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 a rural 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 I enjoy 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:

• “I 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.” • “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.”

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

• “It was too cold and too windy.” • “There was no chip timing.”

We keep some of the buses at the start, with their motors running, in case people want to stay warm. Apparently

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

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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. • “I 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

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. * * * 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

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 have been lost. It is a matter of expectations that each runner (and each board member)

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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. * * * 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 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

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 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

The Olympics We are 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 I am. I have 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