Midwestern Mindset

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Loch Raven State Park, Maryland

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View sitting in my tree stand today

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A New Film Examines an Unusual PCT Record Attempt

I once ran a 10K for charity while living in Amman, Jordan. I’ll always remember the surreal, final stretch of the race: the sidewalk was crowded with people watching, but no one was cheering or clapping. Mostly, the locals just looked confused. Running for running’s sake, it seemed, didn’t register strongly there. And while Jordanians obviously value charity, running for charity didn’t seem to make much sense to them either. When I thought about it, I had to admit, raising money by doing a race is kind of a non sequitur: People should donate money to some cause because I’m going to push myself physically for a few miles? In these events, do we run so we can selflessly raise money, or do we raise money as an excuse to run for our own sake?

That’s the question that kept bothering me while watching Elevation Change, a new documentary that will start streaming on Amazon, iTunes, and Vimeo today. The film follows 24-year-old ultrarunner Sam Fox, who ambitiously—but ultimately unsuccessfully—attempts to break the Pacific Crest Trail speed record in 2011. At the same, he raises money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation in honor of his mom, who has Parkinson’s disease. It has all the makings of a boring film about physical accomplishment for a good cause, but first-time filmmaker Marion Mauran instead takes an unusually honest and thought-provoking look at the story’s protagonist and his motives.

The film begins by introducing Fox, a Thor-haired, former Yale high jumper who thinks he can hike the Pacific Crest Trail faster than anyone ever has before—and raise a quarter of a million dollars for charity while he’s at it. But Fox’s over-the-top confidence starts to break down when injuries and exhaustion stop him from meeting the daily mileage he needs to break the record. Visibly frustrated, Fox appears to rationalize his failure by claiming that setting a record was always a secondary objective. The true purpose of his thru-hike was always to raise money, Fox insists, somewhat unconvincingly. In the end, he hikes 2,257 of the trail’s 2,650 miles in 62 days, which is slower than the record pace, and does not reach the Sierra Nevada before winter sets in, forcing him to skip a section of the trail. But he does surpass his fundraising goal, earning $300,000 dollars.

Throughout the film, Mauran puts Fox’s irritable arrogance front and center. His less than charitable attitude and early obsession with setting a speed record force you to question the depth of his altruism. Did this guy hike the trail because of his mom or because he wants to be the best? It feels like Fox is indulging in motivational double-dipping in order to claim the title of both hero and conqueror. “There is a level of overconfidence and cockiness that comes with any kind of success,” Fox tells the camera before his hike. “I’ve been accused of being cocky my entire life, being overconfident, being a dick. That’s fine, I have no problem with it. I’ve accepted that.”

Elevation Change handles the messy line between Fox’s large ego and his altruism with a deft touch. The film makes no attempt at handing its viewers a satisfying answer to his ambiguous motivations. You have to sort through the moral complexities yourself. It’s actually the best part about the documentary, and I’m not sure the film could have worked any other way.

Speaking with me over the phone eight years after his attempt, Fox was much more thoughtful and humble than he seems in the footage of him during his quest. He told me that, in hindsight, his motivation was probably partly charity and partly personal achievement, swinging from one to the other depending on his mood. “Let’s call it 50/50,” says Fox. But it was the naked ambition of his goal, he says, that allowed him to bring attention to his fundraiser and successfully generate a significant amount of money for charity. Otherwise, nobody would have cared.

So maybe it’s misguided to care what his, or anybody else’s, motivations are. If people keep wanting to run for charity and others keep donating because of it, why question if it’s a good thing? I’ve raised squat for Parkinson’s disease. In 2015, Fox biked to and climbed the highest peak in each of the lower 48 states, helping raise $2.5 million more for the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Runners around the world have, in the recent past, raised more than a billion dollars a year for good causes. Maybe I should stop thinking so much and start running for charity a little more.

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Coach Alberto Salazar Has Received a Doping Sanction

On Monday night, the United States Anti-Doping Agency imposed a four-year ban, effective immediately, on Alberto Salazar, the head coach of the Nike Oregon Project. USADA has also sanctioned Dr. Jeffrey Brown, an endocrinologist who worked as a consultant for the NOP and had previously been implicated in possible rule violations by the club. Both men were found guilty of “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct,” by two separate three-person panels of a dispute resolution body known as the American Arbitration Association (AAA). In a statement posted on the Oregon Project website late last night, Salazar said that he was “shocked” and planned to appeal USADA’s decision.

While yesterday’s announcement may have sent high-magnitude shock waves through the running Twittersphere, it would be incorrect to say that the news came as a huge surprise. Indeed, the charges against Salazar, which include administering illegal quantities of L-carnitine (a naturally occurring substance that converts fat into energy), trafficking testosterone (a banned substance), and tampering with the doping control process, have already been reported on in the past. Seen in this light, the big news isn’t so much that Salazar has violated anti-doping rules, but that he finally has to suffer the consequences.

https://twitter.com/IBuiltTheArk/status/1178831814242136064

As a quick recap: in 2015, ProPublica published a damning report that included testimony from former NOP coach Steve Magness and former NOP athletes Kara and Adam Goucher, which alleged, among other things, that Salazar had smeared testosterone gel on his sons’ legs to see how much would trigger a positive test. In 2017, the New York Times published an article detailing Salazar’s enthusiasm for L-carnitine. As a supplement, it’s not banned, but anti-doping rules prohibit infusions or injections of more than 50 milliliters of any substance (for non-medicinal reasons) in a six-hour period. As the Times reported, a leaked USADA document showed that former NOP athlete Dathan Ritzenhein had likely received an infusion “far in excess” of 50 mL and that Dr. Brown had seemingly altered Ritzenhein’s medical records to obscure this fact. Meanwhile, Magness, whom Salazar appeared to be using as his personal guinea pig, probably received an infusion of “at least 1000 mL.”

Of course, there’s a difference between experimenting on your assistant coach and experimenting on one of your athletes. That distinction could prove crucial in the coming weeks as questions will inevitably arise as to how it can be that Salazar must face the music, while none of his runners (neither present nor former) suffer any repercussions. At least so far, no NOP athlete has been officially been charged with any wrongdoing.

The timing of USADA’s announcement gives the question of potential athlete sanctions an additional degree of urgency. On Sunday, Oregon Project superstar Sifan Hassan won the women’s 10,000-meters at the IAAF World Championships by running the final 1,500-meters of the race in three minutes and 59 seconds. It was the kind of performance that turned heads, to put it mildly. (Hassan, whose personal best in a straight-up 1,500 is 3:55:93, issued a statement through her management company saying that she was also “shocked” by the USADA announcement and that, somewhat contradictorily, she had been aware the NOP was being investigated when she joined the team in 2016.) Meanwhile, two NOP marathoners, namely Galen Rupp and Jordan Hasay, are slated to compete in the Chicago Marathon in less than two weeks’ time. At the time of this writing, neither Rupp nor Hasay has issued a statement.

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While the charges against Salazar don’t really include any new bombshells about the beleaguered coach, yesterday’s announcement appears to also implicate Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike.

The AAA’s decision on Dr. Brown details a 2009 email exchange between Parker and the endocrinologist. Responding to Brown’s report on the NOP’s experiments with Androgel (which contains testosterone), Parker notes that: “It will be interesting to determine the minimal amount of topical male hormone required to create a positive test,” and asks whether there were “other topical hormones that would create more dramatic results.”

To be clear: this is the CEO of the world’s largest athletic shoe and apparel company, not some skulking henchman. In fairness, it is possible to read the email exchange between Brown and Parker as a confirmation of what the NOP has been claiming all along: that the Androgel experiments were meant to test how easy it would be for opposing athletes or coaches to sabotage NOP runners.

“We know that rubbing arms and legs is more of a potential problem than hand shaking after an event since an athlete is much more likely to feel a ‘blob’ in a hand shake,” Brown writes in his email to Parker. Unless the two men are communicating in some form of code, the language here strongly suggests that the NOP was legitimately afraid that its athletes could be framed.

But does that kind of paranoia warrant allegedly conducting an experiment with a banned substance—an experiment that effectively doubles as a test to see what prospective cheaters could potentially get away with?

In his brief statement, Salazar notes that the panel that condemned him had simultaneously been struck by the fact that he did “not appear to have been motivated by any bad intention to commit the violations,” and that he had shown an unusual level of care “to ensure that whatever new technique or method or substance he was going to try was lawful under the World Anti-Doping Code.”

This, I would argue, is pretty revealing, in the same way that it is revealing when an athlete proudly states that he or she has “never failed a doping test.” Of course Salazar had no intention to commit a violation. He has always, however, seemed intent on testing the limits of what he could get away with, while still officially complying with the rules. But just because something is legal, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ethical.

It’s likely that Salazar is not interested in that distinction. He may genuinely believe that you have to be willing to venture deep into the gray area of what’s officially allowed in order to succeed on the razor’s edge of professional athletics. For years, his athletes appeared to benefit from that philosophy. But yesterday’s announcement feels like a sign that that’s about to change.

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