Making the Rounds

On March 2, the 30th annual Kaiser Permanente Napa Valley Marathon was held under what can be described only as ideal conditions: cool air, bright sun, and a consistent tail wind.

Four young women used the race to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Boston on April 20; all four set personal records. The Napa race is limited to 2,300 runners and is run on arural two-lane road that loses roughly 300 feet of elevation over the 26.2 miles. There are some rolling hills in the early miles and at least one gentle but sustained uphill between miles 19 and 20.

As is typical, roughly 15 percent of the runners who signed up didn’t show up on race day because of injuries, unanticipated changes in plans, or other reasons. Just under 2,000 runners started the race, and 1,757 finished within the six-hour time limit.

The ideal conditions provided the opportunity for numerous personal records.

Typical comments on the race weekend:

“The course lived up to expectations. Very scenic, peaceful, and free from traffic. There are a few rolling hills but nothing too difficult.”

“Beautiful landscape, and so nice to be running in a spring in full blossom and warmth compared to the colder climate I left. Aid stations were well

stocked and friendly. They seemed to be there just when I needed them (the orange slices saved me for the last eight miles).”

“Despite running one of my worst races ever, I had loads of fun. Beautiful course, and even for a flatlander, the hills weren’t bad.”

“The scenery is beautiful, and we had a perfect weather day. The CHP [California Highway Patrol] did a good job of keeping cars off the course. Volunteers and water stops were plentiful with water, Gatorade, oranges, and other stuff. Appreciated the GU!”

“The pasta feed was the best I’ve experienced so far (five choices of pasta, of which I had four), although having wine and beer at prerace festivities is just mean. Overall, a great experience, and since I’m new at this long stuff, I did manage a 2:42:10 PR!”

“What an awesome run! From the pasta dinner the night before with Joan Benoit Samuelson as featured speaker to the jazz band at the finish, everything was great. The hills were short and over before you knew it, and the tail wind was a big help.”

“This is my second NVM, and I can’t say enough about how well the race is organized and how much Tenjoy the course. Because of the self-imposed size limit, we rarely get such a great course and sophisticated organization with a race of this size.”

This is all very nice, but the race organizers, in that uniquely perverse human bent, tend to concentrate on the complaints more than the compliments. Ya wanna hear some of them? How about these:

° “You got me to the start too early: 40 minutes before the race started.”

° “You got me to the start too late: 20 minutes before the race started.”

° “There weren’t enough portapotties.”

° “I didn’t like the flavor of Gatorade that was at the aid stations.”

° “It was too cold and too windy.”

° “There was no chip timing.”

¢ “You started the race on time, but I was in the porta-potty.”

“T finished past the six-hour limit, but I want a finisher’s medal, and I want my time listed on the Web site.”

It’s convenient that the Napa Valley Marathon is located in the heart of Wine Country, because fielding some of the postrace complaints gives the race directors a perfectly valid reason to drink heavily.

We usually wait for 24 hours before responding to complaints because that gives us time to allow our blood pressure to normalize. What is our extremely biased take on the complaints?

– “You got me to the start too early: 40 minutes before the race started.”

We keep some of the buses at the

start, with their motors running, in case people want to stay warm. Apparently

this person has never run New York City or Boston, where the runners are taken to the start three hours or so before the race begins and left there to fend for themselves. Marathoners are supposed to be tough.

– “You got me to the start too late: 20 minutes before the race started.”

If only we could have planned better, we could have switched these two people. The rule of thumb is that the longer the race, the shorter the warm-up period a runner needs. Twenty minutes seems adequate to warm up.

¢ “There weren’t enough portapotties.”

There were 46 toilets at the start and three at each of the aid stations. At the start, that is roughly one toilet for each 44 runners. At the pasta feeds, when the subject of porta-potties comes up, we relate that when the race began in 1979, there were no porta-potties, and people still talk about what a wonderful vintage the up-valley wineries produced in 1979.

° “TI didn’t like the flavor of Gatorade that was at the aid stations.” Maybe we should offer Gatorade

tasting at each aid station the way we offer wine tasting at the expo on Saturday.

° “It was too cold and too windy.”

We’ll work on that.

¢ “There was no chip timing.”

Until about 10 years ago, there was no such thing as chip timing. I wonder

how the races managed to get by in those Dark Ages B.C. (Before Chip). Every few years, the Napa Valley Marathon board of directors weighs the pros and cons of chip timing, and we consistently feel that a point-to-point race of our size doesn’t need the chip. The timing company we hire has been doing its style of scoring since the days when a chip meant a thin slice of potato deep fried. With a race of 2,000, the starting line is cleared in 30 seconds or so. Runners who are going for a fast time are invited to line up in one of the front rows in order to get a clean start. And let’s keep in mind that chip timing is not without flaws. Sometimes it just plain doesn’t work, and you have 20,000 runners wandering around the finish area wondering what their official time is when, because of the failure, they haven’t got one. Not so with the B.C. methods.

Over the 30 years that the race has been held, the board has attempted to make subtle changes behind the scenes in order to stay up with the times. At the same time, the board works hard to keep the race low key, somewhat retro, and very much down home while also offering some special aspects. These include one of the best goody bags/runners’ bags in the world, the best pasta feed available, a beautiful course that has not changed one foot over all of its 30 years, and special drink tables for any runner who wants to have a secret concoction waiting at a specific aid station the way the elites do. Also, the male and female winners are awarded their weight in premium Napa Valley

wines provided by the Silverado Trail Wineries Association (the course runs along the Silverado Trail). Napa features an ambitious marathon college (this year with Joan Benoit Samuelson, Dick Beardsley, Helen Klein, Joe Henderson, John Keston, and more), as well as a wine and cheese reception on Friday night for all runners and their family and friends.

Over the 30 years that the race has been held, the typical marathoner has changed. A marathon is no longer strictly a race; now it is more of an event, a happening, a form of entertainment. During the evolution, some things have been gained, and some ave been lost.

It is a matter of expectations that each runner (and each board member)

must deal with. There are certainly enough marathons available today that at least one fits the desires of each runner. And with the information about marathons available on the Internet, a little research into a particular marathon’s characteristics might save both the runner and the race committee a lot of grief. Oh, yeah, and if anyone comes across a bottle of 1979 cabernet from an up-valley winery, don’t tell anyone what makes it special. * * ok

Speaking of advances in the science and art of marathoning, how about those sports gels? How about the mess they make when runners carelessly discard them during a run or a race? Some runners must not have been raised well by their mothers, since they nonchalantly

toss empty sports gel wrappers on the side of the road as though the possibility of safely and responsibly disposing of the wrappers never occurred to them. I cringe to think what their bedrooms look like.

At Napa, we give out GU at two of the later aid stations. All weekend, at every available opportunity, we urge runners to drop the deflated wrappers at the aid stations, where special GU wastebaskets are set up for that very purpose. And every year, we get calls the day after the race from the owners of vineyards that line the course about the spent GU wrappers that have blown into their fields. Volunteers scuttle about picking up discarded wrappers when they break down their aid stations, but there are usually two to three miles of road between aid stations, and that is a lot of real estate to patrol looking for wayward wrappers. The problem is aggravated on the Napa course because it is nearly all rural and it is nearly always windy: tail wind in the first half, head wind in the second. So the wrappers are like little Frisbees flying all over the place. (The skunks and raccoons seem to like the gel that is left in the discarded wrappers, however. Of course, the last thing we need in Napa Valley is a horde of artificially energized skunks and raccoons. It’s bad enough that the skunks are always in heat during the week leading up to the marathon, but that’s a whole different matter.)

Recently, Clif Bar & Company (www.clifbar.com) of nearby Berkeley launched a program in conjunction with TerraCycle, Inc. (www.terracycle.net)

of Trenton, New Jersey, to collect and recycle not only sports gel packets but also granola bar wrappers. The program is called the Wrapper Brigade and is directed by TerraCycle guy James Artis. And—nice touch, folks!—the wrappers don’t have to be only Clif Shot, Clif Bar, or Luna wrappers. They can be any brand. Here’s how it works:

1. Visit www.terracycle.net/brigades. Sign up for the program; there is no cost to you. Within a week or two of signing up, you will receive four collection bags that hold roughly 200 wrappers each.

2. Use the bags as your waste cans for gel and bar wrappers. When you’re out on your workouts, you can pick up stray wrappers and deposit them in a bag at home. (Hint: there are literally thousands of wrappers to be had the afternoon of the first Sunday in March along the final miles of the Napa Valley Marathon. You might also be able to find some perfectly good discarded running clothing.)

3. When a collection bag is full, simply mail it back to TerraCycle, designating what charity you would like the donation to go to. The donation is 2 cents for each wrapper. All shipping fees are covered by the program, so you aren’t out of pocket on the postage.

TerraCycle—a company founded by Tom Szaky, a Princeton dropout —will then fuse and weave the wrappers into a strong material that will be used to manufacture backpacks, gym totes, and other products.

“This program is designed to keep millions of energy bar and granola bar wrappers out of landfills,” Artis said. If it is a success, we assume that he will expand the program.

Obviously, this is one of those nobody-loses-except-the-skunks deals. You guys have made a lot of vineyard owners very happy today.

Eo * * We’re spoiled in the wonderful world of running because most runners are swell people. (Because of the preponderance of swell-runner-type people, the real stinkers really stand out.)

One of the swellest of running people is Bart Yasso, the Chief Running Officer of Runner’s World Magazine; Bart is known to many as the mayor of running. Bart works with thousands of races to get them free race numbers and running bags from Runner’ s World, in the process running all over the planet. Over the years, Bart has run in some pretty exciting, dangerous, exotic, and crazy races and places. He frequently gives his crazy-races slide presentation at prerace pasta feeds to the delight of the crowd; it is a nice way for the nervous runners to let off a little steam the night before their big race.

Bart is a terrific ambassador of our sport, especially because he is one of those inspiring people who didn’t get anything handed to him. He overcame a lot of challenges to become the personable, beloved raconteur that he is today—and this is probably the first time in history that anyone raised in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, has ever been called a raconteur—spreading

the message of running’s revivifying effects to a panting world.

Those who know Bart can’t believe this, but he has written a book—with the help of Kathleen Parrish, who probably had to beat Bartie over the head with a computer mouse on a regular basis to get him to sit down and cooperate. It’s not that Bart has a short attention span; it’s more that he is nuclear infused and can’t sit still for very long.

The book is titled My Life on the Run: The Wit, Wisdom, and Insights of a Road Racing Icon and is published by Rodale, which publishes Runner’s World.

The strength of the book for those who know Bart casually is that he fills in his personal back story, the part of Bart that isn’t on public display when he gives his entertaining talks. Born the middle child of seven in a family led by a pigheaded Slovak father, Bart received little love and support from the old man. A spindly-legged kid built like a soda straw, Bart contrasted almost comically with his brothers, who were making names for themselves in football and baseball and garnering the old man’s attention and affection. Bart probably would have been happy for a childhood based on benign neglect. Although his father pretty much ignored him, when he did notice Bart, it was always with a negative eye. (“I was never asked to join my brothers when my father took them golfing or to Philadelphia for baseball games. The man barely said two words to me, nor would he refer to me by my real name. He called me Alice.”’)

In high school, Bart drifted downward like detritus spiraling toward the bottom of a deep ocean. He drank cheap beer and wine, smoked

Ce Sa ia

of the nuances that don’t make it into the talks. We will credit Kathleen Parrish with lassoing Bart’s wild-man stories and corralling them, which

(8 eet, @tinde, net mtientt

cigarettes, and indulged in the popular weed of the day. Things were looking good for an early extinction for young Bart. Then a series of events occurred that changed his life. He got arrested when a guy he was with tried to buy weed from an undercover cop. He swore off weed and drank more, but another series of events—I won’t ruin the story of the fortuitous chain of events that fell into place—led him to take up running. Just a little running, early in the morning, before he left for his dead-end job. He discovered that he had at least a modest talent for running. He increased his volume and intensity and eventually ended up working at Runner’s World, and the rest, as they say, is history. Bart’s book nicely blends his varied adventure runs (elements of his standard talk include India, Death Valley, and the Antarctic) with the trials and tribulations of his personal life (which he doesn’t weave into his talk). The result is a nice autobiography that modestly lays out why Bart is Bart in an honest, lighthearted, upbeat way. The book is also nice from the obvious standpoint that we all have heard Bart’s fantastic running tales, but in book form, he can elaborate on them, enrich the terrain, and fill in a lot

rvs ee

brings me to complimenting both of them on some memorable lines. This one comes from the chapter in which Bart heads west to take part in a race where you have to run with a burro: “What’s the difference [between mules and burros]? Mules are the domesticated offspring of a female horse and a donkey, and a burro is a small donkey. A jackass is a wild donkey or someone who runs a race with a burro.”

Or consider these lines from the chapter on the Bare Buns Fun Run 5K, held at a nudist camp: “The display of flesh was like passing a car wreck on the highway. You didn’t want to look, but you had to look. You couldn’t help it. My eyes were drawn to boobs, butts, and, um, other things. But after a few minutes, I had seen my fill. I couldn’t handle any more nudity. It was like eating too much chocolate chip cookie dough. I felt a little queasy.”

Bart’s story is inspiring, charming, full of fun and humor (some of it, classically, culled from pain), and as easy to take as it is to take a run with Bart.

My only quibble: the training programs pasted into the latter part of such a smoothly paced autobiography come across like leather elbow patches on a nudist. —Rich Benyo

ON the ROAD WITH DON KARDONG

The Olympics

Weare sprinting happily—at least I think it’s happily—toward the 29th Olympic Games of the modern era. If not happily, at least inexorably and inevitably, so we might as well be happy about it. I know Iam. Ihave great memories of my one trip to the Olympics as well as some, well, interesting memories of competing in Beijing.

My one trip to China was in 1975, when that country’s main threat wasn’t its economic muscle but rather its political isolation and adherence to a strict communist ideology. At that time, the People’s Republic of China and the United States had endured three decades of Cold War standoff, and China was running a close second to the USSR on America’s list of Nations That Really Annoy Us.

By the mid-1970s, though, the People’s Republic and the U.S. were inching toward a normalization of relations. You may remember “ping-pong diplomacy,” the notion that athletic competition between countries could improve the political atmosphere, something that actually seemed to work—at least until the 1980 Olympic boycott, when Jimmy Carter decided that not competing was an even better idea. But I digress.

Our track and field team was the third U.S. sports group to compete against the Chinese, but diplomacy aside, it was a classic mismatch. Most of the American athletes had been in the sport for a decade or more, while the Chinese were all novices. I met only one athlete from China who had been in the sport for more than three years. We competed in three cities, and each time, our athletes won virtually every event, usually sweeping the top three spots. We Yankee invaders were merciless.

We were having such an easy time of it that we stopped stewing about our Chinese competition and went back to worrying about the rest of our competitive seasons, the ones that would be in full swing once we returned to the U.S.

And that brings me to Beijing, the third stop on our tour, capital of the People’s Republic, the heart of the communist nation. A full stadium, maybe 70,000 strong, was on hand to watch what would be a monumental mismatch. I didn’t ask, but I assumed the home crowd was eager for a little redemption, however it might occur.

THE CHALLENGE: MY TEAMMATES AND MATH

Three Americans, including me, were running the 5,000 meters. Rather than

worry about the Chinese runners, though, I was focused on my own race, and in particular on trying to reach the threemile qualifying standard for the U.S. championships later that summer.

A three-mile race is about 12 laps. Unfortunately (as it turned out), a 5,000-meter race is 12 1/2 laps, an additional 200 meters. I remembered this when I sprinted to the finish line and eased up, only to notice my U.S. teammates zipping by on the way to the actual finish. You know that sound acrowd makes when everyone simultaneously inhales in surprise? Hhhhhh! 1 heard that. I rallied as best I could over the final 200 meters and finished third behind my two U.S. teammates.

As I was walking back to the bus after the race, several Chinese fans recognized me, grinned, and slapped me on the back. I was the Yankee doofus they would talk about for weeks. Those Americans can run and jump and throw, but they sure can’t count.

And true to the purpose of our trip, our relations with China have steadily improved since then. Now, we buy billions and billions of dollars worth of stuff from China, and China buys millions of dollars worth of stuff from us. (Obviously, they’re still better at the numbers game than we are.)

In any case, I’m eager to see how Beijing looks now, 30 years after that trip, even if the only way I’ll see it is courtesy of NBC. And Ill also be eager to relive my own moment in the Olympic limelight, which occurred a year after that China trip in the cozy North American streets of Montreal.

When I’m asked what the greatest moment was in my 40-plus-year career as a runner, the answer comes pretty easily. It was the 1976 Olympic marathon, where I finished fourth. Just being in the Olympics was a thrill unequaled in my experience. I had run in international meets like those in China and competed in indoor races where every seat was filled and the crowd was close enough to spit in your ear (fortunately, none did). But to walk from the locker room beneath the main stadium in Montreal to the starting line, to stand surrounded by the best marathoners in the world, cheered by spectators from a hundred nations and watched by a billion TV viewers around the globe—well, that was very heady stuff. That was my Super Bowl. Maybe better.

That special moment, one I had trained a dozen years for, came at the very end of the final week of the Olympics. By then we marathoners, psyched and primed and on edge, had had to suffer through a world of wait before our race.

WE ALSO SERVE WHO ONLY STAND AND WAIT

Think about that for a moment. As an Olympian, how would you wait? You’ve spent half your life gearing up for your time in the limelight. You’ve sweated and strained and outwitted misfortune well enough to have earned your 15 minutes of fame, and now you find yourself in the Olympic Village. So how do you put competitive drive

on hold, keep passion on simmer till it’s time to turn up the heat?

Well, for one, you watch. You watch other athletes compete, and you try to enjoy yourself. You spend a morning watching women’s volleyball, a great diversion, a chance to relax and keep the mind occupied. A diversion, that is, until one team’s Olympic dreams are trashed in the whoosh of a final overhand smash. The agony of defeat. Your fate, perhaps? The stomach flips.

OK then, try reading a book or watching television. Until a teammate returns to the room with a bronze medal, and you shuffle over to take a closer look. Or another teammate returns, not witha medal, but with a tragic story of a strategic error, a dumb competitive mistake that cost him a place in the final. Or the television shows a medal ceremony in progress, and you watch Old Glory climb the flagpole. And you wonder: how many more hours do I have to wait?

So you decide to take an easy run, a jog to blow off some steam. But after a mile, you suddenly realize you’re zipping along at 5:30 pace. Yikes! This is the time to be storing energy, not pushing the envelope. Energy. . . you’ve got way too much of it.

Later that evening, you meet family and friends for dinner. Their chatter keeps thoughts of your impending race in the background, at least until the waiter arrives. Then you find yourself stewing about what to eat. What to eat now, what to eat tomorrow. Your stomach is persnickety. What should you eat, and not eat, to keep it placid? And why won’t it stop churning?

And finally, that evening, you head to bed. You fall asleep easily, as you always have. To sleep, perchance to dream, and there’s the rub. You awaken in a sweat, haunted by images of yourself scrambling down random hallways searching for the starting line of the Olympic marathon. You’re going to miss it!

You glance at your watch: 3:15 A.M. And you wonder, staring at the ceiling. How many more hours do 1 have to wait?

Olympic competition? No problem. But waiting for Olympic competition to begin? For that, they should award a slew of gold medals.

And yet, in the end, the waiting period is over. After all that stewing, and with my stomach still churning, I walked from the locker room beneath the Olympic stadium into the unforgiving light of a Montreal afternoon.

THE STRATEGY. REMEMBER THE STRATEGY!

Standing on the starting line, I was convinced I had the best strategy in the field. Stay relaxed the first hour of the race, | told myself, then start moving up. An even pace will result in a medal. Standing there on the track in the middle of the stadium, though, it was hard to relax. This was my moment, and the adrenalin was pumping. A hush came over the stadium.

When the gun fired, I reacted like a 1,500-meter runner. I felt an urge to sprint to the front of the pack and show the world how great I felt. Instead, I

reminded myself to stick with the plan. Stay relaxed and let the lead pack selfdestruct. Run an even pace.

After two laps, we left the stadium and headed out into the streets of Montreal. I saw some friends, smiled, waved. As our journey began, I made a conscious effort to let the lead pack go.

It was difficult holding back when I felt so good. Any time I thought about being in the Olympics, I felt myself speeding up, so I began doing things to dissociate my thoughts from the race—watching the scenery, waving to spectators, and whatever else seemed to keep my mind off racing. I was convinced that keeping my focus off competition in the early miles would help me finish the final miles quicker and stronger, allowing me to pass a passel of stragglers.

For no particular reason, keeping focus off competition turned into tossing water bottles to spectators. After drinking half a bottle of fluid, I would look around for someone I thought would appreciate receiving a discarded bottle from an Olympic marathoner. For the first two water stops, those someones were young kids. “Souvenir!” ’’d shout, and toss a bottle. Each time, a youngster would scurry to retrieve the memento.

By the third water station, though, as the course wound through a residential area of Montreal, spectators were few and far between. I grabbed my bottle, took a drink, and looked for someone to throw it to. This time, I spotted a few guys sitting on the front porch of

their house, watching the marathoners run by. I thought I would add to their enjoyment by throwing them my bottle, so I gave it a good toss.

The house was a ways off the street, so I had to throw the bottle high and hope for an accurate shot. I watched it arc toward the front porch in a great rainbow, and at first, I silently complimented myself on the throw. A second later, though, I noticed something. The bottle was heading for their front window. Here I was in the race of my life, something I had worked for and dreamed about for a decade, and I was about to create some kind of bizarre international incident. I was appalled and about to be severely embarrassed.

Fortunately, fate, luck, or some merciful god smiled on me. The missile hit the overhanging eave of the roof, missing its glassy target by several inches, and bounced harmlessly into the front yard. As I ran past, I took a deep breath of relief and told myself, “7 think it’s time to start focusing.”

GETTING BACK TO RACING

From that point on, I took my body off autopilot and started racing with conviction. Over the next 10 miles, I moved steadily past a couple of dozen runners. I had no idea what place I was in until somewhere around 18 miles, when someone finally yelled, “You’re six seconds out of a bronze medal!” I looked up the road and saw three runners—Jerome Drayton, Karel Lismont, and Lasse Viren. Those three were all that separated me from a medal.

At about 22 miles, they all cruised in to an aid station for fluids, and I surged past. I was in third place.

As I headed down the final stretch of highway and the Olympic stadium came into sight, I was sure I was going to earn a bronze medal. Suddenly, though, I heard footsteps. It was Lismont. He had rallied and was now hot on my tail. My near-perfect Olympic experience was suddenly unraveling like a bad sweater.

Lismont caught me, and we matched strides for almost a mile. On our right, the Olympic stadium loomed. Lismont and I both angled for advantage, but neither of us could gain an edge. Finally, though, turning off the main road and cloverleafing onto a sharp downhill back into the stadium, Lismont surged. I reached deep and found . . . cement. My quads, beaten over 25 miles, were lifeless. The Belgian outpaced me on the downward slope and burst into the stadium in third place. A lap and a half later, I finished my one and only Olympic marathon in 2:11:16. It was my lifetime best, then and now, faster than Abebe Bikila’s Olympic record. It was also three seconds too slow. That same afternoon, Karel Lismont

mounted the victory stand with Waldemar Cierpinski and Frank Shorter and accepted his bronze medal.

A few days after that, I was back home in Spokane. There, my friends greeted me at the airport with a handmade, fourth-place medal made of. . . wood. If you’ve ever wondered, that’s the unofficial medal sequence. Gold, silver, bronze, wood.

I don’t know how American marathoners will fare in Beijing, but we’ Il all find out soon enough. I just hope that if they have to count anything during their trip to China, they count their blessings. Making the Olympic team comes as a result of hard work, but it also helps to have a bit of luck in your corner. So I wish them all good fortune and an Olympic experience worth waiting for. And when the moment arrives when they jog to the starting line, I hope they will cherish it. It’s sweet and powerful and unforgettable, but it passes quickly.

And finally, if they end up throwing anything to those watching, may it be, simply, kisses, on the way to winning a medal made out of something cold and hard. In a word, a medal made out of metal.

Are You Moving?

Please let us know when you move so there is no interruption in your subscription.

Send address changes to Marathon & Beyond, 206 N. Randolph St., Suite 400, Champaign, IL 61820; or via e-mail to jan@marathonandbeyond.com. Put “Address Change” in the subject line.

Ryan Hall

Inspiring With the Gift.

he men’s Olympic Marathon Trials come around only once every four years, and the stakes are always high.

On the morning of November 3, 2007, 130 of the country’s best marathoners, including 25-year-old Ryan Hall, clustered in the predawn darkness near Rockefeller Center to vie for the right to represent the United States at the 2008 Olympic Games. While all had spent the better part of their lives training for this moment, only three would make the team.

The atmosphere for these Trials was particularly electric. For the first time in history, the competition was being staged in conjunction with the New York City Marathon, one of the highest-profile races on the planet. The course, which featured five challenging loops through Central Park, had been designed for bigger crowd support and heightened drama. Anything to do with the Big Apple, it seems, always equates to heightened drama.

Aside from Hall, the field included all three returning marathoners from the 2004 Olympic team: Meb Keflezighi, who earned a silver medal in Athens; Alan Culpepper; and Dan Browne. Other headliners included Khalid Khannouchi, a former world record holder who has thrice broken 2:06 in his illustrious career; the Hansons-Brooks team, a 13-member contingent led by Brian Sell; Ryan Shay, the 2003 USATF marathon champion; and Abdi Abdirahman, whose marathon PR of 2:08:56 had earned him the third seed.

But the two runners who seemed to be bringing the most buzz to the proceedings were upstarts Hall and Dathan Ritzenhein, 24—two of “the big three” from the celebrated high school class of 2001. Prior to race day, both had completed just one competitive marathon, yet they were looked upon as bona fide favorites to grab one of the coveted spots.

Earlier, Hall’s coach, Terrence Mahon, predicted that anyone who could hold a five-minute-per-mile pace would make the team: “There may be someone who wins the race and runs 2:10, possibly even sub-2:10 if they’re really just out there rocking and rolling, but I think the top three will probably be 2:11.”

A Hall en route to capturing the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials-Men’s Marathon.

After the gun went off, the group of athletes swept along the darkened streets toward the park. Soon, daylight began to illuminate the overcast skies over Manhattan. This event, and the increased media exposure it generated, was ushering in a new dawn for U.S. distance running.

A COMPETITIVE UPBRINGING

Ryan Hall comes from an athletic family. His grandfather, at 76, is still active in a softball league. His mother, Susan, comes from a dance background. And his father, Mickey, played baseball at Pepperdine University.

Mickey introduced running into the Hall household. After he walked away from the diamond, he turned himself into a marathoner—a pursuit, he says, that took hold while he was chasing a future in the major leagues.

“Tran a lot when I was a pitcher,” Mickey says. “I loved that part of it. I did probably two to three times as much as they asked us to do just because I liked it and I figured that it would be good for me.”

Mickey, who teaches and coaches the cross-country team at Big Bear High School and has since gone on to compete in triathlons, has always been fascinated by movement.

“My major was kinesiology, the study of the body when you move,” he says. “T appreciate watching people move.”

More significant, though, is the fact that he has been enthralled with competition.