The Ideal

Another decent week of mileage is in the rear-view mirror, but the workouts in these past seven days gave me more trouble than I expected. I had to work very hard to stay within 50 metres of my primary training partner on Tuesday's 6x(3min quick+ 1 min surge) up on the McMaster indoor track and was well off goal half-marathon pace during a 4 mile tempo on Thursday. Thankfully a 29 kilometre run with 13k at an estimation of current marathon pace went quite well, thereby salvaging the week somewhat in terms of quality. 

Part of the reason for my lacklustre workouts the past week may have been the residual fatigue that carried over from the week before, and possibly the two hours I spent cross country skiing in the Dundas Valley on Sunday. 

I absolutely love cross country skiing, even if my technique could use some serious tweaking. I've owned a pair of  of classic skis since Christmas 2007 and in all that time have only gone on ungroomed trails/golf courses when the snow has permitted, which altogether has likely been less than 20 times (school work got in the way of many chances the past five years). 

I tend to think the way cross country skiing is broadcast in Canada and the United States during World Cup and Olympic events is the ideal that distance running should strive for. Many of the races are of a similar duration; the men's 50km event at the Vancouver Games took around two hours and five minutes to complete, similar to Sammy Wanjiru's 2:06:32 for the marathon at the Beijing Olympics two years earlier. Yet there is a stark difference in the quality of the commentary, primarily because knowledgable former athletes are often brought in to provide analysis during the ski events while major marathons and long distance track races feature a talking head who has often been prepped more about the materials in a particular athlete's shoe than who the major players for medals are and their history. 

Can this be changed? Absolutely. But it will likely take Canadians and Americans winning consistently on the world stage (again) for networks to take notice and focus more on the compelling story of the race that is unfolding rather than the personal tragedy of some homegrown talent meant to pull at the heartstrings rather than stimulate the minds of viewers.