Letters to the Editor
Frank Smith, Bluff City, KS
Published Letters: 161 Editor's Choice: 15
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On your knees!!!
[Read the article: Never mind]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ex-Admiral Reed used to be Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, Iraq.
I had a knee replacement five years ago. I asked my doctor what I couldn't do.
He said, "You can't run and you can't kneel."
I wasn't "...able to run after breaking my back in 1989," I said, "...and I'm not a Catholic or a carpet layer, so that shouldn't be a problem."
Nowadays I would have added, "...nor a Senator from Idaho, Tennessee or South Carolina, nor a Flag Rank Officer in the U.S. Military."
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Yeah, I saw that in "Fargo"
[Read the article: "We got naked and got in the Jacuzzi"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]MARGE
Okay, I want you to tell me what
these fellas looked like.
HOOKER ONE
Well, the little guy, he was
kinda funny-looking.
MARGE
In what way?
HOOKER ONE
I dunno. Just funny-looking.
MARGE
Can you be any more specific?
HOOKER ONE
I couldn't really say. He wasn't
circumcised.
MARGE
Was he funny-looking apart from
that?
HOOKER ONE
Yah.
MARGE
So you were having sex with the
little fella, then?
HOOKER ONE
Uh-huh.
MARGE
Is there anything else you can
tell me about him?
HOOKER ONE
No. Like I say, he was funny-looking.
More'n most people even.
MARGE
And what about the other fella?
HOOKER TWO
He was a little older. Looked like
the Marlboro man.
MARGE
Yah?
HOOKER TWO
Yah. Maybe I'm sayin' that cause
he smoked Marlboros.
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Bunk, bunk and more bunk
[Read the article: How Oprah ruined the marathon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What a sorry article!
I started running marathons in 1955 when I was 16 and was damn good at it. Everyone who ran them in those days was damn good at it and most of us knew each other. A massive, scarring lung disease contracted in 1963 kept me from every being a top flight runner again, but I still could break an hour for ten miles at 44 years old.
Back in the '50s, the average time for U.S. runners completing a marathon was possibly far faster than at any time in history. In 1955, Oprah was one year old.
In 1971 or so, the NY Road Runners Club really popularized the race beyond the less competitive devotees that ran Boston each year. Bigger fields meant slower times. But U.S. road racing and cross country had been popular since the beginning of the 20th Century. Tough, competitive races such as S.F.'s Cross City/Bay to Breakers, Marin County's Dipsea, Cambridge's Hyde Shoe and many others were local traditions and barely slowed even for World Wars. The NYRR allowed women to compete even though they had previously been discouraged from running as as far as 800 meters for decades.
What really slowed average times, beyond the growing popularity of the sport, more was the magical notion that the marathon was a special distance. People who simply did not have nor could they ever develop the necessary physiology to ever be seriously competitive decided, however inappropriately, that it was a desired challenge. But 26.2 miles/42 kilometers is an extremely arbitrary distance. In competitive athletics, few runners show much "range." Not many 100 meter specialists can last for 400. Not many 5,000 meter stars are impressive at a half mile. Exceptions such as Julie Brown, Joan Benoit Samuelson, or even less well known runners such as Ivan Huff were quite rare. So most marathoners were running the "wrong" for them, distance.
The reason that native born Americans are less competitive than they were during the flowering of road running in the '70s, is that I believe they simply do not have the genes, that is, the physiology for it. A raising in the U.S. standard of living has also taken its toll. Thanks to better nutrituion, we have bigger kids, they don't walk to school every day and don't run much at all. Except for the rare "sport," just like racehorses, we're pushing the limits of our inherited ability to compete at the level to which distance running has risen. European-Americans could compete against West Africans and do quite well, but not only Kenyans could clean both groups' clocks, but so could their closer tribal cousins, the Tanzanians, Ugandans, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalinese, and even an occasional South African. If you look at their gracile frames, their tiny calves, you will get a better understanding of why this is the case. Another very different physiological group, the Algerians, the Moroccans, also seem better equipped for the rigors of running rapidly for 15 minutes to a couple of hours. Orientals have competed at a world class level for many years, including the Koreans who startled the world at the 1932 Olympics and their genetic cousins in China and Japan.
Lastly, I'm obliged to mention that this country has been blessed with a long history of athletic prowess, including in distance running, for instance with one of the greatest marathoners of all time, Clarence DeMar. We've raised up and nurtured a wide ethnic variety of champion distance runners, from John A. Kelley, to Tarzan Brown, to Ted Corbitt, to Maria Trujillo. And while the tunnel-visioned Salon writer McClelland drops names, I hope he won't forget Dick Beardall, who gave as good as he got whether running against native born Americans like Ron Tabb or "imported" champions such as Alberto Salazar, and he did it more often than almost anyone.