Early autumn grab bag
A down year for N.H. cross-country?; some orts for wonks; and professional running looks more like a special-needs bingo hall by the day
I am all out of intros, so I’m just gonna thrust a bulleted list into everyone’s mind with no foreplay even though this practice is rude.
The Manchester (New Hampshire) Invitational was held on Saturday (results).
God bless the Small School Boys You can watch videos of all the races here and interviews with the winners here. (Whenever I watch videos of races at Derryfield, I lament the fact that the current course has been in use since 1985 (my sophomore fall) with very few alterations. If they had begun using it in 1984, Cathy Schiro O’Brien’s senior season at Dover High, the two-time Olympian’s incredible venue records would still stand.)
In the boys’ large-school race, which strongly resembles a D-1 State Meet preview invaded by a host of out-of-state and prep-school teams, the top five New Hampshire squads were 4th, 10th, 11th, 13th, and 18th in the 34-team field. And that’s misleading because Coe-Brown, which was 4th, is a D-2 school that has been running in the large-school race for years. The 2020 team was among the best in the Northeast and probably the best in state history; the only plausible reason it wound up outside Milesplit’s nationwide top 25, apart from Milesplit’s myriad organic imperfections, is that Coe-Brown co-coach Tim Cox is one of the principals of NewHampshireCrossCountry.com, a site that has neutered Milesplit New Hampshire (admittedly not a huge arm of the FloSports business).
Bishop Hendricken of Rhode Island won the meet, but with a top-five average of 16:33 didn’t live up to its Milesplit #21 ranking. Colorado’s top-ranked boys team is Valor Christian at #22, and VC’s top quintet recently averaged 15:32 at the Liberty Bell Invitational, held on a fast course but also at close to 5,500’ elevation. And Valor Christian was beaten by 22 points by Cherokee Trail. Derryfield Park is tough, but nowhere close to a minute or even thirty seconds slower than a flat course at 5,500’.
Individually, Coe-Brown senior Aidan Cox—and the answer is yes, if you’re wondering—had his first truly good race since his 7th-place 14:18 at the Garmin RunningLane XC Champs last December. Alone almost from the start, he ran 15:20, close to Ben True’s event-record 15:17 from 2003 and within sight of his course PR of 15:15 from 2020. If it seems strange that Cox was so fast as a sophomore, keep in mind that he ran 16:37 in a 5K road race when he was 11 years old (but closing in on 12).
Of the 36 boys who broke 17:00, only seven were New Hampshire public-school kids. One was freshman Josiah Conley of Concord, the top ninth-grader on the day by 17 seconds with a time of 16:45.
The boys’ small-school race, which consists almost entirely of New Hampshire D-2 and D-3 schools along with a smattering of out-of-state teams, had five kids break 17:00. All were from N.H. schools, including Gilford’s Patrick Gandini (15:58), a kid I expected three years ago to be challenging or beating Cox. That means a total of a dozen boys from New Hampshire dipped under 17:00 at Derryfield Park on Saturday, with four from D-1, six from D-2 (including three from Coe-Brown and two from Oyster River) and two from D-3.
I’m tempted to see this as a weak year from New Hampshire, but the results at last year’s Manchester Invitational were similar. I think this is a function of being associated in word and sometimes in deed with a string of fast Concord kids who have all moved on, mostly to UNH. They should actually all be playing football for the University of Colorado, whose season so far looks like this:
Vermont schools won the two main girls’ team contests of the day: Champlain Valley claimed the girls’ large-school race with ease, while U-32—which should be a government form rather than an educational institution—edged Oyster River in the small-school event. Perhaps the individual highlight of the day was the emergence of Susannah Zahn of Bow, who won the small-school race in 18:16. Zahn ran 5:16/10:58 for 1,600m/3,200m as a junior this spring after finishing only 24th at the 2021 cross-country state meet and 98th at the Meet of Champions.
Letsrun reported yesterday that the World Marathon Majors have essentially been demonetized. As you can see from the table below, this is another blatant example of corporate adherence to Wokism. It looks like a joke, but only because the sport itself is one.
If people are going to risk their reputations by doping—and in case you just arrived here from the green moon Endor, almost all world-class runners dope—then they shouldn’t be competing for relative table scraps. The problem is that the even the scaled-down sums remain very lucrative from the perspective of an East African mostly subsistence economy, and Ethiopians just aren’t being busted or, as far as anyone can tell, even being tested despite obviously being so juiced that even the asphalt they race on feels like going running.
I looked at these numbers right after seeing that Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros makes $29 million a year. Obviously, there is nothing more Eliud Kipchoge or Tigist Assefa could have done on Sunday in Berlin to make anyone in charge reconsider this downgrade. What a sham. At least wheelchair racers are fantastically fit, even if no one cares about them. At this rate, by 2027 or 2028 the entire WMM will be dedicated to people with long covid, vaccine damage, gender trauma, and auto-gorging disorders. I’m barely kidding, and I’m rooting for all of it unconditionally.On Range Widely, David Epstein and the inestimable Alex Hutchinson discussed how the media typically mishandles research about the effects of distance running on health and longevity. The media typically mishandles everything to do with science on purpose, because not only are most reporters these days far too dumb to read a research paper for comprehension (picture Lindsay Crouse trying to digest something about the level of People Magazine), but they’re also motivated to report as much direness as they can whether it exists or not.
This is the important part:I don’t want to sound like a multi-level marketer, but regular, vigorous exercise really does make your body work better and last longer in pretty much every way imaginable. And in most of Williams’ studies, there’s a clear dose-response effect: more is better.
Another of life’s ironies is that unless I take radical steps to stop my own heartbeat, I will probably outlive all the slobs and inadequates I criticize despite having no desire to even see 55. I probably run more miles in a typical week than the entire harpie-brigade combined, and despite their superficial zeal for life, they’ll have eaten and drunk themselves dead by 2030 and I’ll still be jogging too much and ranting about ghosts. My dad’s mother lived to be 100 years old and all the exercise she ever took was yelling and playing golf. There is no damned way I would allow myself to exist in 2070, but I can take solace in knowing humanity will be in a post-nuclear shambles by then anyway.
Newsletter recommendation: Six Minute Mile. I started getting this out of the blue maybe a year and a half ago and find it to be a helpful, cheerful source of information. It also includes a podcast; ordinarily I don’t recommend podcasts I haven’t listened to even if I’m planning to listen eventually, but this one with Amby Burfoot looks promising.
I haven’t listened to this episode of The Singletrack Podcast yet, but I suggest giving it a whirl. Ten Junk Miles host Scott Kummer is the guest and the title is “Running Content Debates, Race Coverage Issues, Athlete Sponsorship Concerns, Ten Junk Miles.”
