off and running

My buddy Ed Basquill with a fun but insightful article in Running Times...

I love running because it is pure total aggression. Many other sports seem to have left their roots, and are no longer the games I used to play or can relate to today.

For example, I am watching the Vikings play the Redskins. The Redskins' receiver makes an obvious non-catch where the officials miss the call and call it a catch. It is an obvious error and the Redskins know it, so they rush to the line of scrimmage and snap the ball to prevent Minnesota from having time to “challenge.” They fumble the snap and the Vikings recover, but the Redskins then challenge, saying the Vikings had 12 men on the field -- and win the challenge.

The Vikings need a new position on their roster: team lawyer. Theoretically, they could now challenge based on the twelve men on the field penalty, saying that there never was a play so they can still challenge the bad call. Don’t lawyers have enough work in this crazy world?

Just as running is about training hard and running races, football used to be about athletes competing, and not video litigation. Without the technology, we would have just had a simple bad call, which would have evened out eventually. Instead, I lost precious minutes out of life I will never get back, a sponsor got more advertising time while the investigation took place, and the game moved a few steps further from what is played in the park down the street.

On my varsity crew team in college, we had an expression: “It’s not the chariots, it’s the horses” meaning, its not the boats but the style and power of the oarsmen: it’s all about the crew. That is a statement that used to be true, but isn’t anymore.

World class rowing now has a price of entry in the form of the most state of the art rowing shells, not unlike professional cyclists and their bicycles. Lance Armstrong’s great book used poetic license to make a good title: instead of “It’s Not About the Bike” it should have read “Only Some Of It Is About the Bike.” I did my first triathlon in 1999, riding a 1989 Schwinn LeTour -- to the smirks of many. Even my Trek 1200, so low end as to barely register as a racing bike, makes a huge difference in how well I can compete.

I grew up within a mile of Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia and have been a life-long Eagles fan. No number of losses could challenge my loyalty to the Eagles, but one victory did. The Eagles beat Dallas, our arch-rival. The Eagles are up by four with a little over two minutes left, have the ball and are driving. McNabb throws a pass to a wide open Brian Westbrook who can cake walk into the end-zone, except he doesn’t. He downs the ball on the one. This move is widely commended as great strategy by everybody I could find, because it allowed the Eagles to run the clock down and win the game by 4.

How can everyone forget? This is a football game, and this is Dallas, Dallas! An eleven point lead with less than two minutes left is pretty safe. But if you want safe, play cards. This is football! Where is the passion? Where is the aggression? The fact that offensive linemen are about one hundred pounds heavier than they were twenty years ago, before steroids were perfected and mass produced, is not evidence of better players but of a different game in a different weight class.

Running is the primal element of sports. Its essence is what makes sports like football exciting. In the middle of a high scoring game, with a lot of big plays, announcers describe the game as “a track meet.”

Competitive running is not for the faint of heart -- which is why when Lance Armstrong finished the 2006 New York City Marathon, he told the Associated Press that it was “the hardest physical thing I have ever done.” Besides the seven long bike races climbing through the French Pyrenees, Lance's bout with cancer and chemotherapy treatments all qualify as experiences that one might think of as a “hard physical thing.”

I once got tossed out of a flag football game. When I grabbed the flag, the guy pulled away, and I maybe had a tiny thread from his nylon running shorts with the flag. He ended up running down the field in just his jock strap, as his shorts weren’t made very well. At this point, the referee had a choice: he could have penalized the runner for being out of uniform, exposing himself and rigging the flag to his shorts so it couldn’t be pulled off, or he could throw me out of the game for roughing. The call didn’t go my way, but I didn’t complain. Chances go 'round, and sports build character, we used to say. That doesn’t seem to be true anymore in big time sports. The lesson today isn’t to work hard and persevere through trials, but to lawyer up early.