IN THE ARENA WITH AMORY

The Will To Do, The Soul To Dare

2010-02-22T10:23:00.005-05:00

Although we've soaked up plenty of Olympic sporting action, it would be giving the stunning city of Vancouver short shrift not to feature some of its non-Olympic venues. Here are a few images from places we've enjoyed visiting the past week --and to which we will undoubtedly return.

Team USA apparel being sold at USA House in downtown Vancouver. You, too, can dress like an Olympian!

A fruit stall at the spectacular Granville Public Market. Those are gooseberries --or goldenberries --on the far left and we can all vouch for how tasty they are.

One of the bakery vendors at the Granville Public Market. 'Nuff said.

Octopus, anyone?

How about some morels?

Halfway around Stanley Park on a Saturday morning run with the Lion's Gate Bridge and the Seay to Sky Highway in the background.

She's tough to see in the photo, but the "Lady in Wetsuit" statue is definitely a crowd favorite.

Here's the Harry Jerome statue at the base of Stanley Park. Note his Canadian red mittens.

David couldn't resist the challenge to race Jerome. I'm worried he might pull a hamstring trying to outlean Harry at the tape.

The Harry Jerome plaque with a fitting motto indeed.

Looking towards Vancouver from the East side of Stanley Park.

A crazy Canadian car parked on Robson Street. Check out the license plate: "I Am Eh."

Sometimes it takes a baby's bottom to deliver the most succinct message.

My two favorite Olympic revelers heading out for a morning coffee.

Scenes from the WOP

2010-02-20T18:22:00.007-05:00

This virgin cross country ski spectator was floored by her first glimpse at a sparkling nordic ski venue. Whistler Olympic Park --or the WOP as it's rather unfortunately called in Games shorthand --is as stunning a spot as one could find. I'm sure cross country skiers the world over cut their teeth in less attractive spots, but nothing says "you've arrived in the big time" quite like a perfectly-groomed, remotely-placed, flag-limned course presided over by snow-capped mountains and throngs of crazed fans alike.

Here are some shots from the past few days of action at the WOP.

An Aussie fan getting prepped for a big day of classic sprint action.

Fans lining the slope above the stadium where the athletes start and finish.

My fan favorites: husband David Salem and daughter Thea Salem in her Olympic debut (and her pig hat).

A partisan crowd member --and ITA insider --Lizzie Torkelson.

Middlebury graduate and US Olympian Simi Hamilton getting a few last minute words of advice from his coach before he starts the men's 15k.

And he's off!

US Olympic cross country skiers getting after it on the course of the men's 15k.

The carnage at the finish line. In all my days of sports fandom I've never seen so many people collapse at the finish line. Phew: this sport must be really hard!

The fan base for US skier Holly Brooks.

A couple of fans taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather in Whistler this month.

A Russian fan flying the flag.

A Norwegian fan complete with flag, viking helmet, leg of cured meat...and cell phone!

The Salem family with a superlatively friendly bunch of Finns.

Still smiling after a long day spectating.

Let the Games Begin

2010-02-16T18:55:00.029-05:00

Here are some images from the Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver, a majestic city indeed. Can you tell which country is which based on the flag alone? Some are easier than others; but many are quite challenging.

Word on the street was that the athletes behaved in a manner that befit their attire. So, for instance, the Austrians in their smart three-button blazers were apparently quite proper; while the Swedes in their denim with the yellow Swedish cross emblazoned across the rear pockets were far more casual in their demeanor.

Makes one pause, doesn't it, before donning one's daily sartorial selections?

2010-01-22T17:22:00.004-05:00

A phrase that’s been much bandied about here in Massachusetts of late is: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” This pithy adage has been deployed in reaction to —or as cover-up of —the recent special election held to fill Ted Kennedy’s US Senate seat. As you all surely know, it was a heavily-watched and hotly-contested election with both state and national implications. But why do I invoke Massachusetts politics here? Because —to continue with the kinship analogy —a close cousin to the aforementioned phrase is: “Good news travels fast.” And here at ITA we have more good news to share (on top of the news about Scott Blackmun’s appointment to the position of USOC CEO, Emily Azevedo’s secured spot on the US Olympic Bobsled Team, and the ITA podium sweep at the Methow Valley SuperTour).

To wit: two more members of the Arena Roster have just been named to the US Olympic Team: Torin Koos (pictured above) and Caitlin Compton (pictured below) will be donning Team USA uniforms in Vancouver next month as members of the US Nordic Ski Team. This is Torin’s third Olympic team berth (wow!) and Caitlin’s first. Congratulations to them both, as well as to all of the other skiers on the roster who laid down their best efforts over the course of the rigorous Olympic selection process. Each one of you can also claim a measure of victory knowing that you helped push your competitors —and colleagues —to their best performances.

Toot! Toot!

2010-01-18T17:20:00.004-05:00

Yes, that's the sound of me tooting ITA's horn, which is not something I do all that often, but the circumstances so merited today. Two days ago I was impressed when I learned that not one but two ITA Athletes —Torin Koos and Laura Valaas —won their respective sprint races at the recent SuperTour event in the Methow Valley, virtual hometown competitions for both Koos (pictured below) and Valaas.

But before I could bask in the reflected glow of that news for even one revolution of the earth, a second set of races happened at that same Methow Valley SuperTour. In those races —a 15k classic for the men and a 10k classic for the women —ITA Athletes not only went 1-2 in the men’s race, but they swept the podium in the women’s race. To wit: Torin Koos edged out Brian Gregg by nine-tenths of a second on the men’s side; and Caitlin Compton led an ITA 1-2-3 on the women’s side, with Laura Valaas and Nicole De Yong taking second and third, respectively. Pretty impressive results, yes?

And as it so happened, the logging of the above superlative athletic performances coincided with the publication of a fascinating editorial in yesterday’s New York Times titled “On Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving”. (FYI: there’s really very little sex in the piece; I think that’s just a hook to get you to read the column.)

It was penned by Nicholas Kristof (one half of the duo expected to speak at Middlebury College's commencement ceremony this spring; the other —and better? —half is his wife Sheryl Wu Dunn, with whom he co-authored the bestseller “Half the Sky”), who uses his 750 word allotment to link “doing good” to “feeling good.” To the extent that happiness drives athletic performance —and I would argue it does —one might be able to make the case that all of the Arena Athletes who do good on a regular basis are putting money in their emotional banks, as well as in the vault of their athletic potential. Just my two cents.

Texas Tech Teachable Moments

2009-12-31T09:20:00.003-05:00

Anyone who has spent a modicum of time in a classroom --on the teacher's side of the desk, that is --is familiar with the term "teachable moment." It is precisely as it sounds: a spot in time when the teacher spies a ripe opportunity to reach out to the student and to offer that mentee a pearl of wisdom, a diamond in life's educational rough, a gem of a lesson. Any adult tagged with the responsibility of educating writ large must be in the business of searching for, identifying and leveraging these teachable moments for the betterment of the kids under his or her purview.

And it is precisely the failure of the now jobless Mike Leach to recognize and capitalize upon a series of teachable moments that underscores his unsuitability for his former position as head football coach at Texas Tech University, a position that asked of him not to teach his charges how to win, but rather to teach the young men under his supervision how to be better men.

That Leach lost sight of the mission and got caught up in the marching orders is unfortunate. That he seems to have developed what some might call a "God Complex" and what I would call a "Warden's Complex" is also regrettable. But that the well being --both physical and mental --and most importantly the character of one of the young men he recruited and was hired to educate became collateral damage in Leach's mad scientist approach to his coaching craft and subsequent rush to his own defense...well, that's where the axe falls for me. Cut him loose. He's not fit to be coaching. He's not fit to be mentoring. And he sure ain't fit to be teaching.

If he were, he would have come up with a more creative, less Alcatraz-like solution to the Adam James problem. Have a player who you think needs motivating? Want to teach him --and his teammates --a valuable lesson? Bust out any of John Wooden's books on mentoring and have yourself a read. Call up the Tebow family and talk leadership development. Take notes on some Pat Summit game tape. Or, hey, here's a new one: sit down with your coaching staff and brainstorm the most innovative and uplifting way to spin hay into gold. Because this is the teacher's mandate: to perform alchemy.

But put a concussed kid in a dark shed? Twice? Really? Is that the best you can do, Mike Leach? Was it a bad day? Get up on the wrong side of the bed? Forget your coffee? Because that's the least impressive, most banal solution to a teachable moment I can recall. Leave aside the isolation of a single player in a team sport; forget for a moment the cruel and unusual punishment foisted on James; and temporarily suspend your disbelief at the subsequent character assassination unleashed upon said 20-year old, a 20-year old Leach was supposed to be educating. (All failures in my book.) And focus instead on the missed moment to work with a player and a whole team in a meaningful manner. If one of Leach's players had committed a similar offense on the football field, had failed to capitalize on a wide open opportunity to score a point or three or six by, say, dropping a pass or botching a hold, he'd be benched. Which is precisely what has happened to Mike Leach.

Have a seat, Mike. Preferably off the field and outside the stadium. Take a time out, kindergarten-style. And think about what you should have done differently. Just be glad you're not sitting in a shed.

Italy, Qatar and...Berlin!

2009-05-14T09:49:00.006-04:00

Although the work we do here at In the Arena is domestic (ie: our programs run in the 50 United States and address the under-served children therein), our athletes travel more frequently than Lewis and Clark. To wit: this past week saw two Arena Athletes journey overseas for competitions in Italy and Qatar.

Matt Chisam (pictured below at the 2008 US Olympic Trials in Eugene, OR) traveled to Milan to compete in a Multistars event. Although Matt had to bring all of his charm to bear on the airline personnel to get his poles to and from Italy in an affordable manner (barely), the trip was a great success and you can read about it on his blog.

Mike Hazle also ventured quite a ways from home for the thrill of a top-notch athletic competition. He traveled to Doha, Qatar for the second time in as many years to contest an IAAF Grand Prix meet --and one chocked full of talent at that. Mike threw his best season opener ever in the javelin and finished sixth in a field he says was worthy of an Olympic final. He, too, has blogged about his experience in typical Mike fashion: full of candor, humor and interesting nativist tidbits. As you can see from the photo below, Mike is all about getting a feel for the culture of the loci he visits.

And finally, it's with great pleasure that I can announce the appointment of Arena Athlete Zoila Gomez to the US World Championships Team in the marathon. She and a few of her compatriots, including Kara Goucher, will travel to Berlin in the fall to test their mettle against the world's best at that grueling distance. This will be the second time Zoila --the alternate for the 2008 US Olympic Marathon Team --dons the USA uniform. To read an interview with Zoila and her US teammates, click here.

Meanwhile, as the above athletes and their colleagues on the Arena Roster continue to pursue excellence in the civic and athletic arenas, the little one below is working out daily in the hopes of some day being able to join their ranks. While she's not yet running --or even walking --she's really good at leg lifts and arm circles. Onwards and upwards, folks.

Who is in the arena? Where? And to what end?

2009-05-05T09:49:00.011-04:00

While I've occasionally used this space to offer a Keith Olbermann-esque "Special Comment" --albeit minus the caustic wit and inevitable toppling of some political giant --I'm becoming increasingly enamored of using it as a locus to update readers on the competitive goings-on of the Arena Athletes. While it's entirely possible to surf around to each and every Arena Athlete blog, that can be a cumbersome task; so I'll endeavor to post a one-stop shopping update every week so that those who prefer can keep tabs on the athletes' performances (in addition to their mentoring work, which is superlatively important and also detailed on their blogs and in ITA's collateral).

But wait! Before I provide an update on the Arena Athletes who have competed since my last post, I have a quick introduction to make. ITA is pleased to welcome a new member to the fold. Nope: not a new athlete. More of a peanut, actually. But she is a budding sports fan as she has already spectated the Boston Marathon (although she didn't much like the helicopter and police escorts accompanying the lead female and male packs) and has shown great interest in the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. (Yes, she was up at 1:40am this morning to see Jonathan Papelbon strike out Robinson Cano with a bases-loaded fastball to elevate the Sox to 4-0 against the Evil Empire this season, but I digress.)

Who is she? Thea Rowe Salem (as in TR), born March 27th and weighing in at a whopping 7lbs and 2oz. She's now nearly 9lbs and, we've been told, has gained more weight in three weeks than most babies gain in two months. Folks, we may have a shot-putter on our hands. Wouldn't that be great?

Without further ado: an update on those members of the roster who have been "in the arena" of late.

Gabriel Jennings (at left) ran 14:38 for 5000m at the ASU Invitational on March 28th and, having returned to Eugene with the Oregon Track Club, has turned his sights on the inaugural USA Road Mile Championships to be contested in Minneapolis, MN on May 7th. With a rich prize purse and a stacked field (one usually follows the other), perennial "big race competitor" Jennings is sure to bring his best stuff.

Karl Erickson has put in a serious winter of training and his first competition of the year showed it. At a small meet in Mesa, AZ, Karl threw the discus farther than he ever had in a season opener --and farther than he ever has period: a PR of 62.77m. Not bad for the first meet of the year. We all look forward to seeing what else is in store for Karl in 2009.

Matt Chisam has also had a banner start to his year, highlighted by a 110m hurdles win at the Penn Relays. Matt leaves for Italy later this week for an international multi-sport competition called the Multistars, upon which I'll be sure to report in my next post.

Mike Hazle is currently in Doha, Qatar for a track and field meet. This is where he had a monster throw last year, so hold good thoughts for him as he prepares for his competition later this week. If you want to read an amusing tale of an athlete abroad (and see some great pics of Doha), check out Mike's most recent blog post.

Sara Hall has had a phenomenal start to her '09 season, culimating in a PR in the 1500m this past weekend at her alma mater's Payton Jordan Invitational. Sara ran 4:09.69 for third place. Prior to that she ran for second place in the 5000m (15:34.68) at the Brutus Hamilton Invitational. On a more personal (ie: less competition-oriented) note, Active.com posted a wonderful profile on Sara a few weeks ago; and even more impressive: Sara's husband, Ryan, threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park on April 18th (oh yeah, he finished third in the Boston Marathon a couple of days later, too).

Sarah Groff (at right) has had a sterling --as in silver --start to her season. To wit, she's notched two impressive second-place finishes in both of her big races: one at Ironman California, in which the reigning 70.3 World Champ had to set a run course record in order to best SG; and one at the hotly-contested Olympic distance St. Anthony's Triathlon. These are both non-drafting events and admittedly outside of the comfort zone of our proven ITU star. Given these early successes, just think what the World Cup circuit has in store for Sarah this season!

In a not-too-surprising turn of events, Torin Koos (at left) picked up his umpteenth national title at the US Distance National Championships. He and US Ski Teammate Chris Cook dominated the field, winning the US National Title in the Team Sprint, prompting TK's hometown paper to run the following headline (and accompanying article): Next Goal, the Winter Olympics.

Fellow Native Pacific Northwesterner Laura Valaas finished up her season in style with a dominating set of performances at the Canadian Nationals, earning herself a mention in the same "Next Goal, Winter Olympics" article as Torin. Let's hear it for the Wenatchee World's sports coverage!

Speaking of Torin's victory in the Team Sprint event at US Distance Nationals, Caitlin Compton also had a great race on the women's side. She and CXC teammate Maria Stuber came in second to a US Ski Team duo, rounding out an impressive season for the Minneapolis native.

Zack Simons has traded his skis for a cycle...a bicycle, that is. He's currently tearing up the macadam in and around his native Park City in his quest to cat up to a 1 or a 2 by the end of the year. Given Zack's ability to suffer and his raw athletic talent we think the likes of Armstrong, Leipheimer and Horner should consider themselves forewarned.

Focusing on the shorter distances this spring (in preparation for another marathon in the fall), Zoila Gomez has posted two strong results this past month: a third-place US female at the Cherry Blossom 10-miler in Washington, D.C.; and a fourth-place finish in the 10,000m --in a time of 33:50 --at the prestigious Payton Jordan Invitational at Stanford University this past weekend.

That is, as they say: all --or most, at least --the news that's fit to print.

From Winter to Spring

2009-03-16T17:50:00.007-04:00

It’s mid-March here in New England and what with the early turning forward of the clocks and the particularly vernal weather we experienced this past weekend, folks ‘round here are understandably getting excited about the onset of spring and –more importantly –the fading of what has been a long and persistent winter. Happily, evidence of the imminent change of the seasons is at-hand as the embedded photo –taken on my morning run –attests.

Here at In the Arena this transition brings with it its own peculiar set of rites: it’s when the winter athletes wrap up their ski seasons, usually with a barnburner of a World Cup or a National Championship; and it’s when the summer athletes begin to test the fitness they’ve so dutifully been building since the beginning of the year.

I’ve borne witness to both of these types of events the past few weeks –albeit at a distance –as the full roster of Arena Athletes continues to pursue excellence in their chosen sports fields, as well as, of course, in classrooms, gymnasiums and community centers around the country and for the benefit of today’s youth.

Here’s a brief look at the competition highlights posted by Arena Athletes in the past few weeks as winter fades and spring approaches.

Brian Gregg notched his first SuperTour win of the season –along with CXC teammate Bryan Cook –in the Freestyle Team Sprint at the Madison SuperTour. A few days later, he capitalized on the confidence from that race to win a sprint finish for 4th place at the American Birkebeiner, the country’s largest single-day Nordic ski race.

After traveling over to the Czech Republic for the World Championships, Caitlin Compton returned stateside to do some domestic races, including the hometown City of Lakes Loppet, which she won in front a hugely –and understandably –partisan crowd. Given Caitlin’s propensity to dominate the longer distances, look for her to have a serious impact at the upcoming US Long Distance Nationals in Fairbanks, AK at the end of the month.

Sporting a new affiliation with the esteemed Oregon Track Club, Gabriel Jennings proved his early season fitness with a 3:58 mile at a recent meet at the University of Washington. To his credit, he said he’s taking the result as just one step along the road to running really fast this spring and summer. He has since decamped to Tucson, AZ with the OTC for some warm weather training prior to settling down in Eugene for the race season.

If ever there was a buzz forming around the development of an athlete, that would have to be Karl Erickson who –after relocating from his hometown of Minneapolis, MN to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA –has put in a superb winter of training and is very much the talk of the elite athletes gathered there. We all look forward to seeing the caliber of results Karl produces this spring and summer.

Kate Whitcomb admits that she hasn’t had quite the season for which she had hoped and prepared; a back injury left her with no choice but to settle down in ID to pursue various PT treatments. But now she’s on her way back to being healthy –and fit, no doubt. And the good news? All that down time left her with an abundance of energy for “her kids” at Hemingway Elementary, where she is a regular fixture.

As Laura Valaas herself writes in her most recent blog post: “There aren't too many days when you laugh when a teammate tells you your place because you're both happy and unsure that she's telling the truth, or when your first glance at a results list your own name jumps out at you from the very top.” Well, that pretty much sums up Laura’s past few days of competition. After returning from the Continent and a few World Cup races –including an appearance on a sprint relay team with silver medalist Kikkan Randall at the World Championships in Liberec, CZE –Laura turned her attention to some North American races and has been decimating the competition. Currently installed at the Canadian National Championships, she’s won two of the three races she’s entered and is going for her third Canadian title in four tries later today. Go, Laura!

Coming off of a New England winter in which he wasn’t once able to get outside for a training session, Matt Chisam posted his best-ever finish in a post-collegiate National Championship when he placed 4th at the recent USATF Indoor Multis National Championship in Durham, NC. He’s now en route to his sunny home state of California for some warm weather training and a few more early season competitions.

Mike Hazle gets the award for number of miles traveled this season (although he might have to arm-wrestle Torin Koos for the honor). He’s just returned from a banner six-week training trip to Scandinavia where he ate, slept and trained with some of the world’s best javelin throwers. Some might say it’s counter-intuitive to leave sunny San Diego to go to cold and dark Norway for a bout of training; but Mike has a keen sense of precisely what he needs to do to succeed and there’s no doubt he’ll be raring to go come this outdoor season.

After earning a much-coveted World Cup start earlier this winter, Nicole De Yong settled down to contest a series of North American races. Hampered by a cold of late, she’s only raced one of the three events at the Canadian Nationals. But when she kicks her cold to the curb, watch for her to have a stellar performance at the US Distance Nationals in her home state of Alaska.

Sara Hall rebounded from a nagging winter injury to score back-to-back top-three finishes at the USATF Indoor National Championships in Boston last month. She earned a 2nd and a 3rd place in the 3000m and 1500m, respectively. Those strong finishes, especially among that caliber of competition, bode well for the season to come. Hopefully we’ll see her in Boston again soon when husband Ryan Hall competes in his first Boston Marathon on April 20th.

Like Mike Hazle and Torin Koos, Sarah Groff has been racking up some frequent flier miles. She kicked off her season in Hawai’i before returning to Colorado Springs, CO for some more altitude training and is now bedded down at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA. Happily, she’s been able to catch up with two ITA colleagues while there: the aforementioned Karl Erickson and Mike Hazle. It’s good to know that our virtual community occasionally becomes real…and enjoyable.

Of all the news that is happiest to report, this particular tidbit tops my list: Tim Broe is running. He may not be running very fast, and he may not be running great distances; but he is indeed running again. Having a keen sense of Tim’s talent and determination, I’ve no doubts that he’ll be a force with which to be reckoned in the coming months and years.

Truth be told, I can’t recall the last time Torin Koos was on US soil. Christmas, perhaps? Such is life on the road with the US Ski Team, which Torin represented for the fifth time in this winter’s World Championships in Liberec, CZE. In addition to racing well at that venue –and doing a superb job of chronicling the experience for fans near and far, including his rapt fifth-grade youth charges back in Wenatchee, WA –Torin has also competed in a full slate of World Cups, posting an impressive 12th-place finish last weekend in Lahti, FIN and an 8th-place in Valdidentro, ITA (his best-ever freestyle World Cup finish) in mid-February. With just a few more races ahead of him, including a race around the King’s Castle in Stockholm, SWE and the US Long Distance Nationals, Torin has surely earned a trip home and ample R&R.

After battling giardia in the early part of the season, Zack Simons rebounded to post some impressive results, including a win at the Boulder Mountain Tour, some strong sprint finishes and a well-fought race at the Engadin in Switzerland last weekend. Although I know Zack was planning for a more robust season, he did a great job of working with what he was given and will surely be aiming to have an impact on the ski scene next season.

Zoila Gomez and her longtime coach Damon Martin have decided to spend the spring and early summer going after a new 10k PR before focusing on a fall marathon (possibly the World Championships in Berlin). To that end, Zoila has assembled a slate of shorter races, including a recent appearance at the US Cross Country Nationals in Maryland and some upcoming events on the track. Something tells me that 32:47 is going to fall by the wayside as Zoila rolls her way through the 2009 season.

Here at ITA we wish all the Arena Athletes –and the kids who work with them –the best in their pursuit of excellence.

In Defense of Authenticity

2009-02-13T09:48:00.009-05:00

In this day and age of plastic surgery and PhotoShop, we’ve grown accustomed to being confronted by scenes of apparent perfection: the too-tight pull of septuagenarian skin over cheekbones; the flawless pose of Paltrow in her Tod's raiments; the oddly full heads of hair adorning pates of grandfathers everywhere. We look upon these scenes with the studied eyes of skeptics and know to take them with grains –dumptrucks –of salt.

“It’s not real,” we say to ourselves. “Not really real.” And we feel better. But what is “real” these days? Aren’t those cheekbones and mops of hair real, even if they don’t look it? Do we actually mean to say they’re not natural? But again, what is “natural”? Perhaps what we mean to say is that they’re not genuine (origin: Latin for birth, race, stock). Gosh darnit, those people were not born into this world with those features. They’re not authentic.

And it is this fundamental question of the slippage of authenticity that keeps me awake at night. Most of us can recognize a surgically-enhanced visage when we see it. But what about the better disguised cases of inauthenticity? What about the folks who received envelope after envelope of consistently sparkling quarterly returns from Bernie Madoff? What about the baseball fans who watched home run after home run soar off the bat of Alex Rodriguez? Or what about the millions of Americans tuning in to the inauguration of our current President who found themselves awed by the virtuosity of Yo Yo Ma & Co. performing so beautifully in such frigid temperatures? Did these people know they were viewing something that was neither real, nor genuine, nor authentic? Did they care?

I would wager that the folks invested in Madoff’s vehicles cared. And if the judgment that’s been passed on Mark McGwire’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame is any indicator of the public’s distaste for the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport, I would posit that fans care about seeing a clean ballgame, too. While we could impugn the media for making a mountain out of a molehill of soaped-up cello strings and gutted pianos, learning that the musicians (but not Aretha!) at the inauguration were “fakin’ it” did diminish my previously unfettered appreciation for that event.

The crime perpetrated by these people –if that’s not too strong a charge –does not lie in their instincts to please, to thrill and to entertain. Those are admirable aims. Rather, the transgression lies in their intent to deceive their audiences, to pass off the inauthentic as real. Just as the airbrushed images of willowy models plastered on glossy magazine covers have saddled a generation of women with skewed perceptions of beauty, so do doctored returns, doctored athletes and doctored instruments do a terrible disservice to a public’s standards of achievement and our ongoing attempts to get our bearings in a rapidly changing world.

So it was with great surprise that I catalogued the following experience weekend before last. My husband and I were seated in the stands of the Reggie Lewis Center in West Roxbury, MA, soaking up the track and field action of Reebok’s annual Boston Indoor Games. In addition to the cohort of recent Olympians performing, the crowd was also being treated to three record-breaking attempts: one by 10k Olympic bronze medalist and MA native Shalane Flanagan who was gunning for the US Indoor 5k mark; and two by pole vaulters: Jenn Stuczynski, the Olympic silver medalist who was aiming for the US Indoor mark held by compatriot Stacy Dragila; and Aussie Steve Hooker, the Olympic gold medalist who was chasing Sergey Bubka’s long-standing World Indoor mark. Hooker fell just short, but thrilled the capacity crowd in his attempts. Flanagan, however, got hers; as did Stuczynski, who then went on to take a shot at the Indoor World Record height.

What was most startling, however, was a nearly inconspicuous moment that transpired in the interstice between Stuczynski’s successful American record jump and her first attempt at a World Record height. Nearly all other track action had come to a halt as the bar was verified and reset for her first World Record attempt. As Stuczynski shouldered her pole and squared her shoulders to the bar, drew a deep breath and relaxed in the final seconds before initiating her approach down the runway, a sudden cacophony erupted just to our right.

Now granted my husband and I were seated across the arena from the pole vault pit, and chances are only a small fraction of the assembled crowd was subjected to the aural interruption. But what we heard was this: sportscasters Lewis Johnson and Larry Rawson –nestled atop the adjacent broadcasting tower like fledglings in an aerie –were enthusiastically calling Stuczynski’s jump of five minutes earlier as if it were happening in real-time.

“Here she goes, folks, taking off down the runway…”
Real-time Stuczynski was motionless.

“She’s got great speed. And there’s the plant. Can she do it?”
Real-time Stuczynski palmed her pole a final time.

“And she’s over! She’s clear! Jenn Stuczynski has just set a new American record in the pole vault, ladies and gentlemen!”
Real-time Stuczynski, who had been the American record holder for at least five minutes, rolled her neck left and right and began her sprint to the bar.

Never mind the bizarrely disjointed experience those of us fans had as our eyes and ears delivered radically differing versions of the reality at-hand. But is calling a single pole vault jump too complex a job to be done in real-time? Must the commentators use a tape delay to get it right (and they did sound awfully convincing)? What was so wrong with the first call, the real call?

Ordinarily it seems that the higher the stakes, the greater the probability of dissemblance. A multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Baseball’s highest-paid star. The inauguration of the country’s first African-American President. But a track and field call for ESPN2?

Et tu, Brute? Could track and field, in its hunt for a slice of our sport-crazed public’s attention, really have stooped to this level? And if this is happening in the small fry sport of track and field (don’t get me wrong: I’m as ardent a track fan as you’ll find anywhere), then where isn’t it happening? And what, if anything, can and should we do about it?

Call me naïve. Call me old-fashioned. But I think this trend continues at our collective peril. Yes, I live my professional life at the nexus of sport and youth development, where I’ve come to place the highest of premiums on authenticity (a mentor who tries to “fake it” with the kids not only won’t gain any traction, she’ll be ridiculed and rendered ineffective faster than a suburban kid can say “phat”), but what sort of a message does it send our children when we make it clear that it’s prohibitive to make a mistake, to appear less than flawless, to be decidedly unsuperlative? I’ll tell you: it’s emphatically the wrong message.

Kids need to witness failure –and the graceful management thereof –as much as they need to witness excellence. Not only that: they need to witness imperfection in those they admire most: Moms, Dads, teachers and coaches, and arm’s length idols and role models, too. I’m not advocating for mediocrity; I’m pushing for candor and transparency, for authenticity in word and deed.

If the barrier for entry into any new activity is too high (who hasn’t heard a child opt out by moaning: “I’ll never be good enough”?), ambition will languish. If we set false ceilings of expectations, confidence will fade. Some kids are born with fistfuls of talent and those outliers will undoubtedly rise to the top of their chosen fields. Others look to their environment for clues and cues to determine which path they’re best suited to pursue; they scan the searchable world (an ever-expanding realm in this day and age) and measure themselves against the images they find there.

“Which am I?” they ask themselves in a more mature version of square-peg-square-hole. “The investor? The ballplayer? The cellist?” And when the examples furnished them are not authentic representations but artificially distorted images, flawed only in their flawlessness like a reverse funhouse mirror that polishes and perfects rather than perverts, then we’ve failed our children. We’ve deprived them of the ability to get their proper bearings, to gather information and to make educated decisions based on their findings.

So, because I’m a Red Sox fan, I’ll end on this note: some say the media’s treatment of A-Rod has been too harsh. I disagree. Rodriguez is paid –and paid handsomely –to ply his trade in the baseball arena. Yes, to entertain, but also to represent the sport at its most virtuosic. So when he uses performance-enhancing drugs to inflate artificially his already impressive talent, thus distorting the public’s sense of baseball at its best, well then he deserves whatever name-calling befalls him. The New York Post ran the headline, “A-Roid.” And that was his hometown paper! What will we have waiting for him when he first takes the field at Fenway this season? Something befitting his proper place in sport history: A-Fraud.

A Righteous Wind

2008-11-06T10:05:00.006-05:00

With all the recent talk of wind --conservative-crippling headwinds, righteous liberal tailwinds --one might think we were soldiering through the Ides of March and not rooted in early November. Alas, it is the fall and a change of seasons is indeed upon us: a sea change, you might say.

Barack Obama has been elected President, and whether you cast your ballot for him or for John McCain, whether you believe that global warming is a reality or a farce, you have to admit that meteorology aside, January will bring a vastly different climate to this country than the one we've experienced of late.

In the days, weeks, months and even years (this was a long election cycle, the most sustained in our nation's history) leading up to the election, there was much talk of the perfect storm that had gathered and would likely elevate the Democratic nominee to the seat of the Presidency. This was, in large part, why the Democratic primary was so hotly-contested: the victor in that race was virtually guaranteed to be our next President. Conversely, pundits and campaign spokespeople alike were quick to point to the immobilizing headwinds facing McCain specifically --and the Republican Party more generally --as the country marched towards November 4th.

The perfect storm drew strength from the hot waters in which our current President found himself: an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq; a recessed and volatile economy (not an enviable combination); and a scarcity of political capital to manage either of the aforementioned. Add to that the zephyr of public perception that Washington was "broken" and it seemed that the deck was stacked against any candidate operating under the banner of the Republican Party, no matter how maverick-y his behavior.

And for once --OK, maybe that's unfair --the talking heads were right: the perfect storm was indeed perfect (witness the stunning vision of 125,000 people gathered in Grant Park on Tuesday evening) and the headwinds were too strong for even the most resilient of war veterans and the most pit bull-ish of governors to overcome. Case closed, right?

Nope; not so fast. As we turn the page on the election of 2008 and begin to contemplate the ways in which an Obama administration will address the challenges facing our country, we'd be wise to cleave to this perfect storm metaphor a moment longer.

Even the most bi-partisan of observers is quick to point out that President-elect Obama faces a daunting task: living up to the domestic and international expectations he's created. Even if he can successfully orchestrate an eloquent withdrawal from Iraq, gracefully reclaim an American seat at the geopolitical table, and carefully manage fraught relationships with Russia, North Korea and Iran, he's confronted with sky-high joblessness and homelessness numbers, a broken health care system, an educational quagmire and a faltering (that may be too kind an adjective) economy that has even the most bullish of investors tucking Ben Franklins under their mattresses.

So he's doomed, right? The Republicans are going to reconstitute their party and mount a fierce offensive in four years, pointing to all of the ways in which the Obama administration couldn't deliver on its promises. What politician --or group of them --possibly could?

Call me optimistic; paint me as hopelessly (or hopefully) Pollyanna-ish, but I happen to think that Obama will be able to deliver on the majority of his pledges. Maybe not in the first year, and maybe not even in the first term, as he was quick to tell us on Tuesday night; but he will deliver and I'll tell you why: because quite apart from the perfect storm that landed him in the White House, there's another perfect storm brewing, one whose gale-force winds President-elect Obama is uniquely qualified to harness.

It's the perfect storm of what Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, calls the recent “emergence of the citizen sector.” In accepting the first-ever Purpose Prize Entrepreneurial Leadership Award Drayton explained, “We are, in fact, now at the take-off point of the biggest transition in history since the Agricultural Revolution. And everyone…has a very important role to play.”

Never before in human history have we seen the mobilization of such an engaged, knowledgeable, vibrant and well-capitalized citizen sector. The US has long led all other countries in the viability of our independent sector. Just ask de Tocqueville. Figures from 2007 estimate that the nonprofit sector accounted for 5.2% of GDP and 8.3% of wages and salaries paid in the US; our next closest competitor is Great Britain, whose nonprofit sector accounts for just 2.2% of its GDP. From 1996 through 2006, the nonprofit sector grew at twice the rate of the private sector.

Why is this important? Because when facing the multi-pronged task of restoring equanimity, equality and equity to this country, President-elect Obama will have a tool in his toolbox that no former President has had. He and his advisors will have an additional lever to pull that does not read "government intervention" nor "private sector solution." President-elect Obama has at his disposal a third sector, a citizen sector, that is ready, willing and able to begin tackling challenges both domestic and foreign: homelessness, joblessness, health care collapse, large-scale educational failure, global poverty and racial division. Of course this third sector has been at work for a while –-some might say centuries --but not 'til of late (ie: Tuesday evening late) has it had such a sense of purpose and such a dynamic leader.

Few people know the power and the terrain of our country's citizen sector better than President-elect Obama, whose community organizing (hold the air quotes and the snarky Republican applause, please) set the groundwork for what became a game-changing political campaign, the likes of which we voters have never seen. How he will choose to avail himself of the potential energy of this movement has yet to be determined (although he and Vice President-elect Biden offer a few clues on the website change.gov. What is clear, though, is that rather than having to deploy either the government or big business to begin to implement the change he seeks, President-elect Obama, for the first time in history, will have a viable third sector to which he can outsource responsibility, a sector populated by recent college graduates and second-career Wall Street opt-outs; dreamers and pragmatists; the passionately committed and the dispassionately administratively-minded. All will be prepared to heed whatever call he sounds.

The fact that a President-elect, whose roots lie in community organizing and whose passion for service outshines most, has come to power at the precise moment when our country’s citizen sector has achieved unprecedented strength and gravitas …well, that’s what I call a perfect storm. And yes, that is a righteous wind we have at our backs.

Character

2008-09-02T11:59:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has read this blog a modicum of times knows that its author is an indiscriminate sports fan. So it will not surprise you to learn that last night, when I tuned into the Red Sox-Baltimore game, I was struck by a particular advertisement. It was sponsored by NESN (the New England Sports Network and home to all televised Red Sox games, for those of you who are not HNES --or Hearty New England Stock) and it was promoting"Sox-tober," the annual autumnal rites of post-season baseball play, which, more often than not these days, feature our hometown Red Sox. Among stills of Ortiz, Pedroia and Beckett were interspersed pithy, sports-oriented, fan-incenting quotes, like " Sometimes character isn't built, it's revealed."

'Tis true. And nowhere have I seen a better depiction of that saying in action --not even on a freshly-mown, long-shadowed, post-season baseball diamond --than in the following blog submitted by Mike Hazle after his debut Olympic experience in Beijing. If you'd like a quick lesson in character, read on.

08.28.08: Beijing in the rear view mirror

With my Beijing experience now in the past by a few days, I have had a chance (including a 10 hour flight to Belgium) to reflect on everything that took place. I have had a chance to learn from a few mistakes, lick my wounds and take dead aim at the great city of London in exactly 1,456 days…and counting…

Beijing as a city was absolutely amazing; the people went above and beyond everyone's expectations. I kind of feel bad for the organizers of London 2012, they have one hell of an act to follow. The first thing my parents said as they returned home from Beijing was how shocked they were as to the rudeness of the American people in the airports…I have to remind myself that we Americans aren’t in fact being rude…it's just that those of us who have spent the last few weeks in Beijing have been spoiled by the “niceness epidemic”. There were actually times that the locals were so unbelievably nice and polite that it almost made me uncomfortable. For example, there would be times when a group of locals would be sitting at a table or huddled around a TV and as soon as you came in the room, they would all stand up and say hello. I don’t think there are 10 people who stand up in the States anymore when a lady enters the room (much less anyone else). I honestly can’t remember a single time when they weren’t smiling or saying “hello” or “is there anything at all I can help you with?”. Then there was the work ethic…It is no wonder why many of the world's largest companies look to China and Asia in general to produce many of their products. The Asians are the hardest working people I have ever seen in my life bar none, and they do it all while keeping a positive attitude. They may work for pennies per hour but they always seem to have a positive outlook on life. I remember thinking that if I opened a restaurant in the USA and had a full staff of Beijing locals, it would be one of the most successful restaurants in the USA within a matter of months (as long as I didn’t screw it up!) I realize that I may have not seen the way things really are or the way that Beijing was prior to the 29th Olympiad, but for what myself and almost all of those who visited Beijing saw…I am sold! Even as I was leaving the Olympic Village and airport, I was bombarded with gifts of every kind from the locals who pleaded and begged “please come back to Beijing… you are welcome back to China!” I for one, LOVE China and cant wait to go back. The last meet of the year for me will be in Daegue, Korea on Sept 25 and it will be interesting to compare the 2 cities. I can’t wait to see if the niceness epidemic has spread throughout Asia, or if its progression was halted at the Great Wall.

On to my performance in Beijing: For those who saw the qualifying rounds in the javelin, you saw the weather. For those of you who didn’t, the qualifying rounds were contested in a monsoon. I have never seen that much rain fall in that short of time. As much rain as there was and no matter how long my flight (group 2) was delayed…it didn’t matter. When I woke up at 4:30am the day of the comp and saw the rain, it actually fired me up because I knew most of the competitors wouldn’t be able to handle the conditions mentally and I actually felt like I had an advantage. I was the last thrower in the 2nd flight: thrower #48. Last thrower in normal conditions is a great place to be in because you get to watch the performances of everyone else and know exactly how far you have to throw in order to qualify…in normal conditions that is. But with as long as I had to wait…it didn’t matter, as wet as my javelins were…it didn’t matter. I was more ready physically and mentally than I have ever been in my life, maybe even too ready. I wasn’t even nervous…anxious yes, but nervous no. I have spent endless hours with my team analyzing my performance from every angle: physiologically, mentally, technically and emotionally. And the result of our analysis was…we wouldn’t have changed a thing. I have analyzed the film of my throws a few hundred times and it’s the best I have ever looked technically. My physical preparation was textbook, exactly where we hoped it would be. I was 100% healthy and 100% ready, mind body and soul. That’s why the results were so hard to comprehend. There were 90m throwers who couldn’t manage even 70m and 70m throwers who set new lifetime bests. In an event where the weather is so dependent on the outcome, one can only say “stuff happens”. All that matters is that you can prepare the best you can and leave it all on the track and then you must accept the results and the weather for what they are. Like the quote my coach said to me before I left for the stadium, “it is what it is”. The entire Olympic Games were filled with upsets and amazing stories. There were people who weren’t even supposed to make the team that ended up medaling and people who were locks to medal who were eliminated in the qualifying rounds…and the javelin was no exception. Here is one amazing story that you may not know the inside scoop on.

I had the opportunity to hang out with a friend/rival of mine who many of you know, Breaux Greer. Breaux was my roommate for several days while in Beijing and for those of you who don’t know his story, here is a quick rundown: Breaux is the greatest American javelin thrower in USA history and won a bronze medal at Worlds last year in Osaka and set a new American Record, which also happens to be the 9th farthest throw in the history of mankind. Breaux had his 11th major surgery of his career this past winter…yes 11th; most people would hang it up after 1. After breaking a bone in his throwing hand before the Olympic Trials, and not being able to take any training throws in several months, Breaux showed up at our Olympic Trials and finished 17th. A far cry from his 90m days of last year, Breaux dealt with an enormous media backlash for him doing some of the things he decided to do throughout the year. The javelin is a very "what have you done lately" event and Breaux received the full media fury. Still Breaux was nominated to the Olympic Team and came to Beijing. Why? I asked myself the question several times…the answer which we may never truly know, is not ours to worry about and we probably wouldn’t be able to comprehend. What I saw Breaux go through in Beijing was nothing short of amazing. He was told by several doctors not to even show up at our trials much less the Olympic Games. I saw a guy shoot up with pain killers just to take standing throws on the grass…I saw a guy who had everyone in the world telling him no and yet he said yes. Even the greatest javelin coach in the world (aside from mine) Kari Ihalinen of Finland (Breaux’s coach last year) told Breaux to go home that he would risk career-ending injury if he attempted to throw again. But those of you who know Breaux, know that he is capable of throwing 80m when he is not even remotely healthy. So, when I heard Breaux tell my why, it made everything crystal clear, not only about why he chose to come to Beijing, but why he does everything he does in life. Breaux looked me in the eye and said, “I'm going to give it one shot...one throw...one throw with all that I have, because I don’t want to go back home and watch the Olympics and wonder…what if?” In an event where it only takes 1 throw…this made perfect sense to me. So, kudos to Breaux for his larger than life attempt at representing himself and his country on the world’s largest stage. After my last throw in Beijing, Breaux came up to me and said, “remember this feeling and use it.” Breaux has gone through this 2 times and had the agony of being 1cm short of making the Olympic Team in 1996. He finished last in Sydney and last in Athens after posting the farthest throw of the Games in qualifying. He also said “you will grow more from this than anything else you do in life.” And I truly believe that I have grown more as a person and an athlete more in the last week than I have all of my life. I have to admit that I didn’t know what to expect from Breaux when I got to Beijing, but it was a great experience that I may never truly know the value of. All I know is, if I am stuck in a foxhole in a war, I want Breaux watching my back.

So now what? I am now in Belgium, post-Beijing and am now officially an Olympian having competed in the Games. So where does this leave me? As strange as this may sound, I believe that the disappointment of Beijing was in fact the best thing that could have happened to me. If I had qualified for the final or even medaled, I would have walked away from Beijing with a sense of satisfaction, which is extremely dangerous as an athlete. I swore to myself that I will never feel the way that I felt as I left the runway in Beijing and that very moment which will be etched in my mind forever set the stage for the next four years. I am more determined and driven now that I have ever been in my life, which I honestly didn’t think was possible. But knowing what I know now, I believe that the next 4 years will hold many far throws that will culminate in another amazing Olympic experience in London. The result in London will be irrelevant, it cold be a gold medal or a last place in qualifying, but the journey along the way will be something that I hope I can someday explain in words. The life lessons that I will learn over the next 4 years will be worth more than any monetary amount that a 9-5 job may offer and the reward at the end of the journey will be indeed priceless. It looks as if Breaux will be moving to San Diego this fall to join our training group. Put 2 of the worlds best throwers together to push each other physically and emotionally, couple that with the worlds best coaching, nutrition and sports science…one can only guess the end product in 4 years…London awaits in less than 1,456 days…
Never underestimate the power of ambition.

'Til next time,
Mike++

Trading a bicycle for a Ferrari

2008-08-18T06:55:00.002-04:00

Seems that Mike is tuning up nicely and rounding into shape at precisely the right moment. I like the metaphor he deploys of turning a bicycle into a Ferrari. I can't imagine anyone could be revved up anymore than Mike must be at this moment. Let 'er rip, Mike.

From Mike in Beijing:

08.17.08: 5 Days Out

Today was the last “intense” training day for me. This morning I had a sprinting workout, which at this stage is more for hormonal increase and release rather than trying to get faster. After the morning sprints session, I had a technical session that included some light ball throws designed to generate arm speed as well as some runway work to solidify my approach. In the previous days, my upper body and arm was moving much better than my legs. My coach said that it looked like I had a Ferrari engine strapped to a bicycle and thus the timing was off. Today it was much better and my legs are finally starting to feel alive. My arm is in the best shape it has ever been in. My coach jokingly was looking for a radar gun over here to check my arm speed. I threw 95pmh from the outfield in college and I’m guessing I would top out around 99-100mph now. The majority of the track and field athletes from the USA who have not made the finals in their respected events are now finished for the most part and the mood around the village is getting more festive. Unfortunately for me I still have a few more days before I can let my hair down! Tomorrow is another rest and recovery day. I plan to do some laundry, check a few hundred emails and maybe catch a nap or 2. See yall on the 18th,
Mike

Good things come to those who...

2008-08-17T18:33:00.003-04:00

...wait.

Yes, patience is a virtue. But the patience Mike is exhibiting --ten days into the world's most pressure-filled sporting event, in one of the busiest cities in the most populous country, when all environmental indicia point to excitement, movement and athletic expression --would rival Job's.

Hang in there, Mike. Your turn will come. And when it does, we'll be cheering.

From Mike in Beijing:

08.16.08: The Countdown Begins

We are well underway with the track and field portion of the Beijing Olympic Games, and there have been a few upsets and a few stellar performances on the USA team. One of the toughest things to do is to sit back and watch all of your friends with whom you have trained and competed against live out their Olympic dreams. The javelin throw is one of the last events of the games, as it was also last at the USA trials. Due to the lateness of my event, I have had the opportunity to watch many of my friends compete. I had the joy of watching one of my best friends, Hyleas Fountain, have the performance of her life and win the bronze medal in the heptathlon. I have also had to sit and watch some of my other close friends see their dreams fade in the men's shot out and discus throw. It has been quite the emotional rollercoaster. Now that the javelin is the last throwing event to compete, the focus has been placed upon Leigh Smith, Breaux Greer and myself to pick up the slack in the USA medal count.

In my recent blog entries I mentioned that the amount of free time that I have is dwindling every day. I find myself staying up until well after midnight due to many of the things that I need to do during the day. The most difficult thing for me has been the juggling act of doing what I need to do to prepare for my event and also taking time to watch my friends compete and share their Olympic experience. As I have said before, there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the day and it doesn't seem possible that I have been in China for over 1 1/2 weeks. These games are indeed flying by and I am caught in the middle of the preparation vs. experience dilemma. My training has been great and the biggest focus now is just getting a sense of normalcy. I have competed well in 12 meets year...my program is timed perfect, my health is good and I am approaching lifetime bests in the weight room. As impossible as it may sound, I very well may just have to approach the Olympic Games as just another track meet (with over 1 BILLION people watching). My plan so far when its time to throw...."just push print."

See you on the 08.17.08
Mike

Back to the Mothership

2008-08-15T08:55:00.002-04:00

Mike sent the following from Beijing this morning (which is this evening in China). He and the US Team have headed back to the city, command central, the mothership, where they'll be testing themselves against the world's best in their respective events. We continue to send our very best to Mike and the whole US Team as they begin their Olympic odyssey.

08.14.08:Back to the Chaos

I arrived back into Beijing today, and was quickly reminded of how much busier things are here than at our training camp in Dalian. As I mentioned in my 1st blog entry, there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done! This blog entry is an example as I am running late for another team meeting in about 5 minutes.

Here is what is on schedule for tomorrow...

5:45am wake up
6am depart USA housing facility at athlete village
6:30am depart for Beijing Normal University (USOC headquaters)
7-8am breakfast
8-9am treatment and therapy
9:30-11:30 last throwing session
11:30-12pm treatment and therapy
12-1pm Lunch
1-3pm rest and recovery
3:30-5pm sprinting and jumps training
5-6pm treatment and therapy
6:30-7:30 Dinner
8pm depart Beijing Normal for USA housing facility at athlete village
9pm team meeting
9pm email and blog updates
10pm lights out

I will make an attempt to give everyone an idea of what my daily schedule is leading up to the qualification and final rounds here in Beijing.

Gotta run, catch up with you tomorrow!
Mike

Perspective and Poise

2008-08-13T09:53:00.002-04:00

This morning the following post came in from Mike in Beijing. And while at first blush it seems a bit disheartening, let me put that anxiety to rest:

During the interregnum between the Olympic Trials (when Mike punched his ticket to the Games) and the US Team departure for China, Mike and I had a long phone conversation, which ranged topically from a recap of the javelin competition in Eugene to his preparations for the Olympics to his travel itinerary. In the midst of it, as Mike was recounting to me the laundry list of interviews and press requests he'd fielded, I innocently asked him if he was growing at all tired of all of the hooplah.

He paused for just the briefest of moments and replied, "No, no I'm not. I mean, in a month all of this is going to be over and everything will go back to normal and none of these people will be knocking on my door. So for the time being, I'm pretty happy to enjoy it and to soak it all up in the moment." Of course, that's a rough approximation (I didn't record the call or anything so I don't have his exact response!). But what was immediately clear to me was how balanced and mature Mike's response was. He's absolutely right.

So whatever small and niggling little injuries befall him in the days to come --while I hope they disappear before he takes his rightful place on the Olympic javelin runway on August 21st --I'm confident they'll not disrupt at all his preparations and his performance, nor his enjoyment of the experience. At the risk of pushing the alliterative envelope: Mike has both perspective and poise, as the title of this post suggests. And for that reason --among many others --I'm confident of the success he'll have, both in the competitive arena and outside of it.

08.13.08: Too Good to Be True…

It would have to be a fairy tale ending to be able to go into the Olympic Games 100% healthy, maybe even too good to be true. And so it is…today was the first set back in my training, although it was a minor one. I have had problems with my low back and pelvis slipping out of alignment causing periodic pain over the past few days. I suppose that's what happens when you're loading 528lbs on your back. As a result I had to modify my training program for the 1st time. However, the modifications that we have made more than likely have more of a mental impact than physical. Basically, as my coach would say, “the hay is in the barn” and all we are doing now is tightening a few screws. Tomorrow I fly back to Beijing in preparation for my last throwing session on the 15th. I will be training at the USA Olympic Committee Headquarters at Beijing Normal University but will be staying in the Village with the rest of the team. I will send updates with what a typical day in the village looks like for me in the next blog. I have to get packing!

Catch you later!
Mike

Mike Hazle, F1 Race Car...and Driver!

2008-08-12T11:37:00.005-04:00

Kudos to Mike for keeping us all posted on his Beijing journey. He sent the following missive from the US Training Camp this morning (evening for him). I love his analogy of the F1 Grand Prix car; it's one of the most masterful and eloquent examples I've seen of how to explain the daily focus of an elite athlete on the verge of a monumental competition. Go, Mike!

08.12.08: Rest & Recovery
Today was my 4th day at the USA Track & Field Training Camp here in Dalian, China. Another rest day…when I say rest day, it just means that there wasn’t any sprinting, lifting or throwing. The majority of the day was spent in and out of treatment sessions that focused mainly on my low back and hamstrings, which have been giving me issues since I arrived. I also had a short meeting with our resident sports psychologist, just to go over a few mental preparation techniques and tactics. For most people, the idea of “rest” or “off” days means that one can become a tourist or go sightseeing, well for most athletes in the games it serves a different purpose. Imagine if you can a Formula 1 race car…before a major F1 Grand Prix the driver takes the car out for a test drive on the course…after returning to the team garage, the driver just doesn't park it and not touch it until its time to race...the car is virtually dissected, analyzed and tweaked to the finest detail. Not only to ensure proper future performance but to analyze past miscalculations and potential future problems. That is essentially what most of us here do. After we take the machine out, we bring it back in and make sure its ready for the next test run and eventually the competition… which for me happens to be the Olympic Games. Tomorrow is another heavy day, lots of weighted ball throws and a lifting session in which I hope to tie or set a few new personal bests.

Catch up with you tomorrow,
Mike

The Calm Before the Storm

2008-08-11T17:37:00.003-04:00

I received the below email from Arena Athlete Mike Hazle this morning. As you can see, he's sending daily posts from the US Track and Fields training camp in Dailan, China. Having experienced the excitement, awe and wonder of the Opening Ceremonies, the US Track and Field athletes (collectively dubbed "The World's Hardest Team to Make," or more simply: "The World's Best Track and Field Team") decamped to a less frenetic locale to put the finishing touches on their Olympic preparation. They will return to Beijing in a few days.

Just pause for a moment and think about the potential energy amassing at that camp: you have a group of superlative athletes in the best shape of their lives; they're all riding the high of making the US Team a mere month ago and the even more precipitous high of making the journey to Beijing to participate in the Opening Ceremonies, unequivocally the most spectacular in Olympic history; the pumps of their competitive fires have been primed and now, they wait: to run, to jump, to throw, to perform, to claim their places on the Olympic stage and the Olympic podia.

What collective fury of athleticism will be unleashed in the Bird's Nest upon the opening of the Olympic Track and Field program? I, for one, can not wait to find out. In the meantime, follow along with Mike's day-to-day activities as he keeps us abreast of the happenings in China.

From Mike in Beijing: 08.11.08 Back to Work

Today was the first hard training day since I arrived to Beijing. I had a hard throwing session this morning in the pouring down rain (which you may have seen on TV). I followed this morning’s training session with a sprints and jumping session this afternoon. The rest of the hours in between training were spent resting and recovering and then preparing for the next session. It was a pretty quiet day here at the USA Training Camp other than the practice sessions. We have had a streak of bad weather for 24 hours but it should be clearing by tomorrow. No major news from Beijing other than a few updates on the medal counts and the Chinese have put up an impressive showing so far. The American Track & Field Machine is set to roll in just a few more days…should be one heck of a show!

Catch up with you tomorrow,
Mike ++

From Mike in Beijing: 08.09.08 The Day After...

2008-08-10T10:07:00.002-04:00

Today I arrived at the USA Track & Field training camp in Dalian. It was a very long day, in which many of the athletes who attended the opening ceremonies were going on 3-4 hours of sleep. Most of us arrived back to the Olympic Village around 2 A.M. and departed for our training camp around 6 A.M. Our flight wasn't until around 11, but due to heightened security measures were had to depart early. Once we arrived in Dalian, we were shown the full force of the awesome Chinese security. Dalian is a city of almost 6 million people and they closed all the roads leading from the airport to our training camp, some 1/2 hour away. That is just an example of the how well they are taking care of us.

The locals have been awesome, and all of us here are extremely grateful and thankful of all the efforts and collaboration of the Chinese officials with the USA security forces. The mood quickly changed and became more serious once we arrived to the hotel where we were notified of the attacks on the American tourists at the Forbidden City as well as the declaration of war between Georgia and Russia. As far away as some of the problems seem to be, it still hits home and reminds all of us here that the real world is still going on without us and it is up to us to show the world an unbiased competition without prejudice. tomorrow I finally have a day off. I plan to sleep, unpack, check some emails and catch up with my family, and sleep some more. Catch up with you tomorrow.

Mike++

Let the Games Begin!

2008-08-09T07:47:00.003-04:00

Over the next 17 days, I'll be posting updates from Arena Athlete Mike Hazle (at left, competing in the 2007 USATF Nationals) as he navigates his way through his inaugural Olympic experience in Beijing. Below is Update #1, written after the Opening Ceremonies:

So Much To Do, So Little Time...

Hello, first let me apologize if this first entry is cut short, there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to get everything done over here that needs to be done. I'm actually catching a plane in 30 minutes for our training camp in Dailan. Its been a whirlwind of a few days and I'm running on about 8 hours of sleep since I arrived. The people of Beijing have been...flawless! They are so excited to be hosting the Olympic Games and their attitudes and personalities certainly reflect that. They have been more than gracious hosts and I have fallen in love with the culture. The village is brand new, as are most of the facilities and there's everything that you would ever need.

Last night I attended the XXIX Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies. I could sit here for hours and not be able to capture the experience in words, so I'll try to wrap it up as...simply amazing, the best day of my life! I had the opportunity not only to meet, but to hang out with George W. Bush and Bush Sr., Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Coach "K" and so many more unbelievable people with awesome stories. After about 9 hours total of standing, sitting and standing some more, I can now say that my Olympic Experience is officially underway. I promise to make the future blogs longer and hopefully with a bit more detail.

I have a plane to catch, gotta run!
Mike++

I'm a Fan

2008-04-22T08:44:00.004-04:00

It’s not difficult to be a sports fan in Boston these days. In one 36-hour stretch, the hometown Bruins forced a game seven against the heavily-favored Canadiens; the Celtics commenced their playoff run with an auspicious romping of the Hawks; the Red Sox sewed up their third late-inning comeback in four games to win eight of their last nine and take a commanding lead in the AL East (and the Yankees aren’t even in second); the BC Men’s Hockey Team is still on their NCAA Victory Tour and drawing bigger crowds than John McCain on his Bio Tour; Matty “Ice” Ryan is virtually assured to be a first round draft selection; and the city hosted not one, but two, world-class marathons on consecutive days: the US Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials and the 112th Boston Marathon.

Add to that the cross-pollination of all of these sporting constituents –Bill Belichek and Teddy Bruschi were on-hand to encourage runners of today’s Boston Marathon (I didn’t even mention the Patriots dynasty in the above digest); David Ortiz and Kevin Youkilis lent their voices to the Garden’s crazed audience last night; and Lance Armstrong, in town to run the marathon, threw out the first pitch at Fenway at Friday night’s game –and you have one savvy, sporting crowd. I mean, c’mon, name another city in which six college-age men would brave a brisk April morning half-naked so they could paint in large red letters on their chests J-O-A-N-I-E, a tribute to the most iconic figure in all of US women’s distance running (and beyond, I would argue). And if you don’t know of whom I’m writing, I suggest you put aside this missive immediately and take a moment to brush up on your sporting history. You can start by Googling “arthroscopic knee surgery,” “1984 Olympic Trials winner,” “gold medalist” and “2:21 marathon”.

Clearly, I’m a fan in a fan’s kind of town. And it is within that context that I offer you the following statement: I have just reorganized my list of my top-10 favorite sporting moments to include at the pinnacle an event I witnessed Sunday morning here in Boston at the US Olympic Marathon Trials.

Unlike other sports and their convoluted Olympic selection processes, track and field has always stood by their do-or-die trials format. For all USATF-sanctioned events from the 20k racewalk to the javelin, and the 100m to the marathon, you must show up on a specified date, toe the line against your competitors and finish in the top three in order to punch your ticket to the Olympics. This coolly objective framework pries from sport the hand of politics, and also assigns “the Trials,” as they are known, a Herculean reputation.

Most elite athletic performances are, by definition, challenging; but add to that the white-hot glare of Olympic selection pressure, especially in a sport like Track and Field that enjoys only a quadrennial moment in the sun of widespread public attention, and you have a recipe for drama, intrigue and strategic maneuvering surpassed only by General Hospital’s twice-risen-from-the-dead, ex-sister-in-law’s suspected affairs with her first husband’s jailed brother.

This year’s US Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials were no different. Stacked with talent –including the formidable US Record holder and defending Olympic bronze medalist: Deena Drossin –the field boasted at least a dozen women who had a legitimate shot at making the team, and another dozen who, given the stark “anything-can-happen” truth of the marathon, stood an outside chance of making a Rudy-type run. But if you’ve ever watched a marathon –or better yet, run one –you know that 26.2 miles is a long way and a distance over which the cream almost always rises to the top.

The event’s criterium-style course, engineered by consummate race directing professional Dave MacGillivray, promised a visual feast for spectators as the 153 competitors orbited a compact section of Cambridge and Boston, affording savvy fans who had taken the time to do some simple course reconnaissance an abundant 15 or 20 looks at the evolution of the race.

Now I could go on to give you the 30,000-ft. view of the race –to tell you, for instance, that the safe pre-race money had to be on Drossin as no other woman in the field had a personal best within nearly 10 minutes of her American Record 2:19:36, or that all were surprised when dark horse Magdalena Lewy Boulet built a nearly two-minute lead over the first fourteen miles –but in endurance contests, where the most overt skill is stoicism (witness Lance’s Teflon Tour de France masks), and competitors are trained to give away nothing –not a glance over the shoulder signaling anxiety, nor an unnecessarily ragged exhalation of breath –the fan’s pleasure is in the details.

A careful observer might note that the woman in third place just ran the penultimate loop 18 seconds slower than the loop before and that, combined with the fact that her left arm is now swinging a bit erratically, might mean she’s dangerously fatigued and thus vulnerable; or that the women running together in sixth and seventh attended rival conference schools and are thus more likely to test each other with grueling surges in attempts to break the other’s will.

You see, it’s the interstices between the obvious competitive markers wherein lies the endurance spectator’s reward. There, and in the history: of the sport, of the event and of the participants. To know something about running, to have a sense of the brutality of the marathon (US Olympic marathoner and accomplished author Kenny Moore has written, “The marathon, if run properly, inflicts serious damage”), or to know personally one of the day’s competitors is to introduce the visceral and the emotional into an otherwise compelling but arm’s length experience. So it may come as no surprise to hear that I had all three, and they no doubt, added to my enjoyment of this quadrennial’s US Olympic Marathon Trials.

My day’s reference point was Zoila Gomez, a 28-year old Alamosa, CO denizen and the seventh fastest qualifier entered in the race. Zoila was the lens through which I was viewing the day’s activity; as she went, so went I. And she went well.

At the 13-mile halfway point, she was tucked safely into the lead pack (Lewy Boulet was way off the front), and shortly thereafter when Drossin began to give chase and the happy little pack shattered, Zoila steeled herself and began her solitary march to the finish, engaged in the grim game of counting places to see if she could earn herself a spot on the US Olympic Team.

At 23 miles she was in sixth place; and by 24 miles she’d moved up into fifth. When she passed me at the “mile to go” sign (the 25.2 mile mark of the race), she was about 150 meters behind fourth place and the video I was trying to shoot is perhaps the purest evidence of my unbridled enthusiasm: it shows the fourth place woman soldiering by and then begins to pan calmly down the road, prepared to soak up the full freight of the distance of the gap to Zoila, whose tiny form jumps into focus much more quickly than the photographer expects. A bell goes off: she’s gaining on fourth! At this point all pretense of adept camerawork is shelved in a frenzy of unintelligible but increasingly amplified cheering; the camera struggles desperately to keep Zoila in the viewfinder but it’s clear the photographer is crazed; various ears and shoes of fellow spectators bounce in and out of the screen –up, down, left, right –until, exhausted, the camera falls to the ground, staring unblinkingly up into the blue sky, all the while recording the unmistakable audio of “Go, Zoila! Go! You can get her! Push, Zoila! Vamanos! Zoila, you’re going to catch her!”

And then: darkness.

And in that darkness, during the interregnum between the spent camera shutting off after the overload of recording Zoila’s hunt for fourth place and the much-coveted “Olympic alternate” spot and the moment it switches back on to tape Zoila’s post-race interview, in those last five and a half minutes of the race, the last mile of 26.2 hard miles, Zoila does indeed pass the woman ahead of her and secure herself the alternate spot, meaning that if any of the three women ahead of her get sick or injured or choose not to compete or to compete in a different event at the Olympics, then Zoila will represent the US at the Games in Beijing this August.

What the camera does not show, what it could not show even if it’s bearer had been able to navigate the thick crowds to get in a position to film the finish, is just how fierce a battle Zoila fought to take fourth. And I’m not writing about the fact that she had to struggle mightily just to get within striking distance of the fourth place woman down the finishing straight. Or that then, after over 26 miles of running at a pace most other bipeds could muster for only a lap of a track, she had to dig down to find yet another gear, had to face the fact that she might fall short –that she might just fall, she said later, and have to crawl to the finish; or that from that place with 100, then 50, then 25 meters left in the race and Zoila still in fifth, she somehow responded to the crowd’s urging and pushed a bit harder to pass her competitor with just 10 meters remaining to eke out a one second margin of victory.

No, I’m talking about the twelve years before the moment Zoila crossed the finish line of the US Olympic Trials, cementing her place in US distance running history. You see, when Zoila passed me at one mile to go and I dropped my camera in my excitement, the audio captures three distinct voices: mine (unfortunately); her coach’s; and her sister’s. And while the words we’re yelling are completely different, and even the languages are different, the message is the unified: not “Zoila, you’re almost there,” but “Zoila, you are there.”

The coach is Damon Martin, who guided Zoila through what was inarguably the best Division II running career ever posted by a scholar-athlete (six NCAA titles, 11 All-American certificates and both the 2004 DII Athlete and Scholar-Athlete of the Year Awards) and continues to coach her still. And the sister is Alicia Zapata, the youngest of Zoila’s 15 siblings (Zoila is the penultimate in the birth order), who lives with Zoila, their sister, brother-in-law and two nephews in Colorado. Together, as representatives of sport, family and community, we three are metaphorically emblematic of Zoila’s life to-date.

Zoila immigrated to the States from Mexico when she was sixteen. Only then did she begin to learn English and, amazingly, only then did she begin to run. She became a US citizen in 2005 (20 years to the day after her father was killed in Mexico) and first represented this country in international competition at the Track and Field World Championships in Japan this past fall. That Zoila found her way from a small Mexican town first to a US Junior College, then to a four-year college, then to professional running is astounding; that she did so all the while maintaining her equanimity, her sincerity, her perspective and her generosity is mind-boggling.

In addition to her unshakeable commitment to her sport, Zoila maintains the closest of relationships with her family, often traveling back to Mexico to see her mother and siblings and to give talks at the local schools. She also spends the balance of her training hours involved in targeted community work, either teaching English as a Second Language to unschooled Alamosans or working with youth in after-school programs at the local Boys and Girls Club.

So when that woman –the anchor of a family, the pride of a school, the boon to a community –passed by us at 25.2 miles of a grueling physical test, on the threshold of securing an Olympic berth, I thought, “Of course.” And I also thought, “Thank God.”

Of course Zoila is right in the thick of it, battling it out. And of course she’s going to win. She’s already won. And thank God for sport to remind us, to hit us –participants and spectators alike –over the head with life’s most obvious lessons. Thank God we watch, we observe, we absorb and we cheer. It means we’re human and that we’re engaged, that we, regardless of the degree of difficulty of the private roads ahead and astern, are committed to the race and its graceful, occasionally painful, but rewarding completion.

In Our Thoughts

2008-04-16T21:51:00.002-04:00

Two Arena Athletes have Olympic Trials races this weekend: Sarah Groff and Zoila Gomez. Sarah is racing in a USA Triathlon selection race in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on Saturday; and Zoila is racing in the US Olympic Marathon Trials here in Boston on Sunday. All that said, and as I often tell ITA-interested folks, the chief metric for the success of this organization is not the number of US Olympic Teams made by the athletes on the Roster, but the way in which the athletes on our Roster are able to internalize, translate and transpose the lessons learned in the arena of athletic competition for the benefit and advancement of today’s youngest citizens. So while Sarah and Zoila have prepared meticulously for their races and will, I’m sure, thrive in their competitions, I also know without a doubt that both are performing the highest services in their respective communities. As a result, win or lose, on the team or not come Monday, I’m confident that both women are on a path that leads to their own growth concurrent with the growth and benefit of those fortunate to come in contact with them. Sarah and Zoila, you have the support, respect and strength of this ITA community and of your communities in CA and CO as well. We wish you the best in your races this weekend.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last...

2008-01-16T09:31:00.001-05:00

To the fence-sitters, the equivocators, the Swiss-inclined among you; to those individuals who wonder if the private funding of public good is really such a promising idea; in short, to those who are neutral --or worse: apathetic --about donating to In the Arena or to any worthwhile nonprofit for that matter; to those people this missive is directed.

When did "giving" arrive on your radar screen? When were you first infused with a sense of joy by realizing that the intelligent allocation of your private capital to trained professionals might actually be able to affect significant and meaningful change, change that you yourself had the inclination but perhaps neither the time nor the skill set to pursue?

For many folks this has happened in the recent past, and by recent I mean at about the time that Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono were featured on the cover of Time magazine as "People of the Year" (2005) or when Warren Buffet made public his monumental gift to the Gates Foundation (2006) or for the deeply empathetic among you, when the tsunami wracked Indonesia (2004) or hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast (2005).

No doubt the landscape of philanthropy is evolving and, as a result of the confluence of events (natural disasters) and circumstances (the deplorable state of domestic education or the sub-Saharan spread of HIV) and gifts (on a Buffet-esque order of magnitude and more diminutive, too), philanthropy is enjoying an increasingly broad share of the free rent in people's minds.

But this newly-touted magnanimous instinct is neither new nor wholly magnanimous. It is, in fact, a time-honored and time-tested idea, and one that has helped to push forward this country and to keep us at the forefront of whatever Age it is in which we are immersed: the Industrial, the Modern, the Digital or the Information. At each one of these junctures, private citizens have assumed the mantle of responsibility where public resources have fallen short. This is not a naked critique of our government; rather, it's a championing of the individual's ability to mitigate the more serious problems facing our citizens. It's what makes America America, according to de Tocqueville, or for the results-driven among us, according to the statistics that reveal that our citizens are the most generous in the world (in 2006, the US gave 2.2% of its GDP to the independent sector, as compared to the UK, the second most generous country, which gave .6% of its GDP).

Take for example, the role that private philanthropists played in the founding of this country's first organized (non-religious) athletic leagues. Troubled by the increasingly mischievous and unstructured behavior of the city's young males at the turn of the century, New York's Board of Education began to brainstorm ways to promote character development and to instill in the city's youth an abiding sense of both competition and fair play. Their solution: The Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL), an adult-supervised, after-school athletics program that emphasized participation over individual achievement. Part-assimilation plan for the city's burgeoning immigrant population and part-damage management for the unruly crowds of boys, the PSAL was an idea whose time had come.

There was just one problem: as a private entity, it was ineligible for public funds. According to Steven A. Reiss, in his book "City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports", proponents of the PSAL appealed to the city's financial community for support. And lo and behold, wealthy industrialists Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Solomon Guggenheim, among other benefactors, bankrolled the idea. So it was that in New York City in 1903, a group of private philanthropists launched the first school-based athletic league (versus the club-based programs popular in Europe)and engendered one of this country's initial examples of the ability to leverage the power of sport to effect social change.

Keep in mind that the income tax, otherwise known as the 16th amendment to the US Constitution, wasn't even instituted until 1913, 10 years after Carnegie, Rockefeller and Guggenheim threw their fiscal weight behind the PSAL. So these three men and their peer financiers received no tax break for their contributions; their giving redounded in no way, shape or form to their own bottom lines. Or did it? Might Carnegie have had an interest in building, from the ground up, a generation of workers who would prove both competitive and productive (could have saved him a load of trouble ten years earlier when the Homestead Strike threatened to buckle his steel empire)?

I concede I could be wrong here and I by no means intend to tarnish the generous instincts of any donor. I do think, though, that it's worth highlighting the private agendas behind the public gifts; and further, to sanction those agendas. People give for myriad reasons, and not all of them are purely charitable, nor should they be. People give to make something happen, something they care about. People give to people and to organizations that can make that something happen.

Today, over 100 years after the founding of the PSAL, our country is witnessing the second coming of philanthropy. We've not been mired in "twenty centuries of stony sleep"; in fact, it's been just one century, but a tumultuous one at that. And although the rules have changed and the societal challenges are different, we're still calling upon our private citizens to address public needs. Your instincts need not be Mother-Teresa-pure to give; but your resolve to affect change must be Andrew-Carnegie-steely.

There is a precedent, and a strong and noble one at that, for the deployment of private funds to leverage the power of sport for the public good; and there are precedents for other causes, too. Pick your passion; follow your bliss; jump on the back of this man-made philanthropic beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Olympic Calculus

2008-01-10T16:49:00.000-05:00

Recently I traveled out to San Francisco to give a little speech to the members of the US Olympic Committee's Athlete Advisory Committee (the USOC's AAC, for those who like acronyms). While leaping the hurdle of my fear of public speaking was no small feat, I was grateful for the opportunity to address such a talented audience on a topic about which I am bottomlessly passionate. While the majority of the speech took the form of a series of stories, the last minute or two was consumed by a review of the below calculus.

The entire speech, should you be brave (or bored) enough to read it, can be found on the Scripts page of In the Arena's website. Here's the coda:

Let’s do the Olympic math, shall we?

• 537 US athletes competed in Athens. Another 211 competed in Torino. That’s just shy of 750 US athletes participating in an Olympic cycle.

• And for every one of those athletes who made the team, it’s probably safe to assume that there were two other athletes who were vying for that spot and who also had a legitimate shot at making it. That’s 2,250 athletes.

• If you take 25% of those 2,250 out of the picture because they’re NBA or NHL stars and they’re financially solvent or they’re running their own foundations; and you take another 25 or 30 or even 40% out of the equation because they either have yet to earn their college degrees, have no interest in civic engagement or quite simply, wouldn’t pass the character test to qualify them as superlative mentors; you’re still left with 1,000 athletes.

• If, over the course of a four-year period, each of those athletes spends an average of two years on the Roster, and in each of those years they’re able to touch the lives of 500 children (which is the number In the Arena’s current athletes are achieving), then that’s a thousand athletes positively impacting the lives of a thousand kids.

• In a single Olympic cycle, that’s a million children –a million children—who have a better chance at success as a result of the opportunity to be mentored by an aspiring Olympian.

I’m an English major by trade, but I like that math. And so the question I ask myself every day is: Why not? Why not try to bring about that large-scale change? What is the worst that could happen?

The Best Mile

2007-10-18T18:49:00.001-04:00

"Best" is a complicated adjective; its four-letter, monosyllabic simplicity is at odds with its superlative function. There's nothing simple about naming a "best," unless you're a sixth grader referring to this week's new, "best" friend, who will inevitably and perfunctorily be replaced by next week's newer "best" friend. But these are not the bests in which most folks traffic, especially those who pursue excellence with the monomaniacal focus of an elite athlete.

So when Zoila Gomez, a World Championships marathoner (pictured above with fans at this year's Worlds in Osaka), told me she'd just run her "best" mile, I was all ears. Expecting to be regaled by a tale of superhuman effort and speed, I asked her to give me the play-by-play of the event; but as her story unfolded, it was clear this was no ordinary mile.

"I was in California..." she explained.
That makes sense, I think: even though Zoila lives in Colorado, she grew up in California.

"...And I had an engagement set up to speak at a local high school..."
Zoila makes countless speeches to high, middle and elementary schools, as well as local running clubs, and high school and collegiate running teams, so this too was well within the realm of believability.

"...When I read in the paper that the town's elementary school had a run scheduled for that morning. So I phoned the school and asked if I could participate..."
Could Zoila have laced up her racing flats and scorched a mini-mites road mile off the cuff? Unconventional but impressive.

"...and so I did. I drove over to the school and introduced myself to the students and we talked about running and then we all lined up for the mile race..."
No warm-up, huh?

"...When the race began, the students were so excited they sprinted off the start line and they were laughing so hard a few of them fell down, causing others of us to trip, too, and soon I was part of a pile of third graders, all of us giggling on the ground..."
Wow, a pile-up in the first 100 meters and she still PR'ed?

"...But we all got up and brushed ourselves off and I asked if everyone is OK and they all said 'yes,' so we kept running. And the students asked me all sorts of questions about the Olympics and the marathon and how many miles I run. So we ran and we talked. It was great fun..."
Wait...Zoila had enough oxygen available to have a conversation and the third graders were keeping up with her?

"...And then we finished and the students were so excited and they asked me if I would come back and run with them again next week. And I said 'yes,' of course."

"But, Zoila, how fast did you run?"

"Oh, I don't know. It took us maybe ten minutes. I'm not sure. I didn't time it. But it was my best mile. It wasn't my fastest, but it was my best."

For a woman who routinely logs 120 miles a week and has done so for longer than most of those third graders have been in school, who has run in more races in more countries than she could possibly count, who has amassed more All-American certificates and NCAA titles than any other DII runner in history, who, flatly stated, can choose among thousands upon thousands of miles which is her best, this one won the prize: a one-mile fun run with a group of inquisitive, giggling, third graders. Welcome to the arena.

Civic Engagement

2007-10-17T07:32:00.000-04:00

Some of you may be scratching your heads and wondering from where the phrase "In the Arena" comes. "It's vaguely familiar," you're saying to yourself, "but I just can't seem to place it."

Question answered: the phrase "In the Arena" was coined by Teddy Roosevelt on the steps of the Sorbonne in 1910 when delivering the civic call-to-arms now known as "Citizenship in a Republic":

“It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

For more information on Teddy Roosevelt, including a number of "firsts" that he bagged (one of my own having come last night when I wrote my first blog entry), visit here.

The first time

2007-10-17T01:26:00.000-04:00

You never forget the first time.
So I'm told and so I believe. If that is indeed the case, I am destined to remember this experience of creating, posting and publishing my inaugural blog entry. As such, I'm pleased to feature one of my favorite photographs embedded in this post. It's a photo of an Arena Project in Chula Vista, CA run by Arena Athletes Gabriel Jennings and Sara Hall. How high can you reach?