Rochester Road Trip

As mentioned in my earlier post, there was actually some cross country running in Rochester last weekend, as well as some poorly chosen race music. A plethora of photographers were on hand - here are some of the photos of my team-mates.



Here JJ Fialkovitch, well recovered from his Chicago marathon learning experience, runs just ahead of the partly obscured Jeff Doyon and John Blouin. John and Jeff are shown clearly in the next shot.







Brad Kozel leads Jay Slowik.



Ted Breen.


Some high points of the men's race: Brian Sell was the top finisher for Hansons (#5 overall), leading them to the team victory. Brian's role as pace-setter was noted in my earlier Chicago report. Interviewed after the race he admitted to being "not much good" at cross country. It's all relative, I guess.


Our own Mike Piech finished an impressive 63rd out of 309 runners. Here he is looking alarmingly comfortable as he heads towards a 31:55 (5:08 per mile) finish, on a course where only the top two men broke 30 minutes. Below, Kit Wells and Sam Blasiak (our #3 and #2 team finishers, respectively).







Unfortunately, the event lacked any notable road trip stories (unless you count driving in circles trying to find the course a notable story). Most of our team-mates ultimately decided to drive back to Boston soon after the end of the race, thus missing out on the post-race party. Thus we missed out on hearing The Skycoasters, described on the race website as "The Number 1 Party Band in the World" and whose website boasts: "Corporate parties, weddings, festivals, special events, clubs, world sporting events.….
The Skycoasters play it all!" Is that a deliberate reference to the memorable bar scene in The Blues Brothers? (Barmaid to Elwood: "We got both kinds of music: Country and Western.")

Forced to find our own post race entertainment, Christy and I headed to Saratoga Springs, a convenient stopping-off point about halfway back to Boston. We stumbled on two gems: the first was a restaurant specializing in crepes and pomme frites (that's French Fries unless you are from a red state) called, appropriately, Ravenous. I can attest that the frites were world class. Our second find was a B&B called The Mansion, a fabulous historic house-turned-country inn; and at only 35% more than the race headquarters hotel in Rochester and approximately 1000% more luxurious, the best bargain of the weekend.

Highs and Lows in Rochester

Last weekend I travelled with my GBTC team-mates to Rochester, NY, for the National Club Cross Country Championships. Teams from around the country travelled to converge on Genesee Valley Park for a day of racing where the focus is on team scoring rather than individual performances. For us Greater Bostonians, it was a 7 hour road trip along I-90 to get there (plus, in some cases, an extra hour or so of fruitless driving around Rochester trying to find the entrance to the park.)

As my earlier post on clichés of running music would indicate, one of my first concerns was the choice of music by the DJ on race day. When we arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we appeared to be in a cliché-free zone - the first song I recognized was Gretchen Wilson's Redneck Woman. While I'm not a huge country music fan, self-parody is hard not to like. As the nameless reviewer on Amazon said, Wilson "isn't just putting the trailer park back into country music, she's the antidote to Shania and Faith." High praise indeed. And full marks to the DJ for picking a song I had never before heard played at a running event.

All continued smoothly during my warm-up. Shortly before the start of the race, I noticed that they were playing The Beatles' When I'm Sixty-Four - arguably an appropriate song as the old men were warming up to race. But as soon as the gun was fired for my race (the masters 10k), everything went pear-shaped. The DJ, perhaps acting on a tip-off from one of my running rivals, cued up Chariots of Fire. I did my best to channel my anger into running faster, with the result that I passed the 2k mark in 6:43, a good 17 seconds faster than I had intended. From then on I didn't hear too much music during the race, and mostly if I heard anything it was the cheering of my team-mates (note to other masters runners: it really pays to join a team with a lot of younger runners who can cheer for you). I also was able to keep tabs on the progress of the leaders, as their splits were announced almost every kilometer - and thankfully I was never more than 1k behind them. I heard the names of former Olympian John Tuttle and top master Brian Pope. I was hoping Pope would manage to win - he is pictured here alongside me just before he took first place (and I took last) in the masters mile at January's Reebok Boston Indoor games.

In the end Tuttle took 3rd and Pope 4th. All in all the race went pretty well from my perspective, and I was quite happy with my 35:39 finishing time and 50th place. But as soon as I crossed the finish line, my relief at having finished was overwhelmed by the sorry sound of Rocky blaring out from the speakers. I must have been blocking it out during my final sprint, but no wonder I couldn't catch those last couple of guys at the finish line. I had to wonder if I somehow missed Eye of the Tiger.

That's me in the red, 2nd from the left, and the expression on my face tells you what I'm thinking about the music.

More on the other races later.

Architecture in Cambridge (1)

I got back from Vancouver with a disposable camera and a few shots left, so I decided to go and take some snaps of the fine architecture of my adopted home town. Now that we have our very own Frank Gehry building, Cambridge is obviously worth a detour for students of modern architecture.

Above and below, the Frank-Gehry designed Stata Center. Cambridge obligingly turned on better weather than Vancouver.

In fact, even before I went off to Vancouver I had been struck by how much modern architecture you can find in Cambridge without covering more than a mile or two. I ran out of film before I was able to do justice even to the few blocks nearest to MIT.



The Stata Center houses, among other things, the office of Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. It is also home to MIT's Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL). As I happen to work with a few people at CSAIL, I've heard a couple of good (if perhaps apocryphal) Gehry stories.

Apocryphal Tale 1: Gehry was selected as the architect for the Stata center not long after he became a household name for designing the Guggenheim Bilbao museum. (Picture at right: note the lack of resemblance to a typical university building.)



Hence the MIT faculty who were destined to be housed in his building were justifiably a bit nervous as to what sort of edifice they might end up in. Gehry allegedly walked into a meeting with the faculty and kicked it off by saying "I bet you're all scared sh*tless. But in fact I can design buildings that people work in." I'm told that the building is generally quite a good place to work (but more on that in Apocryphal Tale 2, to appear shortly.)

Another recent contribution to the urban landscape from MIT is Simmons Hall, pictured below rising over the baseball fields of MIT. I've had plenty of chances to see it in different lighting and weather conditions while running around the MIT track. I wasn't sure about it when it first went up but it has really grown on me. I was pleased to learn that the American Institute of Architects agreed that the building warranted an award.

Architecture in Vancouver

This week I happened to be in Vancouver for a few days and I couldn't escape the feeling I was walking around in an issue of Dwell magazine. So I rushed out and bought a disposable camera to capture some of my favorite buildings on film. Unfortunately, the Pacific Northwest lived up to its meteorological reputation, so all photos were taken under grey skies and mostly in drizzle.

All these shots were taken near Coal Harbour, an area of downtown Vancouver that seems to be almost entirely devoted to the construction of modern residential buildings with a few restarants thrown in. This first shot is of Cardero's restaurant, right on the harbour.

Lift Bar & Grill & View (yes, that's the real name of the place) is pictured above and below, conveniently accessible by seaplane.



One of the many residential developments in Coal Harbour.



That tower really is curved; it's not just the cheap camera.


Even the Westin Bayshore, formerly a drab concrete high-rise, has got into the act with a new convention center.


If you thought that this might be a music post, you probably wanted Matt's Architecture in Helsinki Post. See if you can figure out who was the aussie who led him to venture out to the Middle East on a School night.

Running notes: you can't ask for a much better place to run than Stanley Park, which is right next to all this modernity (some of it is visible behind the photo of Lift). There is a path for runners, cyclists and rollerbladers that follows the sea wall, and its easy to run for about 15 km just by following the path all the way round. Here is a Google Map of a feasible run that takes in all the sights shown above as well as a complete circuit of Stanley Park.

Beyond Chariots of Fire

This article first appear in The Wingfoot


By Mitt O'Chondria

We've all had the experience: you're warming up for a race, or passing some P.A. equipment along the route, and suddenly you hear the song that can induce fatigue in even the most well-trained runner, that old chestnut, Chariots of Fire. And you know that as surely as Heartbreak Hill comes after the Newton Fire Station, the next thing you're going to hear is Born to Run, unless Eye of the Tiger or perhaps The William Tell Overture gets there first. It was when we were able to correctly predict every single song played during a cross country meet last winter that we realized that there actually must be people selling tapes of the Greatest Clichés of Running Music and foisting them on unsuspecting race directors all over the country.

As an antidote to those collections of tired songs, we offer the following suggestions to race directors and to those runners who train in the company of an iPod. (Our judgments about such runners are reserved for a later article, as is the discussion of whether The Chemical Brothers were ever the house band at BALCO.)

Let's start with a few obvious selections:

Stars of Track and Field, Belle and Sebastian
The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner, Belle and Sebastian

We’re not exactly sure why our favorite Scottish alternative band has written two songs with such obviously relevant titles (or why they chose the term "Track and Field" for a sport that is called "Athletics" in the U.K.) but you could certainly do a lot worse that B&S when it comes to psyching up on race day.

The Distance, Cake. "He's going the distance. He's going for speed." You can't ask for more appropriate lyrics than that. (Compare to the lyrics of Eye of the Tiger, for example).

One Way or Another, Blondie. "One way or another I'm gonna getcha getcha getcha" - a perfect song to have in your head at the end of a race as you try to reel in the competition.

Perhaps a more surprising selection is Naked Eye, by Luscious Jackson. With the constantly repeating backing vocal of "It feels alright" we've found it to be the perfect song as you try to judge the correct level of effort in the early miles of a half-marathon. On those occasions where pace judgment fails, we recommend She's Lost Control by Joy Division, which benefits from an excellent drum track recorded on a Manchester rooftop.

Anyone who has watched the opening scene of Trainspotting will appreciate that Iggy Pop's Lust for Life is really a running song, especially suitable for those attempting to outrun police officers.

During the high mileage weeks of marathon training, we find it hard to go past Under the Sun, by Australian band Hunters and Collectors, with the opening line of "These are easy days, but his knees ache in the morning."

And finally, for the night before a race, nothing tops the insomniac anthem Who needs sleep?, by Barenaked Ladies, who also provide us with the perfect post-race song, Alcohol.