Running Shorts

Suffering from post-Olympics withdrawal? Turn on USA channel to find Law & Order instead of table tennis? Don't know what to do without sports on 24/7? Unsure of how to schedule out a day that doesn't revolved around a combination of live streaming, DVR recording, and spoiler avoiding? Yeah, me too. Which means it's the perfect time to talk about the Olympics that just happened! One week out, here are four of my biggest takeaways -- two about Athletics in general and two about the distance slate specifically. 1. Athletics (because that's what the rest of the world calls it) remains the premier event in the Olympics.  While in America NBC played up the swimming and women's gymnastics competitions -- because American dominance plays into the "America #1 heck yeah!" narrative -- the Athletics events were by far the most prestigious of the games. From the iconic marathon final on the last day (with the medal ceremony at the closing ceremony) to the Wor...

With the Olympics starting this week (!), I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. The Marathon Major Model When it comes to road racing, only one event really matters: the marathon. Oh sure, every other distance from one mile on up may be contested and may be competitive, but the only one that people really care about is the marathon. It's the standard by which all other distance races are judged. As it currently exists, the Abbot World Marathon Major series is actually the closest thing athletics has to a fully professional circuit....

With the Olympics coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. A New Calendar of Competition This proposal to fix the sport is going to focus on track and field; specifically, the outdoor competition schedule. Or, rather, the lack thereof. The current calendar is...a mess, to put it mildly. Once every four years there is an incredibly important global championship -- the Olympics. In odd-numbered non-Olympic years, there is another global championship, albeit somewhat less meaningful. In even-numbered non-Oly...

With the Olympics coming up in three weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It wold be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. Shamateurism to Professionalism Athletics exists in a state of shamateurism . On the one hand, it is a professional sport, in that individuals athletes can make money from it (how much they actually make is appalling, but still...). On the other hand, athletics is governed by amateur rules that directly limit the ability of its professional athletes to make money. It's this weird, nebulous purgatory that definitely isn't amateur but isn't fully profes...