The Unbelievable Niceness of Elites

Dear diary,

Today was a big day. I got to go for a run with two-time Olympian Alan Culpepper, and I met Scott Jurek, America's leading ultrarunner.

During the run with Alan and while talking with Scott, I was impressed by four things:

1. When Olympians run, their feet make no sound. Amazing. Try it sometime. Impossible.
2. Scott Jurek is a very tall man, surprisingly tall for a guy who regularly runs 100 miles at once.
3. People who run a lot, and I mean a lot, run with extremely consistent pacing.
4. Alan Culpepper's slowest workout pace is my 5K race pace.

Alan is now a coworker in the Boulder office of Competitor Group. Scott moved to Boulder to train for the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a ridiculously hard ultramarathon, and he'd stopped by the office for a quick photo shoot. Over the past several years, I'd corresponded over email with both men, asking for their endorsement of several of our running and nutrition books. Fortunately, they liked all the books I sent them and both were gracious and generous with their support.

After today's run and run-in, it struck me that elite athletes tend to be really... nice! Sure, some athletes will blow you off, but most of the elites I've met in person (Alan, Scott, Chris Carmichael, Erin Mirabella, Tim Johnson, Joe Parkin, Karl Menzies, Bob Mionske, Michael Barry, Mark Plaatjes, Craig Alexander) have really been quite nice. Like nicer than the average person you might meet at a friend's dinner party. The athletes I've met have been nicer even than non-athlete sports professionals, though most I've met have been quite cordial as well.

How is that that such driven, singularly focused people are so nice? They're on top of the world, paid to do what they love, adored by fans. Athletes come and go, and they have to make the best of their 15 minutes. The pond of endurance sports is not a big one, so athletes rely on their sponsors, their popularity with fans, and on their performances. Sure, anyone can keep up a cordial act for the few minutes it takes to meet someone. Sure, I meet athletes under pretty good circumstances.

Yet not all of them have been nice. I think I know why: all the elites I've found rude have been removed from the height of their greatness, either by time or performance. Even after paying them large sums of money to appear at events, I was barely acknowledged by two cyclists who haven't ridden professionally in 30 years. A decade after the height of his career, I was ignored by one of the world's best ski racers despite holding a copy of the first American edition of his biography in my hand. Some former elite cyclists in Boulder have asked me rather brusquely for donations to their causes, despite any real connection to them.

These rude elites are not washed-up has-beens. All have found some way to spin their athletic success into comfortable careers. So why the rudeness?

Elite sports are the domain of the young. Having found success at a young age, untempered by the wisdom gained in failure, elites flame out of their sports before they are prepared to leave. As Joe Parkin has said, most cyclists don't retire. Most don't even know which race will be their last. Beaten and exhausted, they just quit. Most of us need to work for decades to find success. To have that pyramid turned upside down, to find success early and lose it so soon, to become a usual person after having been special, that must be a rude awakening.

What does it take to retire with civility intact? 

The Most Effective Email Ever Sent by a Social Network

Subject: Dave, 51 of your connections changed jobs in 2010.

What We Feel When We Run: a Review of Haruki Murakami's Book

What was I thinking?

This morning I finished reading Haruki Murakami's book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. For a few years, it had seemed to me that the book was mentioned in the running media with the same reverence normally reserved for books like Lore of Running and Once a Runner. We're publishing our own running memoir this year, and having seen What I Talk About laying around the office, I thought I should read it. I expected it to be taut, maybe a bit mystical. I think I thought it would be for running what Tim Krabbe's The Rider is for cycling.

Just two chapters in, I was thinking about putting it down. At first, it felt like Murakami was rambling and spending too much time qualifying that this book was simply about what running was like for him. After 50 pages, I realized I was reacting to Murakami's complete lack of pretense. There is no artifice between writer and reader. Murakami writes plainly. When Murakami runs, you run. When he tires, you tire. It's not because Murakami's descriptions are lively. They aren't. He describes passing roadkill during a run from Athens to Marathon with as much pragmatism as those whose job it is to remove roadkill. The reader knows Murakami's experience as a runner because the reader is also a runner. The genius of What I Talk About is not the creation of an experience for the reader, but its evocation of experiences the reader has already had. There is no need for Murakami to describe the act of running because we fill it in for him. Instead, he describes the feelings his running brings out in him, and we feel them in our own way. This common experience of running becomes a conversation with Murakami. He says: here is how running makes me feel. Naturally, I thought about how running feels different to me. I thought about how running is the same for me a Murakami and how we are different in our running. Did Murakami plan on this being my reaction? Murakami made me realize that, though everyone runs by alternating the left and right feet, running is a different experience for each runner. The act of running evokes a unique response in each of us, and Murakami's book asks us to think about how running is for us.

Murakami's book is thought of by longtime runners as being particularly quotable, but I don't think this is particularly true. Parts of his book leave strong impressions, but the words themselves are not succinct. When searching for the book's title, Google auto-suggests adding the word "quotes" after it. Clicking on the top result brings you to a blog that quotes literature. The three What I Talk About quotes are over 3,500 words. Murakami writes in impressions. Yet he quotes someone early in the book, "In the act of shaving lies a philosophy." He explains that he feels any act repeated often comes to reflect the person repeating it. For Murakami, running and writing are deeply personal rituals, in part because he has run and written so much.

What I Talk About is really an improvised run. Murakami is an impulsive man, and he felt it time to write this book, so he did. I imagine him sitting at his sun-bathed desk in his open-air office in Hawaii and completing a sentence. He looks up and his eyes focus. Something has stirred in him and broken his stream of thoughts. There will be no more writing now. I think of him rising out of his chair, stepping tightly to his running shoes, which lie neatly next to the door, facing outward. He lifts off his shirt, stretching upward, breathing a deep breath and tingling in anticipation. He opens the door and, head down, begins his run. Murakami has no route in mind, no thoughts, just an urge to move. He must run until he is spent. As his body warms and his legs unspool, he is able to lift his eyes from their clouded writer's haze to see the ocean-side, the trees, the signposts easing past. He tells us what this feels like to him and we feel what it would feel like to us.

For Murakami, running is a moving experience, pardon the pun, and his experience has moved me. What I Talk About has made me think differently about running. I feel sad for those who run blankly or not enough to feel some hint of the depth Murakami draws from running. In the end What I Talk About is more than a description of what we feel when we run, more than a conversation among runners. Murakami describes how this act of running, repeated often, has come to reflect the person he is. He describes how running has challenged him to become better. In making me more aware of this process, Murakami and I will run together for a long time.