USATF: Terminally Addicted to Mediocrity

As any addict knows, the first step to realizing that you have a problem is admitting that you have a problem. In NASCAR’s case, it took the better part of declining revenue over the last decade to convene a $5 million dollar study to figure out why. What it turned up is not rocket science, but had they not done the study, it would have been guesswork, and it is likely that powers that be who are running NASCAR would have been far less motivated to change had the answers not been reported right there, in black and white.

Why does USATF have such a problem recognizing that it has a problem? Well, if we look at the NASCAR example, it was the case of declining revenue. Perhaps USATF is too stupid to realize that, for a global sport, it has no revenue. Because all I see are the same people getting the same free trips playing the same power games and rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. And unlike the Titanic, when it goes down, it will go down in relative silence.

There are numerous reasons for this, and they’ve been hashed out over and over again, but it is depressing to see the same battles being fought over and over again. Those of us in the ‘80’s thought, “well, they got past the Cascade Run Off, and finally admitted that they money could go to the athletes so we’re finally professional.” Except that it hasn’t been that easy. The current logo wars get to the heart of a couple things, the athletes desire to govern themselves and the paper pushers at a national governing body seeing their power slipping away when the money gets into the hands of the athletes.

Lets understand that there is no way for anyone at the national office who gives a damn about the athletes to interpret the Nike contract the way that they did regarding extra sponsorship. Even the former CEO of USATF disagrees with that interpretation.

The only reason to not let athletes get as many sponsorships as they want is to keep power in the hands of the few. Athletes with money are notoriously difficult to push around. Like most boards, they will continue to elect their buddies, so that their buddies can continue to rub their backs when the time comes. Its an incestuous system that helps no one but them.

So how do you get more revenue? More sponsorships? You need to get eyeballs. And to do that you need media. Lots of media, continued media coverage, exciting well produced media coverage. None of which USATF has whatsoever. I recently rewatched the Olympic Marathon Trials, the Arkansas Meet and Indoor Nationals just to get a quick feel for the three most recent telecasts before doing this blog post. So what came across from watching the three in rapid succession?

No one is interested in watching the sport. The sheer number of empty seats in the stands at the meets, and this on grandstands that appear to be only 6 rows deep, tells you a ton, and the stretches of cold, ugly concrete with no fans on them on the Houston course finishes off the story. No one cares. USATF’s decision to move the trials marathon to lonely Houston when they had the national media by the nose in Boston and New York is a case of one step forward, three or four steps backward. And, if we are to believe it, it was the difference in about $500,000. In case anyone cares to correct me, I believe that the difference in the Boston/NYC bids was in the $700K range as opposed to $1.2M in Houston.

So its not a hard formula: make the races exciting and visually compelling for televised media, and keep it in front of people's faces.

How to make the races exciting? Well, personalities would help. And not putting the athletes in identical uniforms is huge. (Anyone recall the marathon majors about 7 years ago agreeing to us different uniforms on the leading athletes? They were then introduced via the onscreen graphics to us with that racing vest and shorts. You could also stop using condensed fonts on bib numbers so that it is utterly impossible to read on television.) I'm not sure there was a worse moment than when Nike outfit all the women of the elite 1500 at the Pre a few years ago ALL WITH THE SAME BRA TOP AND SHORTS. Honestly, these people continue to make the same mistakes year after year. 2011 was no better than 2000 which was really no better than 1992.

The television producers need to watch old tapes to understand that the camera angles and focus points need to change. The way that a meet is televised is much like football: its a better sport on the big screen when its done right. But rarely is it shot right. As a minor sport in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure that figuring out how to televise a track meet by revisiting older track meets and seeing what does/doesn't work isn't too high up on their priorities list, but they're professionals and it should be. And, again, USATF should be working with television to grow the sport and make it more media friendly, and it certainly doesn't appear that that is the case.

more later...

July 1983: Introducing the Tarahumara

This is a little something for those who think that Born to Run was the introduction to the Tarahumara. This ad, for the Bill Rodgers apparel appeared in the July 1983 issue of The Runner. Enjoy!

MBT Pulls Back, But Not Out

Reading the latest interview of Joe Casagrande, the new president of MBT is like reading a story where every other paragraph the person is looking down talking around their most recent failure without admitting that they ever did anything wrong. It reads like an abasement in public, which is essentially what it is.

What is most important, however, is reading that:

Casagrande eschews the toning label and instead refers to MBT as "Euro comfort with physiological footwear properties" 

Seriously? Do I have to do a quick internet search wherein we find MBT sitting on their "rocker technology" as their main selling point, telling the gullible consumer how this great new tech was going to change how they wallked forever and make everything all better. Of course, since a $25 million dollar class action lawsuit was settled over "toning footwear" and its patently false claims, its no wonder that they want to distance themselves from the "toning" label. Whether they can distance themselves from all the consumers that they've hurt with their $200+ shoes is another question. The "great new direction" of MBT should ring alarm bells of everyone who bought their outrageous claims, and had to pay through the nose for the privilege.

Odd how Joe says that "2007 through 2009 were strong growth years" and at the same time says that some of the retailers who were responsible for that strong growth "... were not set up to sell premium product inthe $200-$275 price range...". So which is it? You grew, so they obviously sold the product, and yet now you'll pull the line because they were not set up to sell the product?

Whats sad is that I'm going to continue to customers who come in with their knees and back hurting after purchasing MBT products, especially older consumers, and who force them selves to wear the shoes (as a good friend's mother did) not because they like them, but because they spent a lot of money on them. Sad.

Again NBC Dumps on Runners: Oly Trials Won't Be Live

They’ve done it again. NBC is refusing to air the Mens Olympic Trails Marathon live. Is that why they have Universal Sports? So that they can refuse to televise fascinating sports events? How easy is it to match the drama of the all-or-nothing top-3-or-stay-home drama of the Oly Trials? Not too easy, and yet, again, they refuse to air it.

Anyone remember the great battle for making the Olympic Marathon Team back in 2004? Culpepper surging past Meb in a make or break move that turned into Culpepper’s only marathon victory? Of course you don’t. Because NBC refused to air it AT ALL. The local affiliate actually asked to televise and NBC didn’t even allow them to.

The level of outright hatred to our sport is showing here. The people at NBC had repeatedly, against everyone hoping otherwise, shown how much they HATE our sport. Go back to 1996, when they didn’t air Bob Kennedy taking the lead in the 5,000m with two laps to go on the east coast. I know, because I kept the TV on til 2am that morning waiting for them to show even a single lap of the event.

For everyone who thought that the Trials going to Houston was a good thing: for the difference of $600,000, the idiots at USATF scuttled the sport and forgot how big the 2008 Trials were. If they were in New York, Whittenberg would never allow the race not to be streamed live. Moving the race to a city that far off the radar was moronic, and now the lack of live race shows how little anyone at NBC cares. It makes even less sense to realize that they could charge a fee and get the dedicated runners to watch the web, and then get national advertising on the general show in the afternoon. You don’t have to have 20 different anchors NBC.

They have forgotten how dramatic the race was in November of 2007. Multiple changes to the third place, favorites falling out, Hall running at 2:06 pace in the middle of the race on the hills of Central Park, Sell being pursued by the former world record holder for the final spot. It was brilliant. Dramatic, Exciting.

Everything that sports is supposed to be. And now none of us will be able to see it.

We can see marathons from Berlin and Frankfurt and Rotterdam and others live on the web or on Universal Sports. But we can’t watch the selection of our own Olympic Team.

They’re fools, and they hate us. Not just disinterested, they can’t stand us. They hate the sport and wish to hell that we would all just go away. That way their Olympics could be swimmers and gymnastics and beach volleyball without all the boring running to get in the way.

You like being hated? Think that NBC having control over the Olympics has literally been the worst possible thing for this sport to have in the last 20 years? Tell them how much you hate being dumped on, and having the best part of your sport taken from you.

Let your voice be heard and contact NBC Sports & the Houston Marathon:
NBC Sports-  Twitter: @nbc_sports  Email: nbcsportshelp@nbcuni.com
Houston Marathon- Facebook  Twitter: @HoustonMarathon
Race Director, Steve Karpas
skarpas@chevronhoustonmarathon.com
Phone: 713-957-3453

Elite Distance Running: How Do We Define Successful?

Toni revis has hit the nail on the head so many times in his recent blog post that I won’t post it here in its entirety (just go read it), but simply add a bit more to the pot.

Except for strong fields at their San Diego home marathon, the Carlsbad 5000 up the coast, and the RnR Philadelphia Half Marathon, CGI’s working model pays one marquee athlete (like American Olympic medalists Shalane Flanagan in the recent Rock `n’ Roll San Antonio Half Marathon, or Meb Keflizighi at their Los Angeles and San Jose half-marathons) a healthy appearance fee to run a solo effort without the inconvenience of competition.

Taking on the Competitor Group for its business policies is pretty easy: we assume that they’re putting on a race, and they are, but not an elite race. They pay to have one show pony and then the rest of us poor slobs get to show up and race each other. So what’s the problem?

The problem is the sport of running versus the sport of elite running, of world class and Olympic running. As your average master’s competitor, I will have no problem finding lots of age group competition at pretty much any race I go to. It’ll be a dog fight most of the time.

Yet, it is elite racing at the highest level that interests some of us, even though recent demographics will show that there aren’t that many of us out there. What Toni is talking about is seeing the complete ladder, from jogger to NCAA athlete, to USA competitor, to Olympian. Its not just the elite runners and the rest of the shlubs below (quite a few rungs missing on the ladder there), it’s the whole numbers game that makes the ladder work.

If you have 1,000 high school runners, you likely have 100 college runners, and maybe 1 who will go on to become elite. Make that number 10,000 in high school and you’ve got an even greater chance to have more elite runners. So, yes, it is disturbing when a fairly elite college athlete like Lukas Verzbicas ditches Oregon because he looks about two or three rungs up and realizes, “I don’t think that I’ll ever get there.”

You only get so many of those athletes.

The IAAF and the IOC only have themselves to blame in a lot of ways. They have given away all the marketing that might have given them new generations of runners, mostly black Africans, that could have replaced Geb and Tergat in the minds and hearts of runners the world over. They have let the TV stations and sponsors take away the distance races because it was easy to concentrate on the sprints and the crowd-pleasing showboating and now they’re left without any distance runners who can dream of taking on the Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance in XC, nor any who have the chance to queue up in a global 10,000 and go after Bekele. Ritzenhein tracking him down in 2009 in his Paris 5K was certainly a rare event.

So why don’t you have a new Geb and Tergat? Because, just like baseball’s insane steroid fueled race to get new home runs, the idiotic obsession on times and times alone has taken all of the great racing out of the sport. And without great competition, there goes the sport.

It really isn’t hard to make the case. People remember Coe and Ovett trading the mile and 1500 records but none of them can remember the time. They remember Geb and Tergat racing each other down to the inch in the Sydney Games because it was played over and over again. For every one that wants a Lasse Viren/Michael Jordan/Pete Sampras you have to remember that it was their greatness being defined by great competition that makes us remember them.

The oddities in the drug testing (or lack of testing thereof), the arcane nature of the sports governing bodies (Paula Radcliffe’s off and on world record), and NBC’s desire to Up Close and Personal athletes, wringing every ounce of tragedy out of their backstory, while not televising the actual competition, have all shifted the spotlight away from what used to be memorable sporting competitions. After all, what we remember in sports are the match-ups, the great battles, the edge of your seat moments in sports.

For the elite runners community to change this is to have to learn what the rest of the world has learned, from Tennis to Futbol to Rugby to Baseball: how you market the sport matters. Matters a lot. The answer is not to start cutting events but to make the events better competitions. The cancellation of World XC to an every other year event is disturbing because it represents yet another loss for the world’s runners to stay in the limelight. Or to see the race live on TV in HD and decide that next year they want to be running over hill and through mud and try to chase down a leader. We know from the numbers game that if we don’t have youngsters who are inspired to join the chase then there is no chance to ever have another Ryan Hall pushing the leaders at mile 24 of the London Marathon.

Peter Vigneron of Outside Magazine commented on Toni’s blog post –

Reavis sees competitive running as a commodity. Or he must, because that is the only metric by which it is not wildly successful. Otherwise, things are humming along nicely: international competitive running has never been more competitive, American competitive distance running has never been more competitive, and more people are running and entering races in the United States than ever before. 

And while I agree with Peter that American running is more competitive than ever in the last decade than since the 1970’s, a huge achievement given the black pit that was the ‘90’s, I disagree that distance running is wildly successful. There are a dearth of races for the almost world class, there is the distressing lack of world cross country for the national class athlete to test himself/herself in. There is a distressing lack of the rest of the world in the lead pack of the Olympic Marathon. My ideal? The lead pack of the Athens Olympic Marathon (and I’m doing this from memory here): an Italian, an American, South African, Kenyan, Brasilian, Ethiopian & Englishman. That is my successful metric for international distance running.

Thoughts?

Occupy Your Local Economy: Voting With Your Dollars

With Black Friday rapidly approaching, the economy still in flux, and Facebook all a–jitter with worker-to-CEO ratios, here is a scary thought: retrain yourself and do your holiday shopping differently this year. Don’t buy over the internet and put $0 back into your local economy, buy everything locally. Need a book? Don’t go to Amazon, have your local bookseller order it.

Be the smarter than the Wal-Marts of the world think you are. Don’t line up at 5am for Black Friday deals at Target. Understand that companies, especially large corporations, only understand the bottom line, so you vote with every single dollar you spend.

We have to look past the familiar logos to see that not every company is what they would like to be seen as. Example number one is Lululemon, the Canadian yoga firm built upon a "fluffy warm bunny/empowerment" reputation, the same company that is putting the phrase “Who is John Galt?” on their bags.

Now, Lululemon is not the first firm to use shock to keep themselves in the news and on the lips of their customers. Benetton was doing that in the 1980’s with provocative marketing. But somehow, using an Ayn Rand reference from “Atlas Shrugged” (the aforementioned “Who is John Galt?” phrase), a novel that is being drawn upon by the Tea Party for inspiration, and one that references unregulated capitalism and selfishness, seems to fly directly in the face of the community building that inspires the yoga crowd.

Where does the money go on those $98 yoga pants?

Do more shopping with cash, check or debit cards as opposed to credit cards, especially with small business, which pay more to run a Visa or MC than the larger stores.

All of this will have more of a profound effect on your local economy than sitting in a park. Like viewing election results, you can’t complain if you didn’t vote. You vote with your wallet every day, we all do, and it can, a little bit every day, change the world we live in.

Can't You Just Pick A Shoe? Asics 33 series and NB MT00

Those of us in the shoe biz find ourselves continually walking a tightrope of figuring out what the customer might want to actually spend money on versus what we might want to be able to recommend to help the feet/ankles/knees etc. And in what color. Its not easy to do so even in a stable environment, and the current shoe selling market is anything but. There are move versions of shoes and colors and designs on the horizon than ever before, and more corresponding confusion than ever before.

Take Asics, which has had the guts to take a stand when it comes to exactly how far they’re going to follow the minimalistic trend. They’ve even produced a video or two explaining it.

Key to what they're designing is in this line:

We find it interesting that this definition has traditionally described racing flats, a product not traditionally associated with every-day training for the average runner.

And I certainly enjoyed finally seeing this line in "print" by one of the shoe companies. I've been using this same line to customers for a year a half now, and even bringing out old racing flats to show that the minimalist shoe really isn't a new thing. All in the way to bringing the conversation around to what the customer hopes to gain by going to the vastly thinner and lighter shoe. That means that Asics is going to go lightweight and flexible but still with a 20mm high heel/10mm high forefoot on the whole 33 line. I have two of the 33 line, what i think are the very best two, one for the road and for the trail, coming in the spring.

Asics has their 33 collection coming out now and continuing into the spring, and has taken, for better or worse depending how you feel about it, a principled stand on what they think is safe and can sell to their customers and still go home and sleep well at night.

And one wonders how the makers of MBT and Reebok and other toning shoes can do the same. At this point, I suspect that they’re going home and sleeping less well from the $25 million lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission over false advertising related to the toning shoes. Sketchers has voluntarily changed their verbage in their ads to avoid being sued in a similar fashion one suspects.

It has been an interesting time in the shoe world, trying to separate out claims of zero drop vs barefoot vs minimalist given how many of the categories overlap in design. The Zero Drop aspect, one of the most intriguing, given that it can allow for two of the things the most bother the novice barefoot user: lack of protection and lack of tread, while not putting the runner into any sort of pitched forward position. We’ve not see a ton of shoes that fit the bill yet, although the Altras and Hokas have ventured there, and New Balance’s new spring line looks exceptionally promising (sadly it won’t be here til March).

The very fact that it takes me this long, and this many words to even start to describe that changes in design to the shoes should tell you just how much variation there is today.

Winter is a Pain in Northern CA – Hard to find any takers for rain jackets when it’s a brutal 60 degrees and sunny in the middle of November. Gloves? Ski mask? Baklava? No, its still t-shirt and shorts weather for a walk or run. Wow.

With that in mind, I have a new shipment of Havaianas flip flops coming in this week. All beautiful colors and designs and, I get to say this, just PERFECT for mid November!