Statue of Tired Man

Deep into a race, the body cannibalizes itself, trading energy for distance as systems rebel against the willful discomfort they are being asked to endure. During this exchange, goals shrink as one more mile becomes one more kilometer, then one more minute, lap, street corner, lamp post, until finally, just one more step.

For many runners, it is taking on their personal limits while overcoming the insurgency of fatigue that defines success, not just the time posted, or the place earned.

There is in the human spirit the nature to seek improvement, to better what one has previously done. This drive is the engine that moves sport, science, and other human-forged enterprises. Something as simple as moving from one grade to the next through primary school, then middle and secondary, and finally university, is one such well-known construct. Records are another means of marking improvement. Some sports, like judo, use a system of color-coded belts to reward and display improvement.

One of the most successful models in the second running boom has been the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program, which offers coaching to newbie runners to help them complete their first, and often, their only marathon. It has been a wildly successful model, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable contributions over their two-plus decades with the sport. But, as Boulder Wave president Brendan Reilly said in a previous post on this site, “there seems to be little in the sport these days to carry the runners that have gotten off the couch to the next level of aiming to run faster and treat our events like RACES”.

In a September 24, 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, Losing Is Good For You, author Ashley Merryman wrote, “It turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and uncertainty of real competition may become the activity’s very appeal…If children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never obstacles, to begin with?”

Even as running has gained adherents by the millions over the last six decades, the age-old equation, quantity dilutes quality, has emerged, as if the enterprise is one huge zero-sum game tilting more and more toward participation than performance. But when and by whom was that equation formulated and approved?

If there are three steps to an individual’s athletic journey: health, fitness, and performance, can a successful model be established to help get people not just take the initial step to health, but to expand their horizons toward fitness and performance?

Would it be possible to initiate a Next Step program that people can sign up for during registration that provides a slightly more advanced level of coaching that would lead these still novice racers down the path of improvement? They have already done the hardest work by training their bodies to run a given distance, sometimes as much as 26.2 miles. Now, offer them the challenge to improve upon their entry-level achievements, and the very different rewards that attend such striving.

This Next Step approach could be one means of resurrecting track in the minds of the sporting public. I heard a football announcer recently liken a running back hurdling a defender to Edwin Moses, who retired decades ago, not Karsten Warholm, the current master of the form.

In the public consciousness, Edwin Moses and Renaldo Nehemiah remain the last well-known hurdlers.

Soccer once had a similar recognition problem. But soccer has come a long way in recent years, beginning with a $55 million project initiated in the mid-1980s to develop the next generation of American soccer players.

Formula 1 created the Drive to Survive series on Netflix, which has jump-started interest in F1 racing big time in the United States. Now every sport is looking to produce a similar series hoping to pump up their own interest. Track has its own Netflix docuseries with the Noah Lyles Project.

First, develop an interest at a young age, then present top competition in a compelling fashion and setting.

What about bringing indoor track outdoors? Take an indoor banked 200-meter track and set it up outdoors in a carnival-like atmosphere with vendors, and a fan-zone. Instead of calling it indoor track, refer to it as short-course athletics.

Would people watch short-course track racing like when speed skating instituted short-course racing, or skiing introduced moguls, freestyle, etc.?

Except for Eugene’s Hayward Field, outdoor track in the U.S. is presented in venues not built primarily for track. This strips away the showcase elements, leaving only the results rather than the performance as interesting.

Without a visceral connection or a heightened showcase, it is just running, jumping and throwing at a remove. Without a connection, there is no meaning. Without a theater, how well can the actors portray the material?

To quote former New York Times theater critic Vincent Canby, “A performance is a spooky, ephemeral thing. Without you (the witness) it doesn’t exist. Acting in the moment you behold them creates a relationship in which the members of each particular audience are as integral to a performance as is what’s happening on the stage. When it is over, it is gone, never to be repeated in quite the same way.”

Actors on the stage are as racers are on the track or roads. It is the audience, then, as much as the racers who are complicit in the performances, which is why Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon is such a special place.  Without the awareness and sophistication of that audience, the performances we’ve witnessed over the years would figuratively resemble a tree falling in the forest.

The only thing I’ve seen get measurable results in public interest is the Gender Challenge at the Los Angeles Marathon.

“I am as supportive as one can be,” said longtime LA and New York City Marathon executive TV producer Steve Mayer of IMG – now VP of Production for the NHL. “I think it adds so much intrigue to the telecast. There are so many reasons to keep it, and I do think there is a direct correlation to great ratings because of its popularity.”

Yet running purists view such a program as “a gimmick” which detracts from the sport. But in the world of television, the most important question a producer must answer is “why are they watching?” If you can’t answer that question, you don’t have a viable show.

In the sport of running, having anonymous competitors from far-away lands running unidentified and unaffiliated through your city streets, at whatever speed, for a small prize, does not provide an adequate answer to that question.

Therefore, you have to do something to get people interested in the process and outcome.  A large cash prize is one lure, but rooting interest is always the key to sports viewership.

In major league and collegiate sports it’s the My city/school – My team connection, even though, as a Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, once wrote, “we are rooting for laundry”, as with free-agency and NIL has come the revolving door of players.

So while Derek Jeter and the great reliever Mariano Rivera built a legacy of playing their entire careers for the N.Y. Yankees, even hated rivals from the Boston Red Sox have come to the Bronx to put on the Yankee pinstripes and earned the loyalty of the Bronx Bomber fans. Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, and Johnny Damon are three such onetime Red Sox heroes who completed their careers with the Yankees.

Running uniforms are nothing but shoe company billboards that offer no identification to anything connectable to an audience whatsoever. It’s as if the sport has tried to engineer to least watchable commodity in sports history. Anonymous athletes wearing shoe company logos, running alone in front of empty streets/stadia.

As Mary Wittenberg, ex-CEO  of the NYRR told me once, “maybe we’ve been too flexible, always here when the athletes need a race, as opposed to the athletes being here when we need a competition.”

The cart is before the horse. Why are the athletes the ones getting the choice? They are a commodity; they are being paid to perform. But the producers are the ones who build and fill the theater. But for some reason, our industry only sees participants, not spectators. Where are the great impresarios of running, the Flo Ziegfeld, as Fred Lebow of the NYRR once was?

The bands along the side of the roads are staged for the mass runners. What’s being done to entertain the potential fans?

There used to be fans. Where did they go? How did we lose them? Is anyone asking these questions, much less searching for answers?

END

 

Now that the savvy business people at Competitor Group have sold their business to the Dalian Wanda Group in China, which also recently signed a ten-year strategic partnership with the Abbot World Marathon Majors, the sport of road racing has seemingly embraced that trend.

of course, the athletes have no one to blame but themselves, as performance-enhancing drugs tainted the sport to the point where World Marathon Majors first stopped touting their series champions, and finally stop paying them at all. Instead, they began promoting the six-star finishers medal.

(thrown in the towel in trying to organize elite competition into a workable business model for their Rock `n` Roll events, does that mean nobody can?

 

Now that the moment has been struck by Competitor Group’s withdrawal from elite racing, and the preeminent business in running has determined that elite competition is not of sufficient marketability to fashion into a business model, the task redounds to the organization specifically tasked with building grassroots interest, the governing body, USATF.

Just today another story came out of the UK telling of a Compact Athletics Facility going up in London. A joint initiative by England Athletics and Sport England, the £370,000 facility at Stoke Newington School includes a sprint straight, a long jump straight and pit, a high jump area, a throws area and a running trail around the school. Funded by Sport England, England Athletics and the London Marathon Trust, the venue has been designed to give both school children and the local community more opportunities to take part in athletics. The CAFs form a key part of England Athletics’ aim to get more people into the sport over the next four years across the country.

The concept has been designed with community engagement in mind and is part of their successful Run! Project, which has been linked to a significant number of people taking part in the capital prior to and since the 2012 London Games.