Here’s an excerpt from When Running Was Young and So Were We, a must-read for the thinking runner.
And before that, Track & Field News, February 1999. – JDW
It has come to this. Turning into Victory Lane at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex – the site of USATF’s inaugural Club National Cross-Country Championships – reminds me of nothing so much as Nike’s Beaverton headquarters campus. Architecture stylized in homage to the hype in sport.
And so the circle is closed. Nike and the other shoe companies threw so much money at the runners’ world they smothered the club system.
Look around. You don’t see the Florida Track Club, University of Chicago TC. You’ll find few, if any, of the historically famous teams. Certainly, the Jamul Toads are absent. Athletics West, too.
Look around. You don’t recognize any shoe-company reps. This speaks volumes about the low-key nature of the Association Club harrier championships.
No agents. No Kenyans. No Bob Kennedy, no Lynn Jennings. No excuses. Nobody had their hand out.
Despite some profound dissatisfaction with the overall organization and conduct, this event signaled the start of something new. The rebirth, hopefully, prayerfully, of a club system which once provided the backbone of any modest success this nation formerly enjoyed in distance running. The clubs are the bridge, maybe the tightrope, between the 22-year-old college grad and the 28-year-old international competitor.
Developing even one would help.
What does it say about the club system when an old, burned-out former high school girl’s coach can instantly create one of the nation’s top team?
“It’s pathetic,” answers The Farm Team’s Jeff Johnson. “And what’s more startling, it was easy.”
And Johnson knew it would be easy. “That’s what is so sad,” he adds. “The first time we got five guys together, we were the best team in the country. Anybody could do what I did.”
Tragically for the sport, too few are trying. The most famous face at the event belongs to ’88 Olympian Bruce Bickford, who is doing what he can as coach of Massachusetts’ Lowell Striders.
“It’s great just to get teams together again,” Bick explains. “We don’t see enough of it anymore. We should have more team championships. Team races would do really well on television. The attitude is different about everything now. Why? Not enough people pushing for clubs. Athletes racing on the roads for $300. I don’t know why team competitions aren’t more popular. I really don’t.”
“We can’t get our best runners to go to the World Cross-Country Championships anymore. I hear athletes saying it conflicts with track. Bullshit. The rest of us did it all the time. Porter did it, I did it, Craig Virgin.
“Maybe coaches are getting too technical,” Bick suggests. “‘These are the races you have to run,’ they tell the athletes. ‘You gotta stay on this schedule, nothing else is going to help you.’ Well, everything helps you to a point.”
The U.S. Army team is advertising New Balance on its uniforms. The Defense Department can’t swing the cost of a few singlets?
“You have to know how to run cross-country to run a great track race, and vice versa,” Bickford says. “First of all, the strength you get from cross-country, mentally, physically, you can’t get running the track. You just can’t.”
You wonder at all the athletes who aren’t here today, athletes who could have competed in a U.S. national championship. “Exactly,” Bickford agrees. “I think it was fantastic that Pat Porter could would nine nationals. That’s something you can take with you.”
Concludes Bickford, “Seems like fewer people are running for the love of the sport and that’s the big problem. It’s nice when you get free shoes. I like free shoes myself. But it’s no reason to run for somebody.”
This could possibly be the smallest crowd ever at a national championship. Athletes this age can drive themselves to the race, so they don’t even bring their parents with them.
The coach has his arm around his young runner, a bundle of nerves moments before the race. “It’s nothing you haven’t done a hundred times, probably do again another 100 times,” he comforts her in a soft voice.
“You are well prepared. You will do the best you can and the race will be what it’ll be, and then it will be over and you can start getting ready for the next one. I am proud of you already.”
John Goodridge of Nike Club East exults, “The whole concept is fantastic from a developmental standpoint, in terms of encouraging local clubs to participate in the sport. It’s one of our biggest weaknesses. We simply do not have a legitimate post-collegiate support system.”
This is not the U.S. National Championships, the same championships won by Frank Shorter and Porter and Jennings, some of the greatest ever. That race will now be held in February, supposedly the better to coordinate with the international schedule.
This event is for the local clubs, for athletes who live and train and wait tables in the same town. Never heard of most of these runners, never heard of some of their clubs. Or even some of their towns.
The results will be screwed up whether the finish line technology involves popsicle sticks or computer chips.
“Running put me through college,” says Andre Williams, after leading the Reebok Enclave to victory. “I’ve traveled, made a lot of friends. But I was also a waiter at Planet Hollywood for three years. I make $4000 a year running for Reebok. People see the Bob Kennedys and the Todd Williamses, the top guys, but they don’t understand there are a lot of us still trying to get there. Every year, I close the gap. Nobody knew who I was, but every year I kept running. I kept closing the gap.
“I just keep plugging away. I didn’t live in Kenya. I didn’t run to school. I’m a regular American kid,” says the 27-year-old North Carolina grad, who placed 5th in the USATF track 5000 last year.
“We knew we had to go out hard,” Williams says of the race. “I don’t know if the first mile was accurate, but it was 4:24. Then we settled down. Around 4M, the heat started to make a difference. You could hear guys around you gasp. When you are running in a big pack like that, heat radiates from other people.
“The plan, at some point, Kenyan-style, was get to the front and start pushing, no matter how we felt. I led a mile, then somebody else led. We shared the pace. With a half mile to go, I put it down.”
Listen to your body. One of the sport’s cardinal rules seems to have been ignored by its leaders. Listen to your body, the tens of thousands of athletes who belong to clubs. The club system works.
There are 1100 members of the Central Massachusetts Striders, and one of them is coach Bob Sevene.
“This race teaches kids how to run up front in a very competitive situation, instead of just showing up and running way in the back until they can move up to the next level to learn to be competitive and try to win,” Sevene explains. “Plus with money from the shoe companies drying up, we have to go back to the club system.”
Just go retro.
Sev, like Johnson, is an amateur coach. “I have never taken a dime from an athlete in my career,” Sevene notes. “I just don’t believe in that. I believe you are a teacher, and teachers don’t get paid by their students; they get paid by the institution they teach at.”
The club system hasn’t failed U.S. running, we have failed the club system. Are Johnson, Bickford, Goodridge and Sevene so special? The answer is yes, but are there more like them? Of course, just like there are more athletes like Andre Williams.
And more like Blake Phillips, the women’s champion here. As a member of the New Balance elite squad, she didn’t count as a scorer in the club standings, but she did win her first U.S. title.
She trains with Goodridge, but it’s difficult to get five good women together. “There aren’t many female running bums, so it’s more difficult to put together a team,” one coach surmises. “Women might be too practical to move around the country, rent a house with a dozen other guys, eat macaroni and cheese twice a day and chase a dream that may not ever come true.”
Remember, gang, every place counts, so you all have to finish.
Because a club is just a group of athletes chasing a dream together.