Running, my love, I hate you

Running (not sprinting) can be cool. I swear.

When I was a freshman in high school, I wasn't an especially good runner. I headed to the regional meet that my team had qualified for to watch them and watch my brother run for his school. His team was racing in the toughest division in the state, and probably wasn't going to make it out, so it was almost certainly going to be his final cross country race.

I ended up not really watching my brother. His race, which featured the best three teams in the state, also featured the top two runners in the state, the only guys who had a chance of winning the Ohio Division 1 race a week later. Their names were Levi Fox and Jeff See, and they had a rivalry of sorts that probably existed more in my head than in real life, because their schools were not rivals in any sense. Those two had placed first and second in every common race they'd run that year; See first, Fox second.

So while See went into the region as the overwhelming favorite, there was just no way you could count Levi (this is what everybody called them at the time: See by his last name and Levi by his first. This doesn't indicate preference or familiarity for me, it would just feel weird to refer to them any other way) out; he had that incredible long hair flopping in the wind and was running unbelievably fast times.

You especially couldn't count Levi out once the race had started. 400 meters after the start, Levi Fox was 75 meters clear of the field. After months of running with See and slowly falling back, Levi had had enough. He decided to go for it, and see if See could reel him in. He'd be running alone, making it more difficult on himself, but at least he would make See work for a win, and know it.

By a mile, he had to be 200 meters ahead. It was unbelievable. The best runner in the state looked like he might lose.

Of course he wouldn't stay ahead by that much. Going out so fast meant he would be trying to hold on, not win going away. This is the nature of distance running. See started reeling him in. Still, past the two-mile mark, Levi had the lead. You could see his tactic had had an effect. See was working harder than normal, it was visible from his facial expression.

Jeff See ended up catching Levi Fox and winning the race by about 15 meters. Levi was so spent at the finish line he looked like your run-of-the-mill half-marathoner who went out too fast and paid the price at the finish. He might as well have lost his legs 100 meters back. But he finished.

That remains among the most excited I've ever been watching a sporting event (we'll call running a sport for simplicity's sake). Watching those two go at it, and watching Levi go for it, even though he failed, was thrilling. There's no comparison for that type of decision in any other sport. But it was amazing to watch.

We rarely see this type of thing in elite running these days, where the accepted style is to go slower than most runners are capable of running for most of the race, then turn it into an unbelievable sprint over the final 100/200/lap (American Leo Manzano probably benefited from this type of racing in the men's 1500-meter this Olympics, in a shocking result for him).

That's why distance running is boring. Unless you're a huge fan, you didn't appreciate Galen Rupp's fantastic final 800 to grab silver in the 10k at these Olympics. For the most part, that race was run in a tightly-packed group. While it spread at the end, it was easy for a great deal throughout.

Nobody had any guts. Nobody wanted to make a move and take a chance. Evidently it's much wiser to sit back and try to out-sprint Ethiopians and Kenyans. That has worked a few times in these Olympics, but not very often otherwise.

There's a reason Steve Prefontaine is the most well-like and revered American runner ever, even though he won nothing. Prefontaine took races out from the start and made everyone kill themselves trying to keep up. That way, all he had to do was out-gut them over the final lap. He made races a battle and wasn't scared of anybody. Today, professional distance runners are in a type of condition I can't even imagine. But none of them are interested in using it. It's a shame, because if they did, people might start to realized the 1500 and 5k are way cooler races than the 100 or the 200.

I'm a distance runner, I'm probably biased. But I do think I appreciate the speed and power generated by sprinters. One of the best sprinters in the state went to my high school. He was running the 100 about a second slower than it took Usain Bolt to finish. While a second is a long ways on the track, seeing that power up close (which I did many times) is still amazing. It was something to marvel at, something I would never be able to duplicate.

It's just that the sprints, while cool, are more home-run derby or dunk contest. They're fun, but not as good as the actual game. Middle-distance and distance running is the actual game.

All the sprinting I've seen in person and on TV has never had the effect on me the race between Jeff See and Levi Fox did. See and Fox haven't amounted to much as runners at the international level. Imagine the show their counterparts in the Olympics could be giving us.