A Real-World Course—and Race Everyone at this late date knows the outcome of the U.S. men’s Olympic Marathon Trials in New York City’s Central Park over ING NYC Marathon weekend, from Ryan Hall’s magnificent sub-2:10 performance on a course that demands the description “challenging” to the tragic loss of Ryan Shay, a runner who the Romantics from 200 years ago would have declared was cut down in the prime of his life and his talent. The day was one of decidedly mixed emotions: from astonishment at the energy and exuberance of one Ryan who appeared that he had the steam left to run another five miles at the same speed he was going during the final miles to another Ryan who left a gigantic black hole of a vacuum in the emotional pool of everyone who followed the race either live a mere three feet from the runners or through an at-times cranky video presentation on TV. Every one of the participants is to be congratulated on dedicating a large part of the last few years to make it to New York City to stand on the starting line for a chance to go after one of the three tickets to the Beijing Olympics or to just be part of a very special race, arguably one of the best ever held in this country. Let’s face it: there are some sports where overhyped “athletes” get overpaid for underperforming, and

then there are genuine athletes pure of intention and unburdened by pretension who overperform purely for the love of the sport and the exhilaration of the competition. On top of that are the course and the time of year when some 10 dozen of this country’s finest runners met to winnow their numbers down to a mere three. Too many major marathon courses are made too flat and too easy . . . and in the process are made boring. When Pheidippides ran from the plains of Marathon to the gates of Athens on that September day in 490 B.C., he didn’t run on a course so unchallenging that the bubble in the middle of a carpenter’s level never wavered from dead center. He ran on a course that made “undulate” sound like a dirty word. For the Olympic Games of 1896 and 2004, that same course was used, and as a result, the race was made more interesting than it would have been had it been run on what approximates a ballroom floor. The course in New York City’s Central Park was as close to the real marathon course as the men’s Trials has enjoyed in its 40-year existence. It was essentially a paved cross-country course, which sounds like an oxymoron but in our modern, overpaved world, isn’t.

they were willing to do the half-mile jog back and forth. The fans who were there were enthusiastic. A quartet of Brian Sell fans did the bare-chested billboard act, smearing paint on their chests that spelled out S-E-L-L if they managed to stand in correct order, which they mostly did. There was also a contingent of Bucknell (Pennsylvania) University fans, no doubt members of that school’s cross-country team. And crunched within the Bucknell ranks on one loop was Jonathan Beverly, editor of Running Times. We were on opposite sides of the road but managed to catch up a little bit by yelling back and forth. Like him, I had decided to eschew the official press bennies in favor of being down on the

Back in the ’60s, when I ran crosscountry for Bloomsburg State College in central Pennsylvania, our course was the only one in the conference that was entirely asphalt; it also happened to be the shortest (less than five miles) and one of the toughest (it had a gigantic hill within the last mile that would have better been approached wearing crampons than running flats). The Central Park course reminded me of that: very rolling, lots of turns, chilly autumn air, plenty of wind (at one stretch in the face, at another a tailwind), trees turning into painters’ palettes, and a smattering of fans, some of whom hoofed it from one section of the course to another, then back again. The course offered fans a chance to see the action 10 times if

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ground close enough to the action to catch a few drops of sweat as some of the runners went by very, very close. In spite of all the effort the New York Road Runners Club put into promoting the Trials and the regular-issue marathon the next day—the club had a wonderful poster design featuring the Olympic torch next to the Statue of Liberty’s torch that turned up in plenty of subway stops—most of the New Yorkers walking their dogs in the park seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the onceevery-four-years U.S. men’s Olympic Marathon Trials was happening right there in front of them. One dog nearly got hit by a special drinks bottle tossed off the course by one of the runners, and the dog’s owner regarded the offending plastic bottle as though it were a piece of heat shield fallen from a UFO. Since all the runners knew the kind of course they would be facing, they could train specifically for it. What they couldn’t train for were the supercharged engine and the overdrive gear Ryan Hall had in reserve. On the very positive side, unlike Trials of years past, which were run way too near to the actual Olympics, such an early elimination process allows the three who are going (and the alternatives) to recuperate from the Trials and then rebuild over time for the Games next September. Never have the Chosen Three had the luxury of nearly a year to make their preparations, which thanks to China’s notorious foul air will involve running long workouts behind

a diesel-powered bus that hasn’t been serviced in a decade. Speaking of decades, it has been decades since America’s marathon fortunes have been as rich as they are this year. At least a dozen runners, on paper, could have made the team. The fact that all three who did make it are from three distinctly different training programs nicely balances the team and validates the current state of the efforts made by the various intense training programs scattered across the country. If there was one major shortcoming for the Trials, it is that more of the 37,000-plus runners who were in town to run the ING New York City Marathon didn’t take the time to go to the park to witness some of the best damned marathon running the United States has ever seen on its soil. The spectators were similar in number to those at a state cross-country meet. But what they lacked in numbers, they certainly made up for in enthusiasm and support. Congratulations to the Chosen Three: Ryan Hall, Dathan Ritzenhein, and Brian Sell. All the hard work paid off. Good luck in Beijing. And further congratulations to everyone involved in the 2008 men’s Trials, from the remainder of the field of runners to the volunteers who kept the course under control and from the organizers from the New York Road Runners Club to the sponsors. It was a great day for American marathoning, if one sobered by Ryan Shay’s death. —Rich Benyo