Doug Logan & Gail Devers

e-mail to a friend

tell us what you think!

"Shin Splints"
A Blog by Doug Logan

Doing Our Part

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

NOTE: Vistors wishing to read Doug Logan's blog about the Project 30 Task Force Report can do so at http://www.usatf.org/about/leadership/ShinSplintsBlog/?b=21

USATF CEO Doug Logan on Tuesday gave the "Leadership Luncheon" address at Running USA's annual convention in La Jolla, California. Below is the full text of his speech.

My love for running began in a rather strange way. Many of you know I was in the military in the mid-sixties and was trained by and fought in elite combat units. An integral part of my daily life for three years was a five-mile run, in formation, in combat boots. Our pace was something called "the Airborne shuffle," which replicated the way we moved to the open door of a plane when making a parachute jump. We ran in unison, chanting cadence and singing off-color songs. I loved it! The combination of the male camaraderie and the lulling rhythm of our steps left memories that are a part of me and that I remember fondly.

Shortly after my discharge, I began to run on roads. My reason for running was like many others; I wanted to lose weight. Soon, I found myself logging my workouts and seeking remedies for blisters, shin splints and sprains. The solitary aspect of running alone took some getting used to after all the years of running in a group, but I soon found the pleasure of being able to think clearly on an open road, without interruption or interference. I had to have my daily fix.

In late 1977, I decided to train for a marathon that was scheduled for the 4th of July, 1978. My goal was to break 4 hours. I laid out a training schedule, became a consumer of magazine articles on running and found out that to embark on such a journey meant that everything else in life took a back seat. It was the epitome of a selfish existence. The whole world revolved around my training.

I remember that race as though it was yesterday. I remember my running mates in the first eight miles or so, a lawyer named Pete Switzer and an architect named John Cook, as we ran 7:30 miles. [ I finished behind Switzer but in front of Cook ]. I remember being unsure of being able to finish at around mile 18 when I recognized a friend, Sue Thomas, running about 30 yards in front of me. I became determined she would not out-do me, and I chased her for over seven miles. At the finish, I thanked her for pulling me through under four hours, and she had no idea what I was talking about.

The final anecdote I really should not share, but I can't help myself. I ran all those years while being a pack-a-day cigarette smoker. How I did it, I don't know, but I have finally gotten rid of that monkey on my back. Anyway, the race director had enlisted auxiliary Sherriff's Deputies to assist finishers in the chute. I happened to have my arms around one kind officer as we were walking away from the finish line. I could feel a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket and I proceeded to filch a menthol Kool and light it up minutes after my finish. Everyone around me thought I was insane!

As a first-time and only-time marathoner, I experienced first-hand the powerful social and economic force that distance running had already become in the 1970s. It is infinitely more powerful on both fronts in the 21st Century. But USATF made a critical mistake several years ago, and had it not made that mistake, Running USA would not exist in the form that it does today:

We all but let go of one of the most vital components of our sport. And to that, I can only say: shame on us. We let go of a driving force for the future health of our sport. We are fortunate to have on our National Office staff one very capable person, Jim Estes, dedicated to serving, promoting and marketing long-distance running. It is on a larger organizational and philosophical level that we must re-connect with that critical LDR community. We must go one step further and play the central role in connecting the disparate parts of this far-ranging social and cultural phenomenon that is long-distance running and road racing.

I believe that long-distance running not more Olympic gold medals or even new sponsors will be the deciding factor between whether USATF simply tries to become a slightly better version of ourselves and whether we completely remake ourselves as a truly professional, financially powerful and culturally relevant sports organization. We must find the formula where track and field, race walking and road racing, both competitive and participatory, conjoin and make something more grand than any of us could have envisioned even one year ago.

USATF is a self-defined three-legged stool as the National Governing Body for track and field, long-distance running and race walking. When you pull off the strongest leg, from a numbers standpoint, and cast it into open water, you're left with two problems. Your stool now has two legs, and you've got a leg floating around out there on its own, with no direction.

When USATF helped found Running USA, we helped give the LDR community an organizational base, a true sense of direction and a unifying force. USATF was a founding partner of this organization, but somehow, we moved to the fringes. Today there is certainly no shortage of organizations related to the road-running community in what is an alphabet soup of groups, from Running USA to the RRCA and several others that seem to start up and fade away every few years. I am happy to say that Running USA and the RRCA have been great partners to USATF, and Running USA especially has been a leader in supporting our elite distance runners. But, organizations being what they are, there is always a certain sense of us vs. them.

Now is the time for us to talk about what WE can accomplish. WE as a collective sport that feeds off, supports and advocates for each other. WE who share the common goal of growing the sport and exposing more Americans to the benefits of running. WE who labor for our sport out of love. Out of passion. Sometimes out of insanity. The question is: how?

As I said in my State of the Sport address at USATF's Annual Meeting in Reno, "the advent of last generation's running craze has produced a universe of fit, nutrition-minded men and women who have found an avocation for the rest of their lives. We must connect the disparate parts of this community and provide it with needed services in the simplest, most unified manner possible. Uniform standards, statistics and rankings are obvious areas in which we can play a role. Increased safety and proficiency in the management of races is another. We can and should apply newer technologies such as live streaming of races in order to propagate interest and following. Finally, we should create compelling reasons for more long distance runners to be members of USATF".

I'll begin with the final issue I mentioned. Everyone in this room is familiar with how major races used to require runners to have USATF or at the time, TAC memberships in order to compete. It was a great boon to USATF membership numbers but really did not make much sense from a customer-service perspective. When this requirement was in place, most runners only knew TAC/USATF as a mystery acronym to which they were forced to fork over $15. Thanks for nothing! I certainly can't begrudge any race for dropping this requirement, and it certainly didn't endear us to any runners. Now, USATF is in a position of having to actually make a membership worthwhile on its own merits. One way we have tried to do that is by offering member discounts to certain retailers and to services, but there is much greater potential in those retailer relationships. Memberships should be fashioned in ways that make membership appealing and desirable to distance runners specifically, and the retailer relationships should be structured in such a way that draws these retailers themselves into our organization. Like the runners they serve, running specialty stores should WANT to be part of USATF. We need to provide them, and runners, incentives to help us grow and integrate the sport.

What incentivizes store owners? Driving customers into their stores. What gives USATF value as a membership organization? More members. What kind of assets do we have? Championship races and elite athletes, among other things. You don't need to be a CEO to figure out that the customers who frequent specialty stores are those we want to connect with. Particularly of interest is connecting with Americans who are just getting into running. If we can connect with them as they first enter the sport of distance running, we have a better chance of making fans and members of them and their children and running buddies for life.

I'm sure you can see the dots on the paper, and you can even start to see what kind of shape they might take. But until we connect those dots, an idea is all we have. We need to take the idea and give it shape and form.

One form that some people see when they look at distance running is a dollar sign. If you do the math on the economic potential of running, it is indeed staggering. The New York City Marathon reportedly has a budget of $20 million and makes about a $6 million profit. That's a budget that is about 50 percent larger than my organization's current annual budget. There are as many as 30 million runners in America. Let's beg, borrow or steal a buck from each of them. I've just covered USATF's budget for the next two years. It may sound a bit flip, but my point is obvious: the resources are there in multiples greater than USATF has ever come close to realizing. Even if we only succeed in reaching a tiny fraction of this group, we have made our organization stronger, better-rounded and more stable.

The economic force of this industry may be one of the best-kept secrets in sport, even though it is the most obvious. By USATF's own research, which under-estimated the true value, Americans raise about $1 billion a year for charity through running. Mary Wittenberg will tell you that the demographics for her race participants puts them in a tax bracket that won't see much benefit from President Obama's tax-cut stimulus plans. They also tend to be over-educated.

Forget economics for a moment. This group is a tremendous human resource that can do great things for not just our sport, but for our country. The spirit that created the phenomenon of charity running is one that took the "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" and made it into "The Social Bedrock of the Back-of-the-pack Runner." It shifted the profile of the "typical" distance runner from a self-absorbed naval-gazer, or "inner-directed" people, into what Riesman and Glazer would call"other-directed" runners. I'll spare you a book report on "The Lonely Crowd" and its analysis of the changing American character, but what those authors diagnosed in the American work force is true of the American runner half a century later. For the business of running, having "other-directed" social animals as runners is a positive development because it greatly popularizes and democratizes the sport. If we can take some of that "other-direction" and focus it on contributing to our sport, as well as charities, we will really be onto something.

Allow me to turn my attention to more nitty-gritty, in-the-trenches issues. USATF sets the rules and standards for road running in this country anybody here worn heaphones lately? But there is much more we can do on the administrative side to become the clearing house of the sport. USATF keeps LDR lists and records in-house, but in the last three years, USATF has sought to move beyond lists and establish actual rankings for distance runners on the national, regional and state levels. This is no easy task. Our Masters LDR chair, Don Lein, has for years been a contributor to Running Times Magazine for its masters rankings and lists, and he can attest to how big of a labor of love that mission is. By building cooperative relationships with the resources that already exist in this road racing community, USATF can be the mechanism through which one-stop shopping for road racing fans and participants is achievable. We don't need to re-invent the wheel, and we don't need to orchestrate a strong-arm takeover of functions others are already performing ably. That is no way to make friends, influence people or provide a service to the public. But we can create relationships that will enable us to collect information from many outlets and serve it up in a singular form. Call it the Road Running Rainbow Coalition of statistics, demographics, and minutiae.

We have the tools to do it. Even doing the less-sexy aspects of the business of running is part of our charter. About five years ago, we created a database of thousands of race course maps; we are moving to make our race sanctioning an online process; and in one of our greatest online successes, we created the tool "America's Running Routes." When I first took this job I got a nice note from an old friend, Melissa Newman, who is one of the finest music critics in the industry. After congratulating me for my new post, she thanked me profusely for this magic device we offer that helps her decide her running routes. I had no idea what she was talking about. I came to find out that with Alan Roth leading the way and our webmaster providing the programming, we used existing, free technology to create a tool that draws distance runners to USATF.org to accomplish something very simple: to see how far they ran, or to map out courses for future runs. To date, more than 268,000 courses have been mapped and saved. Hundreds of thousands more have undoubtedly mapped simply for the user's personal benefit.

Statistics generally appeal to the hard-core competitive running fans who want to see how they match up against others in their age group, or to chart on a week-to-week level who the best 8K runners in America are. Maps are something that the most fitness-oriented, 12-minute-per-mile runner can appreciate and utilize just as well as the 30-minute 10 km runner. A set of eyeballs is a set of eyeballs regardless of their foot speed. We may chart the difference between fast and slow and give them awards, but the business world makes no distinction. If anything, the business world appreciates the 12-minute miler more than the 30-minute 10 runner because there are a lot more of the 12-minute guys. I don't need to tell you there is monetary value in every set of eyeballs and every set of legs that takes in even the most basic information on the web. Harnessing that is an incredible opportunity. It is an opportunity that we MUST exploit.

Another way to draw in those eyeballs is to bring our web site into the 21st century and do something that any middle schooler can do with their personal Facebook pages: add video. The USA Running Series has 13 races in 2009. They represent 13 opportunities to give the running community a place to come to see the best American distance runners compete. For the first time, at the USA Half-Marathon Championships on January 18, USATF partnered with another web site to carry video of the race on USATF.org. This is yet another example of where we didn't bully our way toward a goal. We worked cooperatively with a group, flotrack.com, who wants to help increase the profile of running. Both web sites benefited and nobody left with their feelings hurt. Instead, running fans were left with the realization that USATF cares about distance running and is in the business of promoting distance running. Last month, that coverage was posted on our site after the race occurred, but long-term we should be streaming these events live.

The USA Running Series presents yet another obvious opportunity. We have 13 top-quality races loosely joined by their status as national championships, but these races could serve as a true "league." One of the great shortcomings of the track and field circuit is that there really isn't a "circuit" and there is no definable season: no episodic, regular series of events leading to a crescendo. USARC already has the elements for that kind of structure. We have 30 million runners out there who form the makings of a huge fan base; the kind of fan base that could follow the sport of long-distance running on a weekly basis, and follow it as it reaches its final, be-all-and-end-all, let's-crown-a-champion conclusion.

Earlier, I joked about the use of headphones, but safety really is a continuing issue for all road races and specifically for road race directors. Phil Stewart and Jeff Darman's organization, Road Race Management, have brought together race directors to talk about these very issues, and certain major races of their own accord have at times banded together, and are banding together to try to come up with industry standards. But they shouldn't have to do that, because it is our job as a national governing body.

One example of how USATF has done that in the past is when we issued our hydration guidelines for distance runners. This was another Alan Roth project (I see a theme.) USATF utilized its sports science resources to issue guidelines for distance runners, particularly when they run marathons, for proper hydration. I have a personal story related to this issue. Remember I told you I ran my one marathon on the 4th of July. Well, I was so terrified of the heat that I wound up over hydrating and ultimately had to relieve myself in someone's front yard early in the race. Little did I know that I was in danger of serious medical consequences.This study had an immediate national impact. But we haven't done anything similar since that time. There are plenty of opportunities to once again take the lead on standard-bearing: when the Chicago Marathon closed its course due to extreme heat, and when the Nike Women's Marathon had a non-winning "winner", the country, fans and the press all looked to us for answers for how these situations should be handled. While we have general rules that applied to at least one of those two instances, we have no guidelines or resources for race directors to turn to when these kinds of situations arise. What were the proper procedures to follow? There were none. In the end, everyone used their best judgment. Fortunately, the judgment of our major races is exemplary. But once again, the responsibility shouldn't be placed on them. We should bear it. It is our job.

To say it's our job and to do our job are two different things. Those of you who have observed the organization since I was hired have seen I am a man of words; you are also seeing, I believe, that I am a man of action. If I say we're going to do it, we will. But we can't do it alone. We can't pretend that we are the only experts and have all the answers, and neither can you. Together, we can put the pieces together, connect the dots, and fulfill every other clich about getting the job done. If we get this job done, we all will benefit. And we'll get that third leg of our stool back in place.

Share your comments about "Shin Splints" by completing the form below. USATF reserves the right to edit or delete submissions for profanity, inappropriate content or any other reason. The content of the submissions does not necessarily reflect the opinions of USA Track & Field, its athletes, employees, officers, sponsors or volunteers. USATF does not intend for the content of the submissions to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. Neither USATF nor any of its athletes, employees, officers, sponsors or volunteers is responsible for, and neither will be liable for, either the submissions’ content, implication or intent, or any loss, damage or injury resulting therefrom.

>> Blog archives

Doug Logan is the CEO of USA Track & Field (USATF), the national governing body for track and field, long distance running, and race walking. Headquartered in Indianapolis, the organization has more than 90,000 members throughout the country.