Nuggets from the weekend
Alternative title: More than ever, modestly fast competitors supply the most rewarding environments to follow
My nephew Hayden had a great race on Saturday, mainly because it showed what he could do in an ideally executed 1,500-meter race. I had imagined him running as fast as 4:12, which would have been a personal best by over ten seconds.
He wound up leading his heat from start to finish and running 4:13.62. Despite an overzealous first lap, he had something left at the end for a kick he merely desired and did not need (no one else broke 4:20).
Had this been a mile, schematically, Hayden would have split 65-70-70-65 or so. When a kid runs like this, a pattern any high-school coach has seen many times, it implies two important things. One is obvious—the runner has left a good five seconds on the track. The other may not be: Kids (or young adults) who race like this are invariably gamers. They believe in themselves, they love to train hard, they like to win, and, the LORD willing, they gravitate carefully toward the right influences and stay there.
Had Hayden had the luxury of following a pacer (or lights) circling the track at 33.0 seconds per 200 meters, he could have run 4:07.5. When I was capable of running under 15:00 for 5,000 meters and 51:32 for 10 miles, I would have had to work very hard to run that fast (I ran a flat, two-lap road mile in 4:27 during the same stretch). Anyone who predicted that this 5:37 high-school miler becoming this fast in his second season of collegiate track would have been suspected of fanboyistic bias, perhaps even accused of having undergone undisclosed basement brain surgery.
I have a hard time expressing what it means for someone in my family to be enjoying this ride. My clan does not have a rich history of either runners or people who obtain college degrees. But it’s more than that.
Hayden’s conference championships are on Saturday and Sunday. It’s a modest conference, with only five teams, but Hayden is ranked first in both the 800 meters and the 1,500 meters by healthy margins. Perhaps too healthy, because he is focusing solely on the 800 meters in an effort to qualify for the D-III East Regional Championships, and for that he will need a 1:57.5.
Hayden has been handling a leg of the 1,600-meter relay in these meets after whatever other event he has run, and he’s gotten into the low 54’s. I think he can run 1:57.5—his best is 1:59.90, but he’s on a marked ascendancy—but he’ll have to run a perfect race and likely by himself. If he’s out in around 58.0 off a first 200 meters not much under 29 seconds, he’ll be in a position to do it.
The London Marathon was this morning. The men’s race very sneakily produced a time 16 seconds slower than newly battered Eliud Kipchoge’s world record, while the women’s race saw an improbable five figures barrel into the chute 20 seconds apart in sub-2:19:00 times.
If you go to the race leaderboard, you can look at the status of the runners at each 5K split as well as halfway. If you do, you’ll discover that Kelvin Kiptum had four runners with him at 30K, with the group on pace to run 2:02:55. Kiptum then ran 27:50 between 30K and 40K, or 4:28.6 per mile. Between 40K and the finish, he slowed to 4:32.7 per mile.
Kiptum’s halves, in order, were 1:01:40 and 59:45, even though it was only in the second half of his second half that he really started motoring. This is someone who is clearly capable of running 2:00:30 in an official marathon with the right pacing, and gives him two sub-2:02:00 performances at the age of 23.
Anyone can see that Kiptum is capable of beating Kipchoge even if the latter regains his form of last fall. What is harder to figure out is how the sport would be affected if someone other than Eliud Kipchoge suddenly became the fastest marathoner ever, especially if he defeated Kipchoge in the process. Say, in Berlin this fall.
Both men are clearly doping, but I am not sure whether Kiptum will be permitted to steal EK’s considerable thunder before EK retires, even if he clearly earns the theft. Put it this way: If the next man to run under 2:01:09 is someone besides the G.O.A.T., there is a good chance it will wind up triggering a doping positive. Or a far better chance than there would be in a different World Athletics landscape.
Sifan Hassan is perhaps the most unlikable distance runner alive. Part of this is unfair; she’s no “more doped'“ than anyone else, and like her peers was made to run against a man from Burundi for a while before Seb Coe sobered up for once and compelled World Athletics to close out its messy experiment with tainting the distaff side of the sport with unqualified bodies.
It’s probably shitty to dislike someone more than her peers because she looks more unpleasant, or gives idiotic interviews, or trails an especially rancid stink of shadiness around. But I also suspect that Hassan—a Dutch national but Ethiopian by birth—is not more likely to be popped anytime soon than anyone else from her magically and perennially untested nation of origin.
Hassan also provides substrate for demonstrating how unprincipled the running punditry is.
In 2017, when Chris Chavez still worked for Sports Illustrated, he used the reporting of other outlets to describe allegations of doping by Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar and several of its members, naming Mo Farah, Galen Rupp, and Matthew Centrowitz Jr. This was "cool" at the time.
When Rupp won the Chicago Marathon later that year, Chavez neglected to mention that Rupp, in his own words, was operating under serious suspicion.
Hassan was already an NOP member when Chavez wrote these stories, having joined in 2016—one year after Salazar's abject and undeniable shadiness was trumpeted to the world.
But now that Chavez is a full-time running pundit, and is taking money directly from Phil Knight via Magic Boost, he pretends none of this ever happened.
Centrowitz, by the way, was dating Shelby Houlihan at the time she was busted, and both he and his father are deeply untrusted figures by those in the know; I’d be amazed if it doesn’t turn out he was helping her with the intake and acquisition of whatever junk she was slinging into herself.
Expect the same “History? What history?” reactions from the rest of the self-dealing yutzes pretending to be reporters (Erin Strout, Alison Wade, etc.). They don’t care how much rot is right under the surface of everything they observe and wax rhapsodic about as long as they gain attention for themselves in the process.
Wade has a lot of nerve, too, as does Runner’s World, for complaining about Flotrack, another bunch of feckless assholes I don’t remark on nearly enough, botching yet more race coverage.
Neither Wade nor RW has any standing to complain about the low quality of anyone else’s output. It’s hilarious that Wade praises Flotrack’s responsiveness, because Wade’s response to people calling out her own bullshit is to simply block them and go on whining, lying, and trying to smear or cancel something or someone less ugly than she is. Chavez does the same thing, as does Strout.
This is the kind of thing that leads every one of these compromised idiots to block me. They can try to pin this on my allegedly brusque style, but everyone can see that these are just garden-variety cowards with no business pretending they care about the health of the sport.
I’m suddenly more irritated than I was initially at Runner’s World for quietly replacing a piece I wrote for them in 2020, one that lightly ridiculed the idea of nasal-only breathing, within a few months with a contradictory, anti-scientific one by a different author at the same website address. That’s just an unprofessional move.
At first I couldn’t figure out who to complain to, because RW doesn’t even list any names on its “THE RUNNER’S WORLD EDITORS” page. But it happens that someone named Jeff Dengate holds the title of “Runner-in-Chief,” suggesting that he had a role in this move. He looks exactly like the kind of life-sized cock-knob who would be in charge of a fallen trash-rag like Runner’s World.
I’ll get more into this in an upcoming post, but because all of the e-mails I have written in recent years documenting clear malfeasance have gone unacknowledged, and because people block me immediately when I show of in their social feeds, I believe it’s time to fully bring back shame and just insult people relentlessly until I get some answers. If I have to point out that someone looks like a dildo with ears or a human eggplant, or is undeniably morally and mentally challenged, it’s all fair game. We’ll see how well the shitbirds ignore me when they find out that I haven’t in fact, been moderating myself to some extent thus far.
None of this is for a bunch of liars and pussies to wreck. Not without some pushback.