Wednesday 111214

Late afternoon – early evening.  10 miles.  3 degrees, so cold.  And sort of humid (65%+).  No beard for me to create a good ice beard, but I had build up around the hat.  I wore a jacket yesterday but with the humidity it seemed like I was just soaking underneath it so I went with a wool poly sweater today.  While it looked old man like it worked a lot better.  10 miles

Really slow in the cold and the dark.  Just one of those runs …

News stuff – A “podcast” interview with Benji and Amie Durden from Flatirons Running.  If you listen, you can hear Greg W selling shoes in the background.  Pretty fascinating stuff – particularly when Benji talks about the 1980s trials, and how Rodgers and Bjorklund didn’t attend, and Kardong couldn’t make it because of Mt St Helens.  Quite a bit of stuff in there about how they feel about PEDs. (near quote) “I was once told by someone of importance in our sport, who I won’t name, that I was not serious because I wouldn’t take drugs.”  Good listen.
-not running related but sort of as I keep an eye on the local XC team:  I have wondered why the local HS XC team moved up in the past year to the 5A (largest school) classification, but football stayed 4A.  Basically how the counts are divided up are outlined here.  In some regard it doesn’t matter – but at some point it does for some of those teams and individuals.  For example, I was talking to someone about the girl who won the 3A championship.  If you stacked the results across the board, she would have not cracked the top 30.  On the other side, the 2A champ for boys, would have won all the races outright with the time he posted (but even that is hard to compare since he ran about 4 hours earlier in cooler temps).
- still catching up on last week’s news.  NYCM - The “look” that Kipsang threw Desisa after Desisa bumped him (Desisa was completely flailing and Kipsang looked like he was jogging), and then just put the race to bed – incredible.  Oh yeah, and now add a malaria injection to the list of “why I tested positive for PEDs” all time great excuse list.

25 that influence more … this one is going to come across as being a bit of a homer but … how many people in CO have actually been intimately involved in making their take on running a state law?  And how many of them have also been the guy that has scripted multiple World Champions?  Or brought hundreds of people to the start line of a race to do something that they would probably never otherwise do?

Okay, burro racing is somewhat niche.  But it is Colorado’s Heritage Summer State Sport as passed by the legislature.  There are only a few people that can lay claim to driving that to completion and two of them are in the shot above:  Bill Lee and Brad Wann.  Bill is, along with Curtis Imrie, one of the cornerstones of this indigenous to Colorado sport – and Bill has been bringing people to it for decades.  Look at the board listing world champions over the last six plus decades of burro racing in Colorado, and Bill’s burros are all over it.

Each summer people come out and do the crazy “ass” summer sport of burro racing – a combination of some ultra event of running, and zen-like  patience with an animal.  Some love it.  Some like it.  Some hate it.  Everyone I have talked with who has done it walks away from it with a new appreciation for something.  That is influence.  And Bill makes it happen for those people at a level that no one else does, year after year.

It has drawn the slow runner and the fast runner.  Heck, even Jon Sinclair did it.  Colorado Hall of Famer that will never be because he pisses folks off Tom Sobal smoked the Fairplay course – 29 miles with a climb to 13k feet from 10k feet over roads, trail and mountain meadow in 3:45 – with a Bill Lee burro.  Last year 20 burros were brought to Fairplay, because people wanted to try the sport.  No else brings burros in that number to let people try this sport (some actually never have even been near a burro before that day).  That is influence.

 
The guy has his own set of running history as well – running races like Leadville, Mohican, Angeles Crest, and Western back in the days of 28k modem dial up and before lotteries were the way you got in.  Simply by the nature of how long he has been doing it, he is one of those guys that has seen more of the the MUT running scene than  most of us ever will.

Am I biased because of my relationship with him?  Hell yeah.  But it is my blog and my list.  I started the list because I wanted to point out people who had moved the sport more than some guy who blogs a lot  – and clearly Bill has done that.