Early spring grab-bag, or grasp-bag

This could be just a slump, but probably not

Lately, I don’t feel like writing about competitive running. To account for this lassitude while disowning as much of the blame as possible, my mind has been busy concocting and defending a private doctoral thesis: The sport is yet another once-quirky, now-diseased sector of leisure culture, one I now wish I’d never involved myself in and would be well advised to permanently forsake observing.

In short, the mental committee evaluating this thesis is not uniformly impressed with the arguments proposed to date.

Part of this malaise, I tell myself, may be legitimately waning interest in something that’s not especially exciting to watch compared to sports where objects other than people are in motion or metastatic fisticuffs are either the entire point of the competition or well tolerated by officials and fans alike.

What distance runners do, mostly unseen and alone, in trying to extend their capabilities will always carry inherent appeal; to this day, I still scheme myself about ways to get out there and at least try to extract the most from myself in some kind of competition or time trial, even these spurts of ambition are becoming further apart as the concept of goal-formation itself loses meaning.

It might indeed be perfectly normal for even a one-time running-geek to eventually fill up on the sight of tiny, sunken-chested men and women built like prepubescent boys skittering around in wide-eyed, gasping circuits or between big-city skyscrapers, all far more slowly than elegant and refined animals like cheetahs and pronghorn antelopes can manage. I might have even lost interest in pro running by age thirty if not for the specific panache of British television announcers.

As true as much of this may be, and as fun as it is to unleash, it looks and smells suspiciously like sour grapes.

Another potential factor: Getting older means watching things change a great deal, even things that always seemed fine the way they began and hence should be immune to frivolous tinkering.

Anyone who follows the same sport or cultural institution for forty years is eventually going to see administrative and social transformations he’s inclined to grumble about. This is as true for an optimist as it is for a born “Get off my sport’s lawn!” extremist who believes the Boston Marathon should be limited to sub-2:50:00 applicants and exclude charity runners, even if the latter type is inclined to make more noise and enemies.

But whether real or contrived, these two bugbears—understandable boredom and the inevitable sense of encroaching alienation from the culture's most prominent actors—are small contributors to why I have lost interest in running. The overwhelming reason is that I’m even more ill-served than before by paying attention to people and their magnificently regressive antics. And unlike running per se, the progressive, quasi-silent governmental and extra-governmental mayhem driving most of its diminution is not something I'm capable of ignoring.

Still, at least one incredible thing happened lately. On Saturday, my nephew Hayden broke two minutes in the 800 meters for the first time at the Springfield College Classic in Massachusetts, running 1:59.90.

Since Hayden, a sophomore who suffered iron-deficiency anemia in the fall, ran 2:02.45 indoors, it’s not shocking in context that he dipped under 2:00 outdoors, even in an early-season meet. But I still instinctively conceive of him as the kid who spent two unguided outdoor seasons running track in high school—it would have been three, but covid wiped out his junior year—and never ran faster than 2:23.

Hayden is currently ranked 33rd in the Division III East Region in the 800 meters, and is top-ranked in his own conference by over seven seconds. Since no one quite saw this massive improvement coming—not even me, despite Hayden running well under six minutes for 1600 meters when he was eleven—it’s impossible to say when, and at what performance level, it will taper off.

When Hayden ran 2:02.45, that was a 4.14-second improvement on his best. 1:59.90 was a 2.55-second improvement. There is only so many times he can keep taking multiple seconds off a race that now takes him less than 120 seconds to finish before other people start yacking about his exploits.

The Arcadia Invitational, an annual early-spring California blaze-fest, was also held over the weekend (results). The 3200-meter invitational races were absurdly fast:

The top three boys in the race now stand 2-3-5 on the all-time U.S. 3,200-meter list, although they drop to 5-6-7 when this list is combined with two-mile times. And while the girls’ race didn’t scuttle the very top of the all-time U.S. list to the same extent, nine girls broke 10:00 in the same race; that’s 23 percent of the all-time total of thirty-nine.

All nine set personal bests, and four of them are from Colorado: Northern Arizona University-bound Emma Stutzman, juniors Isabel Allori and Bethany Michalak, and Wake Forest-committed Brooke Wilson. Stutzman and Wilson are both in CSHAA 5A schools and may race each other for the 3,200-meter state title next month, if the meet doesn’t get snowed out.

Also at Arcadia, Madison Shults of Niwot, a village audible from Boulder when the Karens are singing and the MILFs come out to play, became the fastest girl in Colorado history in the 800 meters with a 2:04.26, eclipsing Jordyn Colter’s 2:04:56 from the 2015 state championships. In the fall, Shults will head for Stanford “University,” where she may run uncommonly fast yet fail to escape the of morass of terrific and expanding immoralities now associated with the institution itself.

That’s about it for now. As for the gripes with which I prefaced these niceties, we* need to be real: It’s not as though any enterprise labeled a sport was ever sacrosanct, or for that matter remotely dignified, to begin with. But the recent increase in ugliness and ugly people in and adjacent to running is not been part of any sort natural or broadly desired progression, and the whole show makes me wince. And when I avert my gaze from public perambulators, whatever my eyes settle on is usually even more dilapidated and steeped in stupidity and clamor.

Normally, by this point in the Major League Baseball season, I’ve already started scanning the statistical leader boards, but that stuff isn’t attracting me anymore, either. Overall, I'm just less easily stimulated by the same dips into mundane trivia as I used to be.

But apart from my own passive withdrawal from various forms of spectatorship, running in particular has rapidly lost most what gave it its niche appeal into the onset of the social-media age.

When I started running in the 1980s, the sport did not attract, or at least failed to admit, cheaters, grifters, whiners, hypocritical activists, incompetent journalists, and other illegitimate and degenerate cast-offs—many of them enjoying unearned social privilege and in-group standing—as it so lustily does today. One had to earn status by moving their legs in a way that favorably impressed people. Pure ass-wagglers were appreciated and hailed by genuine runners for their aesthetic service, but only because they were strictly a sidebar to a primarily athletic and thoughtful show.

That none of running’s pro-trans-inclusion Scold Maids had anything to say about the recent assault on swimmer Riley Gaines by, among others, a man—and I mean an undisguised male, not an unwell or grandstanding man posing as a woman and trilling in a dramatic falsetto about the virtues of pisswater beer—underscores the uniquely hate-tinged perversities of their necrotic stances. That these decadence-championing influencers and pundits enjoy large followings and sponsorships along with cancellation powers and the luxury of flatly ignoring critics is just one turn-off among many.

My aforementioned regrets and ersatz regrets lie not in wasting time over the years trying to improve at something so organically egocentric and lame—it’s not like I would have been curing cancer or even post-exercise swamp-balls instead—but in passionately following any single cultural institution, even one than would seem to debar by nature most of the kind of clowns whose hollow if sometimes prosperous lives are organized around being loud, stupid, underhanded, and wrong.

I still love running just to see what the process brings; no matter my mood or intentions, the result is always more, and better, than had I skipped it. But following what groups of humans do, no matter the substrate, is bad news for me, because I quickly see the worst aspects of any of these arrangements and become convinced wholesale of the futility of combining human monkeys and letting them make decisions on the basis of what the largest, wealthiest, or most strident buffoons in the room recommend or demand.

In addition to taking more deep dives into the multiple topics that specifically push me closer to frank insanity, I'll post a preview of the 2023 Boston Marathon women's race over the weekend, and will salt it with the usual personal flashbacks to editions of the race I took part in, the last of these being twenty years ago.

But for some reason the 800 meters is rapidly becoming my favorite event in all of athletics. That alone may keep me hooked and yacking for a while, everyone and everything else notwithstanding.