Running news roundup

A lot has been happening in the world of endurance sports, and since this is my blog, I would like to offer my take on some of the top headlines of late. If I were writing for a respected news outlet, I would be required to mention that this piece does not necessarily reflect the opinions of this organization, its sponsors or its affiliates. But let’s be real—this blog never has been, nor ever will be, a respected news outlet. And it definitely doesn’t have any sponsors or affiliates. So, I think I’m safe in that regard. Also, I would like to point out that I realize I have missed the window of timeliness on some of these items, especially by journalistic standards. Again, this blog is not a respected news outlet, so those rules do not apply. (Sorry, Mom and Dad—that journalism degree will come in handy at some point. I promise am fairly confident.)

A different kind of paid appearance: the Suzy Favor-Hamilton debacle

Look, I’ve seen Pretty Woman. I know there are a lot of Vivian Wards out there just waiting for their own Edward Lewis to whisk them away from a world of blonde wigs and cheap platform shoes in a white stretch limousine.

Suzy Favor-Hamilton is not Vivian Ward. She’s not the charmingly unrefined “hooker with a heart of gold” who dreams of a better life. She’s an Olympian with a successful real estate business, a $600,000 home and a loving husband and daughter.

A former world-class athlete voluntarily “going the distance” with the rich sleazeballs who frequent the high-roller tables at the glitziest casinos in Vegas? That’s not charming. It’s gross. And a little bit sad.

I’ve heard a lot of stories about has-been athletes unraveling in the wake of their inevitable retirement from professional sports. Ryan Leaf. Dennis Rodman. O.J. Simpson.

Those guys did some pretty terrible things, but as a former middle distance runner, I was genuinely rocked by Suzy’s admission. It’s usually male athletes who fall from grace after being “caught with their pants down” in the midst of some kind of crime or scandal. Suzy’s exposure was both more literal and more surprising.

As shocked and disappointed as I was when I first heard about this story, I found myself slowly drumming up some sympathy for poor Suzy. Why? Because something she said resonated with me: she missed the thrill of competition, and her double-life as a high priced call girl somehow filled that void.

Why she didn’t try filling that void with skydiving, base jumping, drinking tap water in Mexico or some other similarly-risky-but-less-morally-questionable behavior is beyond me. I miss the thrill of competition too, but I get my adrenaline fix by singing terrible country karaoke in bars full of drunk strangers. (If only Suzy and I had connected before this whole thing blew up—it all could have been avoided with a simple duet version of “Strawberry Wine” by Deana Carter!)

Also, for any other Olympic runners out there who are interested in leading secret lives as Vegas escorts, here’s a golden drop of advice: you might want to keep the whole Olympic runner thing under wraps. No matter how rich and successful they become, dudes will never stop bragging to each other about their “conquests”—even if they technically paid for them. Bedding an Olympian? You better believe that one’s gonna come out at next week’s poker night.

Liestrong

Speaking of getting caught with your pants down*, let’s talk about Lying Lance Armstrong.

I am well aware that technically, this story isn’t about running; it’s about running’s rude, less attractive cousin—cycling. But I think it deserves a mention because it centers on an issue that affects all endurance sports, including distance running: blood doping and the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Lance Armstrong’s recent Oprah interview—in which he confessed to using banned substances during his seven-year streak of Tour de France victories—dealt a heavy blow to athletes across the globe with highly disproportionate quads-to-biceps ratios.

I mean, if THE Lance Armstrong—a longtime proponent of sportsmanship who for years vehemently denied gaining any sort of unfair advantage through the use of banned substances—is actually a lying cheat, what does that mean for the rest of us? I feel like I’ve lost all faith in not only the purity of sport, but also in humankind in general.

The benefit of the doubt is dead to me. There is no longer any benefit. Benefit scammed thousands of people out of their life savings in an elaborate Ponzi scheme and then hightailed it to Mexico. Benefit borrowed your Mad Men season 2 DVD box set and then dropped off the face of the planet. Benefit ordered a dozen shots of Patrón on your tab and then slipped out the back door of the bar.

Now there is only doubt. Doubt in the legitimacy of every notable performance in distance racing. Doubt in the moral fortitude of my childhood heroes. Doubt in sportsmanship and the sanctity of honest competition. Of all the times I have been beaten in a race (not that there are very many), how many were true losses? I will never know. It’s not like Oprah is going to demand answers from every person who’s ever won a 5K.

It makes me sick to think of all of the social cause bracelets I have refused to wear out of loyalty to that original yellow silicone band. I politely accepted dozens of imposters—pink for breast cancer awareness, green for cervical cancer awareness, even blue for prostate cancer awareness—only to bury them at the bottom of my junk drawer.

Turns out, the only imposter in this sad situation is the man behind that rubber ring of hope. It’s a good thing Oprah is such a classy lady. If I had been the one sitting across from Lance when he dropped the doping bombshell, I probably would have kicked him in the nut.

Presidential run

Here’s a news item that further corroborates my longstanding theory that Maine is way too close to Canada for its own sanity, and that eventually it probably will just sort of quietly fade into Quebec.

Some crazy dude decided it would be super awesome to run from his home in Maine to the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C. Total distance: 700 miles, or approximately 27 full marathons.

I don’t know about you, but my list of people for whom I would run 27 consecutive marathons is pretty short:

People for Whom I Would Run 27 Consecutive Marathons

1. Pat Sajak (assuming I have a spot as a contestant on Wheel)
2. Prince William (pre-Kate, obviously)
3. Carrot Top (if he was chasing me)

Sorry, crazy Maine guy—clearly my list is way too exclusive for an American president to make the cut.

In fairness, he did raise money for charity through his efforts, so I have to give him props for that. All I’m saying is that next time, maybe he could run to a Bon Jovi concert or something cool like that.


*I’m not really sure if that idiom applies here, but let’s just assume that at some point, Lance pulled down his pants to give himself a steroid shot in the derrière (that’s French for buttocks, since we’re also assuming that said offense occurred in France).

TSA-holes

Well, I knew that knocking on wood wasn’t going to last forever. Eventually, my knuckles would get sore. Or I would get injured.

I am happy to report that all of my hand joints are in tip-top condition. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for my left Achilles tendon.

What really grinds my gears is that I’m pretty sure I didn’t hurt it running. It’s been almost a year since my college career—a.k.a. five years of walking a string-thin tightrope between peak fitness and serious injury—went off the air, and I have definitely dialed back both the quantity and quality of my mileage.

The last few weeks have been particularly jog-tastic, as I find it difficult to coax my legs into moving quickly when it’s dark and 21 degrees outside. (For real ya’ll—could I get some daylight savings up in here?)

So, as a mature, responsible adult who appreciates the values of character and integrity, I have decided to pawn the blame off on someone else. And that someone is TSA.

That’s right, folks—the Transportation Security Administration has it out for fit, active individuals like you and me.

Imagine the following scenario: You’re in line at airport security. You have all of your liquids organized and safely zipped inside of a one-quart plastic bag. You have your laptop out of its case and ready for examination. You even remembered to wear pants that don’t require a belt, just to speed up the process so you can hurry up and wait in line some more.

Of course, airports are big, and you anticipated having to walk a fair distance once you arrive at your destination. So in the interest of comfort, you wore your running shoes. Big mistake.

Now you’re jamming up the line as you scramble to untie your double-knotted laces. The man behind you sighs loudly in an attempt to inform you of the inconvenience you have caused him, as it has now been close to 30 seconds since he removed his Denver Broncos Crocs, and he still hasn’t gone through the metal detector thingy yet.

The TSA agent rolls his eyes at you as you carefully place your prized pair of Asics Cumulus on the belt. When you collect your footwear and the rest of your possessions on the other side of the Wand Squad, you cause yet another logjam as you bend over to put your shoes back on and re-tie the laces. You’re pretty sure Croc guy gave you the finger as he huffed off to the C gates with his backpack on wheels.

And to think, all of this could have been avoided by wearing a simpler—albeit less supportive—pair of shoes.

So guess what? That’s what I did. I wore a pair of flimsy canvas flats through the entire Las Vegas airport. Then I wore them through a giant Las Vegas shopping mall. And when I cruised up and down the strip with the rest of the drunken tourists? Yep, I wore them then too.

But Brooke—you might ask—why didn’t you just wear your running shoes once you got to Vegas?

Because I’m already a pasty-ass Montanan who has no business wearing shorts in a town full of fake tans and, well, other fake things. So I wasn’t about to make myself even more of an aesthetic misfit by tromping around in a pair of dirty sneakers.

Well, then why didn’t you just pack another pair of cuter, more supportive shoes?

Because I had to cram everything I wanted to take into a tiny carry-on bag, since I’m cheap and I refused to pay $40 to have the airlines accidentally fly my bag to India (again). Supportive shoes tend to be more bulky, which is why they didn’t make the cut.

So, by way of deductive reasoning, airport security is 100 percent responsible for the stinging pain I feel at the base of my heel bone every time something—including the back of a shoe—touches it.

Are you happy now, TSA? You got your way—now I can’t wear any shoes with straps, buckles or laces. I am confined to clogs and Ugg boots, which severely limits my workout options (last time I checked, my gym didn’t offer any Irish clogging classes).

I’m stuck in the pool until further notice, which, among other things, means I will have bad hair until further notice. Stand by.

Vegas vexation

You know how that famous scene from Chariots of Fire makes beach running seem like the epitome of fitness fun, when in reality it just gives you Achilles tendonitis and makes you smell like sweaty fish?

My weekend in Las Vegas was kind of like that.

Like many things in life, my Sin City experience didn’t exactly live up to all of the Hollywood hype.

I didn’t win a car. I didn’t get a suntan. I didn’t meet anyone famous (not even Criss Angel, Mindfreak). Wayne Newton didn’t invite me to ride horses at his sprawling desert retreat. I didn’t even get roofied or wake up with a jungle cat in the bathroom.

What I did do was:

(a) wander aimlessly down the strip, breathing in an ever-present vapor of cheap cologne and cigarette smoke.

(b) pay $12 for one freaking Mimosa, which I sipped while lounging on an upholstered poolside Chaise lounge that reeked of cheap cologne and cigarette smoke.

(c) run on a treadmill—despite the fact that it was 75 degrees outside—in a hotel fitness room that smelled like cheap cologne and cigarette smoke.

Why, you might wonder, would I resort to working out in such a respiratorily hostile environment, surrounded by greasy, hungover dudes in cutoff t-shirts?

Because if I had braved the streets of Vegas, I would not have gotten anywhere without running into:

(a) a horde of intoxicated tourists.

(b) a neighborhood where all of the buildings have metal bars over the doors and windows.

(c) Carrot Top.

To drive home my point, I have created the following chart. Do with it what you will.