just any marathon. Thirteen newbie runners were put through a nine-month regimen designed to prepare them for the 2007 Boston Marathon, the granddaddy of all road races.

Created in cooperation with the Boston Athletic Association, which granted NOVA unprecedented access during the 111th Boston Marathon (April 16, 2007), and Tufts University, the film takes viewers on a unique adventure inside the human body, tracking changes in the runners’ bodies.

NOVA is the highest rated science series on television and the most watched documentary series on public television. It is also one of television’s most acclaimed series, having won every major television award, most of them many times over.

The series originally aired last year, but is sometimes re-aired on your local PBS affiliate. If you can’t catch it on the boob-tube, you can watch NOVA’s Marathon online.

Boston weekend bonus: Bill Simmons’ “Idiot’s Guide to the Boston Marathon.”

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood