fifteen-hundred meters as fast as you can

Life in Amsterdam has been slow going the past week or so. I am finally in full health again so I am looking forward to getting back on the track. We have done a few workouts now and have decided not to rush back into competitions. I was on the start list for the mile in Braschaat (sp?) but never had the intention of running after getting sick. Congratulations to Alan for taking down the long-standing American record in the mile. I was going to travel up there to watch the race but decided against it after a hard workout yesterday morning. I work out with Alan occasionally back in DC, so his time came as no surprise to me. He is in phenomenal shape and it was only a matter of time until he took that record down. Hopefully in a few years the two of us will be able to push each other to even faster times!

Life here revolves entirely around training which usually means a cup of coffee followed by a morning run through the Vondel Park. After that it is on to some core work, breakfast and resting up for the afternoon session. The highlight of the day might be a trip to Albert Heijn to get groceries or a brief shopping excursion or anything to get out of the house for an hour or so. Usually Mark Fountain, Alistair Cragg and I sit across the street at the Toussaint Cafe and drink even more coffee. Alistair and I purchased bikes which have given us the ability to see a bit more of the city and also allowed us to get to the Amsterdamse Bos (best place in the world to run) and the Olympic Stadium for training in just a few minutes. I thrive on the urban environment so I feel right at home in this city. It is one of the easiest cities to get around in and its relative density means I can flee to the outskirts on my bike. We live in Oud-West for anyone familiar with the city. We are basically on the edge of the city center so our neighborhood is quiet and free of tourists who flock to this city in droves.

Next week, on one of my light training days, I am hoping to do a design tour of the city by visiting Droog, Sprmrkt, and Frozen Fountain. The Netherlands is home to some of the greatest designers and architects of this century including Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders, Jurgen Bey, Bertjan Pot, Piet Boon, and Rem Koolhaas. For anyone interested in industrial design Amsterdam is like Disneyland.

The pictures above are of my bike and I, a sculpture in Museumplein, and the Rijksmuseum

I haven’t posted for awhile now because once I landed in Rome my health began rapidly deteriorating to the point that finding the energy to type a sentence sounded like a monumental task. Initially I put it out of my mind and I refused to believe that I couldn’t run well even if I wasn’t at 100%. I even convinced my coach to let me warm up for the race in Rome and only after not being able to make it 20 minutes without having to stop and cough did I finally submit to the possibility that I might be sick. Juli didn’t want me making things worse so there was no way she was letting me out on that track. I was crushed to not be able to line up in Rome as I had looked forward to running in that meet for the past year after setting my personal best there last summer. I know I am in better shape than last year and I wanted to put my fitness to the test there against a very good field. Saturday morning I woke up feeling terrible with a bad headache and I finally admitted that I might be sick. I still thought maybe it was the fact that I was up kind of late and that the feeling would wear off as the day progressed. I decided to go for a run with Alistair Cragg, my thinking being that a little cough is nothing to whine on about so I better just get on with it until it clears up. Around 12 minutes in I had to turn around after spending 5 of those initially 12 minutes coughing my lungs into oblivion. I think that was the actual moment I was finally convinced something was really wrong even though something had obviously been wrong for the entire preceding week. Once I made it back to the hotel things only got worse. My head began hurting and I developed a terrible fever. You prepare to race for so long and you get so focused that you don’t pay attention to anything else. I had been constantly convincing myself that there was no way I could be sick and that I could will my way through any obstacle. Humility comes to you in the harshest ways sometimes.

That afternoon Alistair Cragg, my coach, Juli Henner, and I traveled to Amsterdam, which serves as home for the summer months. Nothing is worse than traveling with a fever and a bad cough. Flying with a violent cough, a fever, and a headache is bad, but having to go through it 7,000 miles away from your mother is even worse. I wish my Mom could have been there to take care of me. By the time we arrived in Amsterdam it was finally late enough in the day that I could call my doctor back home in DC to get his opinion. He diagnosed it as bronchitis and suggested that I see a doctor in Amsterdam to make sure that I was being properly diagnosed and to make sure that it wasn’t something even more serious.

I have yet to see Michael Moore’s new film so I don’t know what he says about the Dutch medical care system, but it was the most efficient operation I have ever encountered (I have done no prior research before making this claim and in no way am I stating that I believe the US medical care system to be less effective or efficient than elsewhere). I asked the concierge at Juli’s hotel how I could see a doctor as soon as possible. It was 6PM on a Friday evening and within a minute he was able to give me the number to a medical center that would dispatch doctors to your residence. Within 30 minutes there was a doctor knocking at my door. He also thought I had an infection and prescribed a course of antibiotics.

The rest of Saturday and Sunday is much of a blur. I just remember that at that point I could have cared less about running or anything else in the world. All I wanted was to not feel sick anymore. Everything was put into perspective when woke up this morning realizing that I need to pay closer attention to my health in the future. There will always be more races, but this is the only body that I get and it is the only tool of my trade. So much of this sport is about putting your body through grueling pain and so often athletes will refuse to listen to their bodies because the mind can often take more than the body will let it at certain points. Everyone thinks that you have to use your head to will yourself to do more and more when all to often at this level it is the exact opposite. You usually have to use your head to train more intelligently by knowing when to stop and listen to what your body is trying to say.

3:45 for 14th is not what I would have expected for my first race in Europe. I haven’t been feeling 100% the past week and when you race at this level, what feels like a minor illness can compound itself into a terrible result. I have a slight upper respiratory infection that I thought was past its worse. I hate excuses and dropping out never really crossed my mind so I hung in there and suffered my way through that last lap. It felt like an eternity. Part of the sport is dealing with situations where your body doesn’t want to do what the mind wills. It is past me now and I am looking forward to what lies ahead. I traveled to Rome early this morning after managing to get a few hours sleep before waking at 4AM to catch a bus to the Geneva Airport. We arrived in Rome to sunny skies and warm weather, a welcomed site when contrasted with last night in Lausanne where it was 45 and raining on and off. It is a new day so I will look forward to what lies ahead. Assuming I am feeling better I will line up at the Rome Golden Gala meet Friday night to contest the 1500m and then run an 800m in Lignano, Italy on Sunday.

Switzerland is known for its graphic design. After all it is the land of Helvetica, the only font to have a full length documentary produced about it. The streets of Lausanne are littered with posters like those below and compared to the postering and wet pasting that happens in a city like New York these posters are unobtrusive and perhaps even a welcome site to the eyes. I recently purchased the book Altitude which documents the current state of Swiss graphic design. Check it out if you are at all interested in contemporary graphic design. I only had to walk about twenty yards to photograph the posters below.

My European season will begin where it first began in 2005, in Lausanne, Switzerland at the Athletissima meeting. I will most likely remain on the continent for 10 weeks because the brutal summer days in DC have never been apologetic for their effect on my training. Since Lausanne is my first race in Europe I arrived Friday morning to acclimate in preparation for the race Tuesday night. My early arrival meant my room wouldn’t be ready for a few hours and I was afforded the opportunity to actually explore a city I was racing in. At most races I find myself rarely venturing beyond a few blocks of the hotel since I have to race within a few days of arriving and don’t want to add any physical stress to my legs by wandering about. This means I waste many days lying around watching TV in languages I can’t understand. Such a glamorous life eh? Thank God for sports since they transcend the language barrier. I’ve been watching a slew of the sports I love. Formula 1 followed by Wimbledon and finally the Meeting Gaz de France Golden League. I watched it live and commercial free! I was starving off my fatigue and trying to beat the jet lag (or is it jet leg?) when the 1500m came on. I was excited for this race because both of my occasional training partners, Alan Webb and Kevin Sullivan, were in it and I knew Alan had a great shot at winning. Man what a race! Alan took down Mehdi Baala in front of his home crowd. They looked pretty evenly matched and when Baala came by Alan I knew that neither of them was going to give an inch. Alan fought back and came down the final straight just behind, but gaining ever so slightly. Baala wasn’t going to falter and Alan showed a tremendous amount of courage by continuing to push with his face clinched in a grimace of pain. He came by Baala the last 5 meters and it was all over. Alan just won a Golden League race and further cemented the resurgence of American distance running! The look on his face after he finished said it all. He showed real emotion unlike a lot of the other winners throughout then night who were all so used to winning these big races that they take them for granted and show little or no excitement. I don’t care how many races you win, each one is special in its own way and celebration and excitement are merited and should be encouraged. The sport would feed off of that energy. Think about football touchdown celebrations, NASCAR donuts, and Formula 1 champagne spraying. Those guys express their excitement for all to see and it is a contagious emotion that spreads to the fans as well.

Lausanne itself is beautiful. I like to think of it as the Swiss Riviera except on Lake Geneva. The weather is perfect here and you couldn’t ask for a better location for a track meet. There are banners and posters all over the city advertising the presence of the meet and when anyone asks why I am in Lausanne their reaction to my response indicates a tremendous amount of respect for the sport and the quality of the meet. They definitely don’t ask, like so many Americans I meet do, “So have you ever run a marathon? No?” As if what they really want to say is, “Even I’ve, run a marathon.”

The picture below is of the marina in Lausanne which is just a few steps from the front door of the hotel.

Again I apologize for not writing anything in awhile. I think I am still adjusting to having a blog and the responsibility I have placed on myself to keep it up to date. The past two weeks have been hectic. Coming off a disappointing race at the US Championships was at first devastating but has since become the motivation I need to continue to focus on the season ahead. Championship races are the most important part of this sport and they are what all athletes prepare for. It is head to head competition at its purest. You become so invested in the process of preparing solely to be ready to run on that one day, so when it doesn’t go well it really is devastating at first. All those hours of training, lifting, ice baths, painful massages to loosen tight muscles, everything that gets sacrificed to chase this dream. The moment I crossed that finish line nothing else seemed to matter. I was in tears for the next hour and on and off for the remainder of the night simply because so much emotion went into that race and it didn’t get to come out as excitement so it came out in deep disappointment.

Once I traveled home and reflected on the outcome I began to look forward to all that lies ahead, both in terms of this season and beyond. Time is on my side. I’m young and I know that if I continue to train hard and continue to learn and seek out my weaknesses that great things will come eventually. This is one profession where hard work and patience will always pay off.