Running Times, Online

by Katie Wolpert

NOW…

Day 5 of this meet hosted a particularly significant and emotional event for me: the women’s 3000m steeplechase final. It was the first time this race provided the women an opportunity to qualify for the Olymics. This race is particularly near and dear to my heart. Although I was born a few years too late to really be a part of the beginning of the event in this country, I was racing it competitively at a time when national qualifying standards were just being announced, and when those standards were slow enough that even I could consider attempting to run one of them.

So it was with a heart full of excitement and pride that I watched the field of 16 highly qualified women take to the track yesterday, running times worthy of national championships and olympic qualification, and racing each other like we’re meant to do in this sport. My bare arms were kept warm in the chilly night air by adrenaline and excitement as Ann Gaffigan told me afterwards, “Well, I can tell you one thing, this event is legit,” because for many years the steeplechase has been accused of being the event runners do when they aren’t fast enough to be a miler, or a 5K runner. “Those 5K girls would have been left in the dust out there tonight,” Gaffigan said.

The women’s steeple community is small and by necessity, close-knit. Off the track, there’s no such thing as a rival in this sport yet, because the improvement of the entire event is dependant on the steeplers working together. Because although we have a great crop of quality steeplechasers in the country at this time, one lives in Michigan, another in Colorado, and another in Utah. One woman is out there training in Nebraska, another up in Minnesota and a third over in Virginia. There’s not yet enough depth in the event to expect any given race to provide the competitve experience necessary to run fast.

Most of the top steeplers are fairly used to running qualifying times on their own, but in order to prepare for international competition, some amount of racing know-how and experience jumping the barriers with someone on your shoulder is priceless. Ann Gaffigan is responsible for bringing the community together. Through her website, steeplechics.com, she not only promotes the event to onlookers like you and I but she has gathered an incredible resource for the athletes themselves.

She provides schedules of upcoming meets that will have a women’s steeplechase and contact information so that unattached steeplers (who often lack funding or agents) can get themselves entered in the event, and she acts as a liason so that the country’s top female steeplers can arrange to meet up and compete against each other to provide that valuable competitive experience.

The other thing I wanted to tell you about is the discus caddies, but that will have to wait until another time. Thinking about this steeplechase stuff is too exciting, I need to go for a run.

by Katie Wolpert

You can’t do much as a runner without encountering a reminder of how small our community is. The web that connects a daily jogger to an olympic medalist is not very large.

Starting in high school, I cheered for my teammates of course, and my childhood friend who now runs for a different team, my cousin who runs for the school across town and for my neighbor’s granddaughter who is a promising miler for the school from a neighboring town.

In college I cheered for my teammates of course, and the guy who also ran in my home town and my older brother’s friend who runs for another school in my conference. I paid attention to results from across the country to see how my former teammates and rivals are doing in their respective conferences and divisions.

Thus began the construction of my tangled web of running connections. And so I find myself here in Eugene, at the Olympic trials, still tangled in the middle of that same web. I have a high school teammate competing for an Olympic berth in the 400m and a former steeplechase rival in tonight’s finals. I’ll be cheering for a good friend’s running clubmate in the men’s 10,000m and a cross-town aquaintance in the women’s 5,000m.

After the men’s 800m finals on Monday, when three “locals” stormed the finish line to make an Oregon sweep, most of the media members who have been covering events at Hayward for decades declared in absolute terms that the crowd was louder than they’d ever heard before.

Andrew Wheating, though he hails from Vermont, was wearing the colors of the Oregon Ducks and has been adopted here as a native son. Wheating had crossed paths with the town of Eugene and in return, the entire community came together behind the kid and cheered loudly enough to push him through the line in second place. “I thought I was out of the game from the start,” Wheating said, “but I finished faster than I thought I could.”

I’ll be caught up in the excitement of the whole event as much as the next person, but let’s face it, we all want to cheer for a hometown favorite.  So best of luck to you Mary, Maureen, James and Amanda. You might not know who I am anymore, but our paths have crossed in the past and I’ll be yelling for you out there.

Welcome to the Historic Hayward Restaurant. My name is Katie and I’ll be your waitress for the duration of your stay here.

We’ll start you off with an appetizer of broiled 10,000m. Seared at high temperatures to seal in the juices, the dish is served warm and should be savored over 30 minutes or so. Seasoned with strength, strategy and determination and sprinkled liberally with pure guts, this race hints strongly at all the delicious courses yet to come.

Next you’ll get to savor a bowl of delicious heptathlon or decathlon soup (your choice). An aromatic combination of running, jumping and throwing events, this soup pleases all palates. A no-height in the pole vault adds just the right about of spice and drama to create a track-and-field party in your mouth.

The third course is a salad of fresh high school stars in the 400 hurdles, 800m and 100m. This salad challenges your perceptions of how young green athletes can compete with the well-seasoned veterans. It’s dressed in a non-descript off-brand house viniagrette and sprinkled with crunchy world and national junior records.

The main dish is a 100m steak with a Jamaican spice rub. This meaty cut is one of the best in the world. If you’re not careful, it won’t even last 10 seconds. Savor and enjoy.

The steak course will be accompanied by Arkansas’ finest wine, aged 40 years, this Pole Vault Pinot Noir has a smooth takeoff with a bouquet of sweat-filled gyms and a soft finish.

And finally, for dessert we offer a whole range of exciting options ranging from the 800 meters and the 3000 steeplechase (male and female versions for the first time ever!) all the way up to 5 and 10,000 meters. These dishes showcase the refined taste and physical endurance of those who are able to partake. We think that our current dessert menu is the best we’ve had in several decades, perhaps ever.

Throughout the fall, winter and spring, we here at Running Times generally stick to just appetizers and desserts, but at the trials, we really indulge in all of it!

Everything is green out here. Summer has hit with force and pine-covered hills are visible rising beyond the boundaries of Hayward field. The busses are green, the well-watered lawns across campus are lush, the music stage is powered with green (solar) energy, and a booth at the festival outside the track is full of exercise bikes that anyone is welcome to hop on to generate power to their heart’s content. Every trash-can-area comes equipped with one receptacle for trash, one for recycling (plastic and metal) and a third for compost (including the potato startch based cups, plates and utensils).

The city of Eugene is full of good trails, but the most well known, Pre’s Trail, also happens to be most convenient to campus. On a morning run one encounters untold numbers of athletes, coaches and teammates running loops on the 4 mile wood chip trail. Local runners and clubs, have tried, just like Beijing, to put their best foot forward for this event. They re-chipped Pre’s trail and added map kiosks and mile markers.

The Willamette River is flowing steady and clear, and the thought of it calls to me each afternoon as I sit in the stuffy press tent sweating through quarter-final rounds of the sprints.

A breeze picked up towards the end of the meet today and at this late hour, lightening is flashing horizontally across the sky. Hopefully this storm will bring some relief to the warm temperatures, although the warm conditions are certainly appropriate, giving the athletes a taste of what they will be facing in Beijing.

Winning or losing, qualifying or not, the one place out here where the green is dissapating is on the track. Between the red and white stripes of the track, the up and coming stars, some of whom will be returning as favorites in the 2012 trials, are losing their greenbacks, mixing it up with the stars of our sport and toughening up for their next years on the European circuit, or on the roads, or in college and high school.

Seeing them come out here, runners whose names we might not have heard until this meet, is inspiring. When Thomas Morgan took the lead in the men’s 5000m prelim on Friday, he wasn’t controlling the rest of the pack by any means, but he had taken control of his own race. He had run past names that no one would suggest he should be passing. We can’t all run at the Trials, but we can all aspire to run with the heart and guts that are being displayed in every heat at this track meet so far.

by Katie Wolpert

With its new facelift, Hayward Field can set thousands more spectators than ever before, and the stands are full. Extra sets of bleachers (no stadium seating here) have been build around the first curve. The media tent, which used to occupy that space when there were no structures present, has been moved back, behind and below the main grandstand of Hayward.

All of the diligent reporters from the country are packed into two large festival tents with tables, water, coke, a wireless network and some surge protectors. But no view of the track whatsoever. TV screens provide noiseless (that’s alright, the noise travels from the track) video streaming of what is happening on the track.

After each race, the athletes have to funnel through the media tent to get out of the stadium. Barriers are set up along one side of the tent to keep the athletes on one side and all of us blood-sucking, question-throwing journalists, news casters and flocasters on the other. This area is known as The Mixed Zone.

Some athletes surge through the mixed zone as quickly as they can, keeping towards the wall, head down, quick steps. Others, exhausted from their race, stumble carefully toward the exit. The ones who are used to it, or have learned to expect questioning turn towards the waiting media and field questions.

Molly Huddle, dejected after a race where she “just had nothing,” was close to tears as she described how she wasn’t even tired because, “I couldn’t dig, I couldn’t even run hard enough to tire my legs out.” She shuffled on into the post dusk darkness, while the rest of the world around her celebrated the incredible show put on by the three front runners.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Lopez Lomong. Lomong has a great story of overcoming incredible hardship before he wound up in the US seven years ago and becoming a US citizen less than a year ago. After the 800m finals though, you might have thought he was a 10 year old kid, who just learned he was allowed to have cake AND ice cream for dessert. He was jumping around and smiling ear to ear, so excited to “run all five races.” He is entered in the 800m (three rounds) and the 1500m (two rounds). He won his heat of the 800 and has the second fastest 1500m time in the country this year. Lomong is obviously thrilled just to be competing and is not bashful about sharing his enthusiasm with strangers or friends.

It took the diminutive Laura Roesler quite a while to make it through the mixed zone. She first started in, before she had to retreat to a water cooler to sit down. Roesler, a 16 year-old who just finished her sophmore year of high school was dizzy. She tried again after resting for a few minutes, answered three questions and had to excuse herself to go back to her cooler. She is already a 4 time state champion in the 400m and a three time champ in the 100, 200 and 800m. She also has 2 state cross country titles to her name. Now she is an automatic qualifier to the semi-finals of the 800m at the Olympic Trials.

I was certainly jealous of those who were able to sit in the stands all day, watching the races in person. But as the meet got rolling, I came to understand how much you can tell about a race just from watching the athletes. Interviews are not always necessary.

Much to my relief, I found that there was enough time during the 5000 and 10000m races to finish my duties in the media tent and then get out into the stands to watch the rest of the race. The setup though was more like a hop, skip AND a jump … or two. I would wrap up my reporting from the previous heat, check the status of my entries and hop up. I’d skip (ok, it was probably more like running, maybe jogging, for safety’s sake) out of the tent to the rickety green staircase and jump up those stairs 3 at a time to the mid-level of the grandstands where I could find an open spot on the bleachers to squeeze into for the duration of the event.

As soon as the winners finished I would hop up and excuse myself from the folks sitting around me (a grandmotherly looking woman with a marvelous hairdo and a shiny green polyester shirt) and skim down the steps, back to the mixed zone and my duties down there.