Optimal Training

The Internet Decade

It's not every New Year's you get to reflect on the past decade.  I took a look back on the past ten years in my latest article at Runner's Tribe and found that the one thing that has affected nearly every aspect of my life is the Internet.  And not just my personal life, but the entire sport of track and field.  As I write,

Ten years ago, I'd never visited sites like DyeStat, MileSplit or LetsRun, if they even existed.  But the rise of these sites provided a place for runners young and old to follow the progress of athletes around the country, to benchmark against better athletes, and to improve their knowledge of the sport.  Then, with the creation of Flotrack, we were suddenly able to see the races as they were run and to hear the athletes in their own words.  Instead of just names on papers, the heroes of our sport became actual human beings.

With the decreased barriers to aggregating historical race results, a number of sites like Tilastopaja, All-Athletics, Athletic.net and ARRS are tracking historical results beyond what had ever been available before.  We can find race results in real time simply by searching for the meet name and we can give our opinion on those results just as fast with a simple tweet.  Heck, we can even go out for a run and have our watches upload our route to a website where we can share it with others.

All this is in stark contrast to ten years ago, when I guesstimated how far and fast I ran every morning, I had no idea what 90% of the top runners looked or sounded like, and I got all my track and field news from Track and Field News (the magazine, not the site).

I don't see this change slowing down either.  Besides the current shift from a PC-based online environment to a mobile-based environment, I see major changes in store in a number of other areas.  I explain five of them in the post, but you'll have to click here to read it.

Happy New Year, all, and here's to a fun and productive new decade!

Nike vs FL Part 2 - What Can Foot Locker Do?

In my last article about Nike vs Foot Locker, there was an implicit assumption in my argument that Nike was going to overtake Foot Locker as the "championship of choice" for high school cross country.  That assumption was that Foot Locker can't (or at least won't) do anything to upend Nike's ambitions.  

I wrote that Nike appeared to be pulling out all the stops to make NXN the premier championship event, and that Foot Locker didn't have many options.  I didn't write much about those options, however.  The closest I came was this paragraph.

I don't expect Foot Locker to go away any time soon, and part of me hopes they get creative and put up a fight with Nike, but they'll be hard pressed to do so without a team element.  I feel like they need to have all the top individuals to stay relevant, not half, not most, all of them.  I don't know how they can do this...maybe delay their races by a week?  They'll need to do something, especially with Nike pulling out all the stops to make NXN the premier high school cross country championship in the country.

Shortly after publishing the article, it nagged at me that I didn't dive into this a little more.  After all, Foot Locker has been a mainstay of high school cross country for 30 years.  They still put on a great event, they still draw a higher percentage of the top individuals, and for the time being, they still crown the "individual national champion".  So let's assume that Foot Locker is willing to make some bold moves.  Let's assume that they don't like being bullied by big, bad Nike and that they aren't ready to go anywhere.  Most importantly, let's assume there's room for two "national championships".

With all of those assumptions in place, what can Foot Locker do?

I answer this question in my latest article at Runner's Tribe.  In fact, having given it a lot of thought, I think the solution is pretty simple and particularly elegant.  It's primarily a positioning issue, and by making a couple small changes, they can reposition themselves relative to NXN and regain the upperhand.  That doesn't mean Foot Locker will do it, of course, but that's a different issue.  To read the article in its entirety, click here.  And let me know what you think in the comments.

Nike vs Footlocker

My latest column is up at Runner's Tribe.  I take a look at the Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) and what it means for the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships.  Here's a snippet:

The big differentiating factor [between Nike and Foot Locker], as you all probably know, is Nike's emphasis on crowning a team champion alongside the individual champion.  Rather than four regional races and ten individuals each, Nike holds eight regionals and takes the top two teams from each region to Portland for the championship race (plus a few others from California).  Since 2008, the top five individuals on non-qualifying teams are also invited to compete.  What started out as Nike creating a team championship to complement Foot Locker's individual championship is now a head-to-head competition to get the best athletes to their races.

And that's exactly why Nike's going to win this battle.  When push comes to shove, every top athlete with a chance to race with their team will choose to do so.  At its heart, cross country is a team sport.  In fact, outside of perhaps ekiden races (which are almost exclusively run in Japan), cross country is the only truly team-oriented sport in all of distance running, and maybe endurance sports as a whole.  

For 25 years, it was fine that we only had an individual championship.  Foot Locker (formerly Kinney) answered one of the two big questions in high school cross country, and gave the sport the one "national championship" in all of high school sports (to this day, there is no national championship in any other sport).  But in a team sport, an individual championship is like the welterweight title in boxing.  It's valid, it's relevant, it's something we all enjoy seeing decided, but it's not the...(cue Michael Buffer)..."heavyweight champion of the world!"  It just isn't.  The big title is the team title, and it's fine if Foot Locker was never in a position to answer that question.  But the fact that Nike is, and that they are providing a competing belt--the WBC to Foot Locker's WBA, if you will--for the individual title, has got Foot Locker in a pinch.

I'm still excited about Foot Locker, though.  Especially this year, with the girls field that will be going head-to-head.  I review the upcoming races in San Diego at the end of the article.

For those interested, Foot Locker will be streamed live on the Internet at 9:15am on Saturday, December 12th, here.