Writing About Running

Whenever there is a baseball game on the radio my wife usually remarks how evocative the game is in this format. She is right. Baseball is evocative and even more so on the radio with its built in nostalgia and call upon our imaginations to supply the missing sights and sounds of the game. As a result baseball has some of the best sports writing in history with superb writers like Gay Talese and John Updike writing on themes of redemption or the search for reclaimed glory.

Writing about running seems harder for some reason. Sprints are too short and marathons are too long may be part of the problem. Maybe also that the greatness is as much internal as external and harder to capture. Where are the stories about Deena Kastor and her brilliant and gutty strategy at the Athens Olympics starting out so slowly that she wasn't in the top thirty half through the race and than reeling in the now faltering runners ahead of her in the heat and humidity of Athens until she captured a rare marathon medal for the US?

Here's to Jere Longman of the NY Times who profiled Joan Benoit Samuelson this morning before she became the first woman marathoner in history to go sub-2:50 in five different decades. Sandwiched between a photo of a triumphant Samuelson at the inaugural woman's marathon in Los Angeles in 1984 and one of the middle aged runner of today were these words: "She is 53 now, her hair has gone gray, and there is autumn in her legs."

Today Joan Beniot Samuelson ran a 2:47 on an unseasonably hot day and Jere Longman became one of my favorite sports writers.