Is Bernard Lagat the Dennis Eckersley of running?
Today, or yesterday, or maybe tomorrow in Australia, 44-year-old Bernard Lagat ran 2:12:10 to place seventh and break the American masters record.
That Lagat is able to immediately render decades obsolete any masters distance record he wants -- well over 1,000 sunsets past his fortieth birthday, at that -- naturally makes one wonder what he might have done over the distance in his prime. Bearing in mind that Lagat remains the second-fastest metric miler in history with his 3:26.34 in 2001 (in a race in which he was beaten by 0.34 by the current record-holder, Hicham El Guerrouj), it is reasonable to say that among male distance runners, only Mo Farah (3:28.81/2:05:11) has demonstrated comparable range over the mile-to-marathon spectrum.
The combination of Lagat's range and versatility is evocative, perhaps, of that of the Major League Baseball pitcher Dennis Eckersley, who was with my quasi-hometown Red Sox when I was old enough to start paying meaningful attention to this meaningless yet compelling sport. Eck is not on the same talent level as Lagat or even really close, but their career arcs are similar. Eckersley was a starter in his early years and won 20 games one season before winding up as one of the best closers of all time; Lagat started out as a Kenyan who focused exclusively on mid-distance track races and only took to the longer distances and the roads as a bona fide geezer. Eck, perhaps not coincidentally, became a reliever in 1987 after sobering up from a crippling drinking problem. In what then looked like at least the midpoint of Lagat's career, but now seems like his early years, Lagat endured his own travails; in 2003, he submitted an A-sample that turned up hot for EPO (the B-sample shortly cleared him) and his 2005-ish transition from Kenyan to U.S. citizenship was now without scowl-inducing features for all concerned.
I remember driving to a late-summer cross-country practice one morning before my senior year of high school when I heard on the radio that Said Aouita had become the first human under thirteen minutes for five kilometers the night before in Europe. I almost went off the road into a ditch, although that was mostly because I was serving as the unlikely and grateful recipient of fellatio at the time. That was incredible (the world record, I mean), but as a longtime observer of running who remembers Back In The Day like it was a mere 30 years ago, I have to opine that had anyone a few months shy of turning 42 followed up the great Moroccan's mark with a 13:06, which is what Lagat logged at the Rio Olympics three summers ago, the entire Internet would have blown up, thus preventing it from ever being created in the first place and in the process precluding stupid memes like "...and the Internet went wild."
I have felt curiously energized while running lately, though not enough to inspire me to do more on the local track than cross it or stop to gab with the village irregulars1. It's been cool-ish for this time of year, and last night we got some serious hail during a storm that reportedly delayed a show featuring the Grateful Dead, or what's left of them, at Folsom Field, or what's left of it. My knee has been acting slightly shitty, maybe because I've been doubling often, just 20- to 30-minute easy runs, often at dusk so that Rosie can more energetically covet rabbits. (Were we dawn runners, which we ain't and never plan to me, it would be a nonstop carnival of squirrels, which Rosie hungers after even more ravenously, and we wouldn't even make it to the fuckin' park up yonder at anything resembling a running clip.)
I think my rising iron levels have made me more frisky, although it's just as likely I am wrong about this. But I have more of an appetite lately for the kinds of things healthy people ought to, and with it, plans to ruin at least one person's life entirely by accident. But I am also certain that going from devoting hours a day to social media in all its forms to virtually zero in recent weeks is a factor as well. Social media doesn't sadden people; the stupid fucking people on social media who never shut up (myself included) about everything under the sun is what saddens people. As do trite metaphors.
If you want to see chaos, turn off "conversation view" in Gmail. Well, if you have "conversations" as protracted and yammerific as I do.
By the by, last week, I pitched an article to a publication few of you have ever heard of but has run at least one piece with tremendous bearing on the sport of track and field, even if the sane words it offers have been swamped by the tide of sewage released from far larger outlets like The New York Times and the The Washington Post. The only thing stopping me from finishing and submitting it is deciding how far I am willing to go on several rarely plumbed personal and professional levels to make the piece what I want it to be if it is to see daylight at all beyond this blog. After this holiday weekend is over and my contacts are back in the swing of contacting, I'll know more. None of you care about this now, or should, but if you're already desperate enough for schadenfreude in all its flavors (metaphor alert! Fuck!) to be here in the first place, you'll want to read this essay.
The two younger of the three Ingebrigtsen brothers ran under 3:31 for 1,500 meters yesterday (or today) in Europe. Currently, and most likely forever, the slowest among the three is Henrik, now 28, who ran 3:31.46 back in 2014. 18-year-old Jacob (3:30.16) had already surpassed his brother with a 3:31.18 in Monaco last summer, and 26-year-old Filip (3:30.82) holds he best among the three with a 3:30.01 from that same Monaco race. That's three brothers who have run the equivalent of 3:48.35 or better for one mile. If there were a fourth sibling who was capable of staggering through no better than an 8:30, the average of their personal records would still be under five minutes, an idea no human, rightfully, has ever considered in a public setting.
I was stung in the lower back by a hornet right after my run yesterday. That was not easy, though I would have expected far worse pain -- it had been many years, decades in fact, since one of those fuckers successfully nicked me with his ass-bayonet. I actually announced, "I'm gonna kill that fucker!" loud enough for anyone within a sixty-five foot radius to hear, but only Rosie and the hornet and maybe some rodents were in that range.
On the matter of noisome critters seen on runs and generally, I have only been sprayed by a skank once in my life, and it was not while running. Imagine, though, if skunks, or perhaps porcupines, turned out to be the by far the best bomb-detecting animals in the world. In fact, imagine if only skunks and porcupines could both sniff out and defuse lethal explosives. It probably wouldn't change the world a great deal other than making buddy comedies even more insufferable than they already are.
It occurred to me as I was jogging tonight that a favorite adjective among literary dweebs who like cliches (which I myself avoid like the plague) to describe unlikely quests -- which runners favor by the billions, just as they do hyperbole and distracting asides -- is "quixotic." This is of course from the 1980s graphic novel Don Quixote. People like to joke that when they first heard the title, they thought is was about a donkey named Hotay. In some cases, they joke is that this is what they seriously believed. I can appreciate this, because as a child I only saw the title in print and assumed it was pronounced "Don Quicks Oaty" like it was some kind of instant breakfast. Granted, I was only seven at the time, and had very recently been introduced to Quaker Oats. But better yet, the word "quixotic" is pronounced "qwik-ZOT-ik," as it should be. And that's what you are if you read running blogs expecting anything besides tepid dribbles and rivulets of verbal diarrhea, interspersed with occasional white-hot explosive rhetorical sharts that leave all readers choking on the offal of my choleric mind and willing to do anything to not have to read one more fucking gruesome metaphor.
Finally, how often is a Ringer brought into a contest only to finish dead last?
