Quarterbacking the Boston Marathon

Hope you got a chance to watch the Boston Marathon online this morning. Wow! Wasn’t it some race?

The women’s race was tactical race while the men's race led by Ryan Hall were off and running from the gun.

Sitting here now thinking about the race, I am sure there were be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about it. In hind sight, it is pretty easy to 2nd guess the decisions by Hall to push the pace from the start instead of laying back and Goucher for pushing the pace from 20 to 25 miles.

So give me some credit for not going down that path.

No, I would like to take about Monday morning quarterbacking of road racing.

Road racing is different from any other sports. There are no breaks between plays. There are no caution flags or pits for help if things are not working. There is no way to replay something if there is a penalty for falling.

No, in running it is a single inning game played without any breaks. Runners go as hard as they can from the start with the hope of running as fast possible.

The decisions they make along the along the way are based on how they feel and how they think it will affect the runners that they are racing. Runners hope their decisions they make will be ones that lead them to beating their rivals. Sometimes those decisions work out and sometimes they don’t.

But criticizing one decision or another made during the heat of an event is really just doesn’t make any sense to me.

When you are in the middle of that situation, you make best decision based on the best available information. And you keep making those decisions based on this principle until the race is over.

This is what makes us live and die for our heroes. We hope they win but know they can lose.

Congrads to Hall and Goucher for taking up the challenge and showing us how to run fast.

Comments

Popular Posts