Tag Archives: Alberto Salazar

MARY CAIN – CHIN UP, SHOULDERS BACK, CAN’T LOSE

Teen Sensation Mary Cain

Mary Finishes Strong in Boston

High school sensation Mary Cain, the junior out of Bronxville, New York, closed with a stride-lengthening rush over the final 50 meters at last Saturday’s New Balance Indoor Grand Prix women’s two mile at the sold-out Reggie Lewis Center in Boston.  Her strong kick delivered her to the finish line in third place, within one stride of Canadian 5000 meter Olympian Sheila Reid,  though 25-seconds behind race winner and three-time Olympic champion Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia, herself a former teen sensation dubbed the “Baby-Faced Destroyer” for the quality of her whippet-like finishes.

Notwithstanding, Cain smashed the 21-year old U.S. high school indoor 2-mile record by 17-seconds (9:38.68).  In all, another fabulous performance for the 16 year-old high school junior who continues her assault on the all-time U.S. high school record book.

And yet – yes, there’s an “and yet”.  But it’s a good one. Though Mary Cain has broken three long standing U.S. indoor high school records over the course of the still budding 2013 season (unofficial 3000m, one mile, now two mile), her coach Alberto Salazar can still see room for vast improvement.  Even a casual fan can see that her youthful physique still exhibits a mix-master, across the midline action in her upper body, an alignment which has profound effect  on the action of her stride, its length, and overall efficiency.

“What I first saw with her was her shoulders hunched forward,” explained Coach Salazar in Boston.  “But we can fix that pretty quick.  And that will fix her legs and stride.  I was talking to my wife about Galen (Rupp) hunching his shoulders forward, and our daughter (Maria) was listening.  She’s an equestrian.  She said, ‘Dad, there’s a thing I wear called Shoulders Back which helps us sit straighter in the saddle’.  So I ordered it, and it has pulled her shoulders back. Both Mary and Galen run with it now. She still has form to improve. She’s weak on top, but at least it’s an improvement.”

Shoulders Back

Shoulders Back

There are many examples of teen sensations who never go on to open division heights.  Melody Fairchild, whose 1991 indoor 2-Mile record Cain broke last Saturday, never approached the same level of track success in her post-high school years.  More recent California teen queen Jordan Hasay, who famously qualified for the Olympic Trials final at 1500 meters in 2008 as a high schooler, has had a very good collegiate career at Oregon – she won the 2011 NCAA indoor championships in both the one mile and the 3000 meters – but not one that stands out like her high school years. BTW, Hasay and Cain will meet up at the February 16th Millrose Games in New York City over the one mile distance.

There are many complex reasons for teen female talent not to blossom further in running, or any sport, for that matter. Some of it has to do with changes in maturing body composition, the psychological pressure to succeed, and new, competing interests. There’s no telling where Mary Cain is headed.  Tirunesh Dibaba took her junior success all the way to multiple world records and three Olympic gold medals.  Mary Decker Slaney, perhaps America’s most celebrated teen sensation, captured double World Championship gold in Helsinki 1983 before infamously – and perhaps ironically – tangling legs with another teen wonder, Zola Budd of South Africa, in the L.A. Olympic 3000 meter final.

Noted throughout his own running career – and now as a coach – for his blunt assessments, Salazar believes the future is unlimited for Mary Cain, who, though restricted by Salazar to post-race interviews, exhibits both an ease and charm in the unforgiving glare of the spotlight that suggest that the stage will not be too big for her to handle.

“In the next couple of years you’ll see her become America’s top middle-distance runner, no question,” Alberto asserted.

The weight on her shoulders will continue to grow.  But with her chin up and Shoulders Back, so far, so good.

END

COACH SALAZAR AND GALEN RUPP DETERMINED TO WIN IN 2013

I button-holed old friend Alberto Salazar to discuss last weekend’s 3:50.92 indoor mile PR by Galen Rupp at the B.U. Terrier Classic across town.  Salazar has coached Rupp since his high school days in Oregon, and lead him and training partner Mo Farah of Great Britain to the gold and silver medals at last summer’s London Olympic 10,000 meters.  Of course, Alberto grew up in nearby Wayland, Mass. where he began his own legendary running career.  Tonight, Al and a bunch of his old Greater Boston Track Club mates will meet up with their old coach Bill Squires for a laugh-filled dinner in the Back Bay.

Rupp’s 3:50.92 solo mile at B.U. was the fifth-fastest indoor mile in history and # 2 on the all-time U.S. list.  His coach was pleased, it’s what he expected, but wasn’t overly impressed.

“He ran 3:334.7 last year for 1500 meters,” said Al.  “That’s equivalent to a 3:51.7 mile. So he’s just a little faster now. It’s a natural progression as he gets older, not like a WOW! all of a sudden sort of thing. He’s gotten faster at all distances from the mile to 10,000 meters.”

The Salazar-Rupp connection began when Al saw Galen play soccer on the same team as one of his sons in junior high.  That led to a long-term relationship similar to the foundation of the old British club system where an athlete is coached by one man his whole career.  But even now with success at the highest levels, Galen has only whetted his appetite for more. Continue reading →

COMPETITION, NOT TIME, SPURS RITZ IN CHICAGO

Ritz 3rd in Philly

   

Dathan Ritzenhein’s 60:56 third-place finish at Sunday’s Rock `n” Roll Philadelphia Half-Marathon sets him up well for his marathon in Chicago in three weeks time.  After his race he was quoted as saying that his goal in the Windy City was to able to run a 2:06 time.  But according to his coach Alberto Salazar, that pronouncement wasn’t at the heart of Dathan’s statement, nor is it how either one of them even approaches the sport.

“They took out the second half of his quote,” Al told me during a phone interview on Tueday.  “He said he’d love to run 2:06, but what he wanted to do in Chicago is be competitive.

“He’s been training with Mo (Farah) and Galen (Rupp, the Olympic gold and silver medalist at 10,000-meters.  Dathan finished 13th in London).  We don’t concentrate on time.  Dathan hasn’t run that super time (in the marathon), and until he does he won’t be competitive, but he wants to run with the guys.”

Having followed Dathan’s career since his days as a scrawny high school sensation in Rockford, Michigan where he won back-to-back Foot Locker National Cross Country titles and a bronze medal in world junior competition, I can attest that finishing position – the essence of cross country – rather than finishing time has always been his focus.  Though he briefly held the American record at 5000 meters, time trials have never been Ritz’s forte.

Following a stellar career at the University of Colorado, Dathan has so far topped off his pro career with a bronze medal at the 2009 IAAF World Half Marathon Championship in Birmingham, England in 2009 (PR, 60:00).  Through it all, however, Ritzenhein has been plagued by injuries, particularly foot problems.   But coming into Chicago 2012, Ritz is as healthy as he’s ever been for a marathon.

“We’ve been disappointed with (marathon) results in the past,” admitted Salazar, himself a former three-time New York City and one-time Boston Marathon champion. “But sooner or later, unless he’s just not suited to the marathon, he will run a (super) time.  Finally, we’ve come to the conclusion that 110 miles is the max per week he can train.  Every time we get greedy he gets injured.  But he’s been healthy over the entire last year.” Continue reading →

1982 BOSTON MARATHON, A REMINISCENCE

1982 Boston Marathon Press Guide Cover

Our Runner’s Digest show had put together a 75-station radio network for the 1982 Boston Marathon, including a thirty-minute preview show the Saturday before.  I was stationed at the finish line above Ring Road adjacent to the Prudential Tower directly across Boylston Street from Hereford Street. We had six reporters out along the course giving live updates from the field. To help with their assignment, we put together what we believe was the first press guide for the Boston Marathon.  Four of those pages are contained in this post.

Especially at Boston 1982, the running boom was thundering over the land at its highest decibel level.  And when word leaked out that Wayland, Mass. native Alberto Salazar was coming back home to compete for the first time at the Boston Marathon, well, for those who have never experienced the excitement that foot-racing once caused, all I can tell you is that the needle was pinned to the far right of the guage that year.

Al was homeward bound off what we thought was a marathon world record (2:08:13) in New York City the previous October.  Only later would the course be remeasured and found to be 149 meters short.  Notwithstanding, Al was at the height of his piercing focus and unwavering willfulness.  The week before Boston he had gone head up against 10,000m world record holder Henry Rono of Kenya at an Alberto directed 10,000 meter race on the track at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon where Alberto had gone to school.  Henry (with a gut, I kid you not) barely edged Alberto 27:29 to 27:30. But Al had shown his fitness, and then some, and seemed ready for anything come Patriot’s Day. Continue reading →

GEOFF HOLLISTER & CHICAGO MARATHON SOLD OUT

Geoff as we knew him best

The sport of running lost one its true guiding lights today as news of Geoff Hollister’s passing was announced in Portland, Oregon.  Hollister succumbed to cancer just days after his 66th birthday following a several year battle with the disease.  Full story here

Among his many other talents, Geoff was instrumental in bringing Alberto Salazar out to Oregon, and this past weekend at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Al’s home town of Boston, Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project athletes Galen Rupp, Mo Farah, and Ciaran O’Lionard all wore specially designed singlets in honor of Geoff.  Galen, who grew up in Eugene and attended the University of Oregon, like Geoff, was especially touched.

“He was so passionate about the sport,” recalled Galen last Friday, Geoff’s 66th birthday.  “He brought so many new ideas, like Athletics West (the Nike-sponsored track team of the late 1970s).  He really knew how to advance the sport.  I’ve known him since high school, and he was always so good to be around.”

I’d known Geoff for over 30 years, too, and we’d reconnect every August at Joanie Samuelson’s Beach to Beacon 10k in Maine, where his laugh and embrace of life were always in full engagement. Though he’d long retired from Nike, Geoff kept busy in recent years using his arts background to produce documentary films, from the award-winning “Fire on the Track”, the tale of Steve Prefontaine, to last year’s “There is No Finish Line” showcasing the saga of Joanie’s rise to Olympic glory, and her continued influence on runners of all ages, genders, and abilities.

One of the original “Men of Oregon”, as writer and fellow Duck Kenny Moore dubbed the men who ran for legendary Oregon coach Bill Bowerman, Geoff Hollister lived a life that exemplified Joseph Campbell’s dictate to “follow your bliss”.  May we all be so fortunate.  Continue reading →

WRINGING OUT THE OLD

    As 2011 comes to a desultory close, with the race of 2012 shaping up to be the one for the White House in Washington rather than the podium in London, the IAAF’s annual ‘End of the Season’ marathon review by A. Lennart Julin (SWE) and Mirko Jalava (FIN) left the two statisticians with their mouths agape, writing…“what really made 2011 a year that will be considered of historical significance in the sport of marathon running was that it changed our perception of what is really possible. The best illustration is probably the fact that there were new course records set in all the five races making up the “World Marathon Majors.”

DISTANCE RACING HAS HIT THE WALL made a similar case back in November, but more than simply challenging our perceptions of WHAT was really possible, 2011 showed us unequivocally WHO it was possible by.

There were 182 sub-2:10 marathon performances world-wide in 2011, including those on downhill, point-to-point courses like Boston, which, despite its history and renown, is often left off the statistical lists by the Stat-Nazis in the name of purity over common sense. Of that 182, athletes from Kenya ran 110 (61%) led by Geoffrey Mutai’s 2:03:02 Boston masterpiece and Patrick Makau’s “official” world record 2:03:38 in Berlin.   For the rest of the world – including the mighty Ethiopians with 42 sub-2:10s (22%) - 2011 was the year of nolo contendere.  The U.S. was once again led by Ryan Hall (2) and Meb Keflezighi (1) with three sub-2:10s.

As the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials nears in Houston, Texas January 14th, a look back at where the sport was four years earlier gives us a sobering indication of why the sport of distance running has been transformed into an intra-mural battle among Kenyan camps rather than a world-class competition amongst evenly matched nations.  The tilt has become so severe, that the average jogger/runner has lost all contact with the exploits of their sport’s fastest purveyors as the running industry in the U.S. has settled on participation numbers, economic impact, and charitable contributions as their standards of excellence, speed be damned. Continue reading →

STEP BY STEP

     In the classic Three Stooges episode, Slowly I Turned, first Mo – then Larry - smashes, hits, punches, and tears poor Curly’s clothing before knocking him to the ground, all for reminding him of his confrontation with Larry (then vice versa) in Niagra Falls over a woman.   After Curly innocently utters the offending city’s name, triggering the attacks, Mo and Larry’s refrain goes, “Niagra Falls! Slowly I turned, and step by step, inch by Inch…”  (Of course, all men can recite Stooges episodes by heart. Women think they are dumb. Men agree, but then remind them, “stupidity is the point. It’s purposeful stupidity, a whole different animal than the unintentional kind most often voiced by candidates running for President).

Well, Galen Rupp might not wear his hair in a bowler like Mo or a frizzed out ‘fro like Larry, but step by step, inch by inch the 25 year-old from Portland, Oregon is proving the American distance running equivalent the Stooges’ classic set piece.

Yes, I questioned the London 2012 Olympic medal chances of Mr. Rupp upon his seventh place finish in Daegu at the World Championships 5000 meters (RUPP‘S DILEMMA), but today at the final Samsung Diamond League meeting of the year in Brussels Rupp took another stride in his step-by-step, inch-by-inch approach to the London Olympic podium in the 10,000 meters. Continue reading →

RUPP’S DILEMMA

      Galen Rupp has been groomed for years by coach Alberto Salazar at the Nike-sponsored Oregon Distance Project in Portland.  Now at age 25 the American 10,000 meter champion is moving into his peak years, and still may have medal hopes for London 2012.  But more and more that possibility is looking less and less likely.  Either you’ve got the wheels or you don’t, and when we are talking distance running at the rarified atmosphere of the World Championship and Olympic medal level, Galen just doesn’t seem to possess the raw speed necessary to contend.

Today, in Daegu, South Korea, Rupp hung with the very best distance men in the world through 23 1/2 laps in the 10,000 meter final of the World Championships.  But when the racing for the medals began in earnest a lap and a half out, Galen was unable to respond, and had to settle for seventh place, 13-seconds behind the champion Ibrahim Jeilan of Ethiopia.  His is now the conundrum for all distance men – hell, all runners. We all start out as sprinters, then move up to find our sweetest distance.

We have seen this for decades, the plight of the strength runner in a speed man’s game.  Remember that Alberto himself was at one time the American record holder at 5000 (13:11) and 10,000 meters (27:25).  But eight days before besting Dick Beardsley in their legendary “Duel in the Sun” at the 1982 Boston Marathon, Al was gunned down at a special 10,000 he’d arranged at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon by the great (but chubby at the time) Henry Rono of Kenya, 27:29 to 27:30.

Steve Jones of Wales was a formidable 10,000 meter runner in the early 1980s, too, but he didn’t have the nitrous tank to go to when pink slips and shiny medals were up for grabs.  So he, too, was lured to the marathon where that kind of speed was less necessary.  Next thing we knew, he, like Alberto before him, became the world’s best over the longer distance.

And most recently, in Oslo last year at the Bislett Games 21-year-old Bekana Daba of Ethiopia ran 12:58.51 for 5000 meters, good for ninth place.  For that he earned all of $500.  Since it cost him $700 to fly from Addis Ababa to Oslo, his 12:58 COST him $200!  But after seeing his friend Gebre Gebremariam win the ING New York City Marathon last November, Daba, then 22, put two and two together, and he ended up coming up with $39,000 payday by winning the Houston Marathon this January in a course record 2:07:04.

But with Galen Rupp taking home a healthy check from Nike every month, he has the luxury to maintain his focus on the track, regardless the results. And one hopes the path will lead to glory. Problem may well be that by the time he moves up in distance sometime after London 2012 the current trend of younger talent out of East Africa trickling into the marathon will have become a mass migration as they follow the only real money in the sport. Then what, join my friend Josh Cox at 50K?

END

DAEGU MEN’S 10,000M – THE SAGA OF MO FARAH

     And so the 2011 men’s World Championships 10,000 meters is  complete.  And poor Mo Farah.  England’s pride came up agonizingly short in  his bid to win his nation’s first ever World Championships 10,000 final.  Instead unheralded  Ethiopian Ibrahim Jeilan rallied in the final 200 meters to run down the  Somali-born runner, winning in 27:13.82 to Mo’s 27:14.07.  Another Ethiopian Imane Merga came third in  27:19.14 to mine the bronze.  America’s  top hope – and Mo’s training mate at the Oregon Project – Galen Rupp finished  in seventh position in 27:26.84.

The look of utter despair that moved across Mo’s face as the  Ethiopian assassin blazed by with but 20 meters remaining was a testament to  the value accorded the potential win.  Farah had grown immensely over the course of the last year, especially after moving to Portland to join Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project.  His 26:46.57 win at the Prefontaine Classic in  June remains the leading time in the world this year, and pegged him as race  favorite in Daegu. And he ran like a champion, too, except – and it’s a big  except – for the final 650 meters.

Based on the results, you’d have to say Mo got just a little too anxious. Rather than waiting for the final 500 meters to strike, as had been his tactic throughout his breakout season, he went to the front on the backstretch of the penultimate lap, maybe 50-75 meters too soon, because he ran out of fuel before he ran out of territory, which allowed Jeilan time to rally down the stretch to snatch the gold.  But that’s an easy assessment sitting in front of a computer screen.  It’s a whole  different matter when your spikes are flinging mondo track beneath you in a blur, the crowd is baying like a hungry animal in your ears, and your lungs are a bellows breathing fire to the soul. Continue reading →