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I'm stunned haring about Shay. Seemingly no health issues. I'll be interested to see what the autopsy reveals.
Meanwhile here is a story about Brian Sell who finished third in today's trial and qualified for the Olympic team.
New York Times
October 31, 2007
Team Turns Unsung Runners Into Elite Marathoners
By GINA KOLATA
ROCHESTER, Mich. When Mike Morgan was in high school in Lincoln, Neb., he wanted to be part of a sports team. But, as he saw it, he did not have much choice. Football was out he was 5 feet 7 inches and 105 pounds. That left cross-country and track.
So Morgan became a runner, doing well but not turning any heads. When it came time for college, no coaches recruited him and he ended up at Nebraska Wesleyan, a small Division III college.
Morgan, now 27, is part of an unusual team, the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, whose goal is to give runners like him a chance to see if they can compete internationally at the highest levels.
He is one of 13 Hansons-Brooks runners who will compete in the Olympic mens marathon trials Nov. 3 in New York; the top three finishers will represent the United States at the Beijing Olympics next summer. Nearly one out of every 10 men in the race is a Hansons-Brooks runner.
And nearly every one of those athletes is, like Morgan, a runner who would otherwise have dropped by the wayside.
The tale of the team and its runners reveals a sport in which money is short, fame hard to come by and glory elusive for all but a very few. It involves athletes who are ready to put their lives on hold for 8, 10, even 12 years while they live a monastic existence in a group home here, far from family and friends, doing little but running, twice a day, day in and day out.
It also is the story of Keith and Kevin Hanson, the brothers who founded, financed and coach the team. They know they have the fate of gifted athletes in their hands and they know there are few scientific studies showing the best way to train.
They have their goal, though. We want to put somebody on that Olympic team, Keith Hanson said.
The Hansons started the team in 1999, after deciding that something was wrong with American distance running. We said, Why is it that Americans were such a factor in the early to mid-1980s and not now? Kevin Hanson said.
They reasoned that it was because Americans had abandoned group training. Ethiopians train in groups, Kenyans train in groups, Japanese train in groups, Kevin Hanson said. But most Americans were trying to work full time after college while training on their own.
The brothers owned three running stores in Michigan in Utica, Royal Oak and Grosse Point that were doing well, so they decided to invest $250,000 a year in a team. They would provide essentials like housing, health insurance, travel money and equipment. And they would give the runners part-time jobs if they wanted them.
Eight years later, the Hansons have spent $2 million, have added another running store, in Lake Orion, and their team has 20 runners 16 men and 4 women. They have two sponsors Brooks, the athletic shoe company, and Saturn, the car company. Most of the runners work 20 to 25 hours a week at one of the Hansons stores, where they are paid $10 to $12 an hour.
The runners start their day at 7:30 a.m., meeting at a duck pond beside a packed-dirt trail. Most end up running 120 to 140 miles a week. Brian Sell, the teams best hope for making the Olympic team, runs 160 miles a week.
Nonrunners seldom understand the life of these athletes, said Patrick Moulton, the newest member of the team. Even many customers at the Hansons running stores do not understand, he said. We get people coming into the store saying, Well, how long of a marathon did you run? he said they asked, not realizing that a marathon, by definition, is 26 miles 385 yards.
The runners devised a short explanation. We call it The Story, Morgan said. We say we are part of a program that provides housing and health insurance and that we train as a group. Hopefully, one of us will emerge and be able to bring American distance running closer to where it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
At the Olympic trials, the runners say, being part of the Hansons team will help. They can run together comfortably and support one another, bringing a team dynamic to an individual sport.
Morgan and another Hansons-Brooks runner, Kyle OBrien, recently competed in the world championships in Japan, so they have not had adequate time to recover. If they are not feeling strong enough to contend at the Olympic trials, they may resort to a support role.
Id probably help some of the guys Ive been training with, Morgan said. I would step in front of them and have them follow me. Kyle and I knew going in that that could be a possibility maybe our only option would be to help a teammate.
The embodiment of the program, said Mary Wittenberg, director of New York Road Runners, is the 29-year-old Sell, who joined the team in 2001. He is a hard working, put everything in it, kind of guy, said Wittenberg, whose organization is staging the trials. He was not a superstar in high school, he was not a superstar in college. His commitment put him at the top of his sport.
Sell would not disagree. The field for the trials includes runners who have Olympics experience, like Meb Keflezighi and Abdi Abdirahman. I think they are more talented than I am, so I have to work harder, Sell said.
And work he does, running an average of 24 miles a day. Unlike the other Hansons-Brooks runners, he is married and has a 5-month-old daughter and his own house. But when his wife, a nurse, is working, Sell often ends up doing his afternoon run alone on a treadmill in his basement, his daughter propped nearby.
Life with the Hansons team has not been easy. The first six months I was here I wanted to leave every day, Sell said. I was running badly. But then, he said, it was almost like an American dream hard work paid off.
Of course, his competitors are working hard, too, and while the runners talent and willingness to train are important, there also is a question of what coaching strategy is best. With coaching, said Kevin Hanson, so much of it is trial and error.
The Hansons say that running huge numbers of miles each week is crucial, along with training as a team and training for the races terrain. To prepare for the Olympic trials course, which will be mostly in Central Park, the team rode its bus from Michigan to New York last month, ran the course, then rode home. Team members also run on a route in Rochester with hills nearly the same elevation as those on the marathon course in Central Park.
But one method the Hansons do not use is training at high altitude. Altitude training can stimulate the body to make more red blood cells, which can provide more oxygen to muscles in a race.
Their top competitors in the Olympic trials, including Keflezighi, use altitude training, and for good reason, said Keflezighis coach, Bob Larsen. When you look at the medalists in the Olympic Games and world championships, there are very, very few who medal without having trained at altitude, Larsen said.
The Hansons runners say they are not worried. And what choice did they have anyway? Few were good enough when they joined to even have the option of joining Larsens Team Running USA, which trains in the mountains at Mammoth Lake, Calif. And even if they were that good, they could probably not afford it. Team Running does not provide the financial support that the Hansons do.
Larsen knows the hurdles. We get requests quite frequently from athletes who would like to be in our group, but unless they can afford to be with us or have a major shoe contract, it is difficult, he said.
The Hansons runners compete, Kevin Hanson said, by dint of sheer hard work.
Running with the team, the athletes said, was harder than they imagined.
You have to show restraint and not run yourself into the ground every day, said OBrien, a 27-year-old from Danville, Ill. I fell into that trap my first year here. I moved here in August, and by November I had two stress fractures. I wasnt able to run again until the following February.
As for Sell, the years of hard training are taking their toll.
When I first came out here, I was bouncing out of bed, running to the duck pond, he said. Now I have to get out of bed an hour or two ahead of time to warm up enough to make it.
The Olympic trials, he said, may be his last hurrah.
I put as much as I can into this trial, he said.
If Sell does not make the Olympic team, he will retire as an athlete, he said. He has applied to dental school and he and his wife will move back east, closer to their families in Pennsylvania, where there will be no more mornings at the duck pond, and probably no more 160-mile weeks.
It is not a life for everyone, Sell added, but he has no regrets. Even the high mileage was fine with him.
If you lose a race, that just means some guy worked harder than you, he said.
To do well against competitors like those in the Olympic trials, he added, you have to want it.
As for himself, Sell said, I guess Ive just been really lucky to get this little taste of success and then to want it a little more and a little more.
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