gj Marathoners daydream of running

y from the front. Dreams can come true.

Masters of the Ultra 67 Jeff Hagen

More and more masters are

moving up—for good reason.

– The Champion of the Chip 76 ae RY Julia Emmons

.«- When “The Chip” came to Boston, [re aoe it nearly found itself locked out. ar TL

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS .

The Great Six-Day Races 92 Ed Dodd Part VIII of this updated version of Ed Dodd’s ultramarathon classic. _ Charles Rowell and Patrick Fitzgerald battle to near death.

A MATTER OF TIME

Why is it that the last 100 yards to the turn-around point on your least-favorite running course takes forever, yet for the final 100 yards in a race, the clock seems to go into hyperdrive, chomping away seconds as though they were salted peanuts?

Why is it that some people claim there are too many hours in the day while others contend there are too few? Who slides the sun lower in the sky when daylight savings time ends?

Time and tide, we are told, wait for no one, yet the timing of some people seems always correct, the tide always heading in a direction that benefits them.

If these thoughts seem like the musings of someone who has too much time on his hands, they’re not. In fact, they are just the opposite: musings processed on arun squeezed between several pressing deadlines. Musings triggered by two incidents:

* the realization that a hilly 10K course I’ve been running several times a week for more than seven years is taking me longer than it used to, and

the reorganization of the closet where I keep my race T-shirts.

It probably isn’t unusual to get into the habit of grabbing the same handful of T-shirts run after run, totally

ignoring those hidden away in the second row—T-shirts that haven’t seen the light of day in, well, more than seven years—since we moved here.

Pulling out all those race T-shirts is like going on an archeological dig: the deeper I get, or in this case, the farther back I probe, the more ancient the treasures. And the more ancient the treasures, the easier it is to see which races cared enough to buy quality T-shirts for their racers. There is nothing quite so dispirited and depressing as a chintzy 20-year-old Tshirt—especially when it’s lying next to a 20-year-old T-shirt that looks as though it was handed out earlier this week.

Some runners periodically reorganize their T-shirt collection, culling and giving away those whose significance has faded—both figuratively and literally—over the years. Others jealously guard each one. I know one long-time runner who maintains the long closet in his guestroom as a shrine to his T-shirts. Each one is ironed and hung ona hanger, and they are all grouped according to colors. Other runners I know really do make an archeological mound of their shirts, piling new ones on top, compressing the oldest ones on the bottom.

The process of going through 20 years’ worth of race T-shirts is both

March/April 1998

EDITORIAL m 1