Experimental Prototypes in the Community Of Tomorrow
Our goal for this piece is to give a view of the experience of the US Olympic Marathon Trials in Orlando- the scene, the landscape and the surrounding circus. Often, watching events unfold on TV, we see the streets and the athletes, but don’t really get a good look at what it was like on the ground. Come, let’s go to the ground…
Words Jeff Merrill
Video JJ Vazquez & Michael Flotron
Race Photos Marnie Kinnaird
Disposables Jeff Merrill
Race Photos Marnie Kinnaird
Disposables Jeff Merrill
To the Pond
Our 737 skidded to a roll on the tarmac in Orlando at roughly 9:39 am. We had a short layover in Miami coming from Portland the night before. Redeyes are soul crushers, and neck snappers. In fact, if the plane seat is actively trying to snatch a soul from a person’s body, it believes that it resides in the upper spine.
Flying low over central Florida, the forests become translucent when you get directly over them. The mud colored swamp water glistens in the morning sunlight through the leaf-barren bald cypress trees. Whenever I pass by a wetland, I wish I had an x-ray cross section of the place so I could see how many critters are rootin’ around in there, and grasp an understanding of the equilibrium of the ecosystem- what that little world can hold of each phylum, class, order, family, genus and species maxed out with predators and prey all swimming in the same muck.
We came to the great resort town of Orlando for many reasons, but all of them tied up to the circus tent that is the Olympic Marathon Trials. The Trials, to the running die-hards of America, is arguably more exciting than the Olympics themselves. Its essence is more grass roots. Athletes from every corner of this great country come to compete to place as high up in the rankings as their legs can carry them, and for 6 (you always hope for 6, but maybe 5) skilled executioners, the honor of wearing the red, white and blue, representing the United States of America against the world in some exotic far off place- for this Olympic cycle, in Paris. In the amateur spirit winked at by the posh old ghost that first lit the Olympic flame, you do not need to do an enormous amount of paperwork or backroom dealing to earn a spot on the starting line of the Olympic Trials. All you have to do is accomplish the monumental task of running an Olympic Trials qualifying time at a sanctioned, real life marathon. A time that 165 women and 214 men achieved during the two year qualifying period, placing them in the top .00000103% of Americans.
If the point of the Olympics is to bring athletic representatives from all of the countries of the world together to find an understanding of humanity through the differences and similarities of culture that only competition can bear out, the US Olympic Trials is the jousting match in the kingdom’s capital to determine who is sent off. Young squires and old knights venture down from villages in the hill country to challenge the very best with dreams of a fairytale ending. It often ends limping and vomiting up colorful fueling choices, but, every 4 years, for a few, dreams do come true. The Trials is a meritocratic holdout in a sport that gets increasingly political the closer you get to the top. And this time around, the 26.2 mile jousting match took place on the flat, wetland-laden, sunshine-drenched turf of central Florida.
We landed, grabbed a Cinnabon and caught a Lyft to the Courtyard Marriott downtown where the Bandit Running crew had set up a photoshoot in a back conference room. The Brooklyn brand invited any and all qualifiers to have their photos taken against a white backdrop by none other than the immensely talented shooter, Joe Hale. (A few weeks later, Joe would snap photos of Kevin Durant and Chet Holmgren for Durant’s media company Boardroom.) Cold, sweaty and dazed from our redeye, we hugged the wall with notorious good guy, Steve Finley, as a gentleman with red curly hair known as the @shirtlessrunner to his social media following, promptly removed his shirt and flexed as Joe pressed his face into the camera and snapped with intention. Mild cheers erupted from the gallery who sat on conference tables looking up from their iPhones surrounded by empty chip bags and half-drunk bottles of water.
The Trials are a marker on the corporate calendar for brands of all kinds in the running ecosystem to showcase their fares and even more importantly, their style, their vibe, their essence. Every company has to stand for something, and wearing a brand telegraphs to the world what you align with, from recovery drinks to chafing remedies, to wearable technology that may influence the purchase of chafing remedies, all the way up the food chain to the apex predators, the footwear brands. The town wherever the Trials are taking place turns into a festival of product with pop-up attractions themed by the brands.
On the evening before the race, we parked our rented Ford Expedition in a grassy side lot in sight of Lake Eola, where the race would finish. The tall grass in the lot was illuminated with a goldish tint from the sunset and as I venmo’d an older gentleman in a plastic white chair for the parking, I wondered if any gators lurked in the weeds. We walked across the street to the Brooks Hyperion House, a row of 5 old wooden airbnbs that Brooks Running rented out and turned into a retail space, influencer and athlete interview amphitheater, t-shirt printer, bar, and all-around hamlet of pleasures. It resembled a frat house village you would find on the side streets of Frontierland.
The Hyperion Elite is Brooks’ new carbon-plated weapon in the super shoe wars- it is what Zach Panning, Des Linden, CJ Albertson, Erika Kemp and the Hansons Brooks team, of which Zach Panning is a part, will wear in the race tomorrow. There is also the Hyperion Tempo, for tempo running and the Hyperion spike, for track racing. They all live under the Hyperion roof and are shown on a bright display in the living room turned retail space. The Hyperion is also one of the 12 Titans of ancient Greek mythology. The story goes that he fathered 3 children with his sister. Those children: the sun, the moon and the dawn.
As I drank a free beer and tried to balance a shrinking mountain of chicken nuggets on my paper plate, I caught up with an old college teammate and her mom, who is an avid track fan and dutiful reader of letrsun.com. We discussed who might finish top 3 tomorrow morning and where on the loop course we planned to watch the action go down. The mother then turned our attention to the topic of which footwear brands showed up and which ones noticeably did not. There was no mention of names of those who did not, but strong inferences as she leaned in and raised her eyebrows speaking in a hushed tone.
This is a common discussion topic amongst people who travel to watch the race. Which brands ‘showed up’ and which did not. It is a relatively small group of die-hards that does actually travel to the Trials, and chances are, if you go to many, you will see a lot of familiar faces and make a lot of friends that you will see across the yard at a brand party and wave a half eaten chicken nugget at while looking like a chipmunk. The sport depends on sponsorship dollars to fund most everything, from events to athlete’s salaries to free buffets of fried bird bits and churros. The pond is small, and any fan who does not directly work in the industry knows someone who does. Everyone has an opinion on how dollars are spent.
In this particular case, the mom praised Brooks for the frontierland frathouse setup and raved about HOKA’s Fly Zone, an alley complete with TV’s that would allow spectators to not only watch the race broadcast, but run between course sections via the alley to see the packs fly by. Hoka had also brought in the boys from CitiusMag and once a runner, Eric Jenkins to flood the airspace with live podcasts and social media content all week long. The Top Gun live show experience was complete with blue flight suits worn by the Hoka reps who handed you a pair of their new carbon-plated super shoe, the Cielo X1 to trial while they held your driver’s license as collateral. This is where my former teammate and her mom would be watching tomorrow. I shifted my focus to the caramel-dipped churros before we made our way to the On Running gathering and community night race at Ivanhoe Brewing company.
Driving down the cobbled streets in our shiny black school bus, palm trees and Savannah-style bungalows, and then chain link fences and warehouses flashed in the reflections on the LCD screens embedded in the headrests. We started to see runners with headlamps darting down the center of the road. When they came to an intersection, they paused, assessed the situation, chose a street and kept truckin’. I don’t know the rules of the game, but it was some kind of flag-grabbing scavenger hunt in the dark. The probability of being lost to the Orlando night in split shorts and high stack shoes seemed high. The On Running style has gone through a rapid change in the company’s short life, shifting from its early, colorful, bubbly days to a more modern, minimalistic and Euro-serious aesthetic, a contrast to the bulky perforated shoes that made them famous. Talking with a Maurten rep at the party, he let me know this is why they tend to partner with On and Nike more than the other brands- their black and white simplicity jives well with the clean look of the premium fueling company. The DJ at the party was playing what I think was house music and all the dark clothing, beanies and trench coat-like jackets with swishy pants tucked into socks made me feel like we had been transported to the Berlin club district of EPCOT. Runners arrived at the blow-up arch in the parking lot with flags in their outstretched hands as confetti cannons blasted and cameras flashed against the night sky. Through the crowd, I saw @shirtlessrunner stumble in with a look of awe, and a twinkle in his eye above his glistening chest.
Vibes were high the night before the race. I spoke to a friend from New York who bought a ticket down earlier in the week. With the excitement mounting, she realized that many of her friends were going to either be on the roads or lining them and she wanted to be there too. It’s also not a bad sell that the race was taking place in Florida in the winter and the hotel she booked on the course had a poolside bar. 70 degrees and sunny is not ideal for marathoning, but it sure is nice coming from the great white north. We, the TRACKLND crew, however, chose to go with the full Florida experience and booked a room at the Days Inn by Wyndam next to the highway- the classic stakeout layout with outdoor walkway access and ceiling to floor windows on the entry side. When shadowy figures crept by, they flashed across the light column from the opening in the drapes stretched across our open eyes and white knuckles gripping the tattered sheets. Just kidding, the pool had a mushroom fountain and we slept fine, waking up at what was 5am west coast time to get downtown to the racecourse.
The events surrounding the actual race taking place at the Olympic Trials are decoration. They are the ornamentation on the thrill ride. The bones are the actual moments of it, and amongst all the fanfare, chicken nuggets and confetti cannons, it’s almost surprising to get to the course and remember that the nation’s best 350 marathoners are shaking out their nerves in a corral behind the starting line, waiting for the TV window to open so that they may fill it with 26.2 miles of beautiful struggle. For spectators lining the course, these moments are fleeting. In a race a little over 2 hours, we will see each runner for at most a few minutes altogether. People will try to get to the perfect spot on the course to see a specific thing happen and get as close as they can to the runners at the front of the pack and then their friends a little further back, but then they are gone. Brands will try to stage themselves in the perfect spot to be associated with these moments when they take place, so that the memory of them includes a branded snapshot of a logo or a product stamped into your mental scrapbook, but at the center of it all, when the layers are pulled back, is the people who earned their spot to be there, and their spellbinding movement.
On the morning of the race, the Starbucks at the corner of N. Orange and E. South Streets was so swamped, orders were not being handed out for a good 45 minutes and some breakfast sandwiches never made it to the hands of their purchasers. Everyone inside circled the counters like sharks at feeding time, speaking casually about how long they had been waiting, but how totally ok they were with it. The staff looked like they were trying to steer a sinking steamship away from an approaching waterfall.
Outside, the barriers lined the street at roughly the mile and a half mark. Crowds shuffled into place, people finding their preferred vantage points.
First, the trucks rolled by, and then the motorbikes, and then more trucks, one with a clock on top that ticked past 7 minutes. Both sides of the street erupted as a few dozen meters up the road the men’s pack came into view. The contenders at the front, strode with their chests out and their heads high, Galen Rupp, Conner Mantz, Scott Fauble, Clayton Young, Lenny Korir, CJ Albertson, Zach Panning, Paul Chelimo. By in a flash, and the rest of the field followed. It was early enough in the race that runners still had the energy to attempt to stifle a smile that would show everyone just how proud they were to be in this elite parade. Doing so might betray the impression that they belonged.
A little after 10 minutes later the women came like the running of the bulls, to cheers from the throngs of people 3 and 4 deep as the road swept past the Starbucks and the Grand Bohemian Hotel with the poolside bar. People stood on the barriers and leaned in squinting through the pack, honing their sights to get a real-life glimpse of the running heroes they see everyday on social media- Emily SIsson, Keira D’Amato, Des Linden, Aliphine Tuliamuk, Sara Hall. Maegan Krifchin, who last year ran 4 marathons in the span of 6 months (2:40 in NYC, 2:29 at CIM, 2:32 in Houston, 2:32 in Boston) got the biggest applause of all as she ran by in her sunglases, 7 months pregnant. Two-time Olympic 1500m medalist, Nick WIllis waved a Tracksmith flag behind the crowd next to the action.
There’s a point in any road race, when a series of roads becomes an arena. It is similar to the phenomenon comedians describe of a crowd becoming an audience, or the dinner scene in Hook, when Robin WIlliams starts to make-believe and can see all of the delicious frosting and turkey legs steaming on the table in front of him. The transformation is not brought on from the portable barriers, or grand finishing arch, it's ushered in by the people and the harmonious synthesis of collective belief. This starts with the racers, themselves. When they’ve gotten past the point of the initial parade and begin to dig, they block out the outside world. When the crowd lining the course sees their actions reflecting their intentions to win, they are no longer thinking about the Starbucks on Orange and South and the breakfast sandwich, they are drawn in by how much what they are watching means to the people doing it, and the ends to which they will go to reach their goal. When all the people lining the course know together how much it means to each person in the race to deliver their best on the day, to win, to place, to finish, and are invested in the outcome, the transformation happens. The asphalt feels like it was laid in this pattern, with these turns by these buildings, the Live Oaks and Cabbage Palms on the 3 8-mile loops + an extra 2.2 just for this specific event.
When it starts to hit, it's odd when the flashing reminders strike that this is normally a regular street, where kids walk the crosswalks on their way to school, and a half eaten cheeseburger sits atop an electrical box next to where the course swings around a bend under an overpass.
The cheeseburger sat just past the 11 mile marker, the point on the course where pre-race medal favorite Scott Fauble stepped off vomiting, unable to control his digestive issues and realizing the day he had marked for years was not his. At this point, Zach Panning was already at the front, pressing the pace, determined to make it a painfully memorable day for anyone trying to go with him.
A man in a wheelchair smoking a cigarette rolled out onto the sidewalk from a senior living center along the course to see what all the fuss was about. Where people are acting wildly, seemingly in a different dimension, it attracts attention, curiosity and a desire to play.
A family wearing Michigan gear scurried through the leaves next to the sidewalk. They were here to watch Aiden Hutchinson in the Pro Bowl the next day, but heard there were Wolverines and Des Linden in the race and came out to root them on. It is not often that you can come within inches of world class athletes as deep in their craft as they will ever get. Unlike the Pro Bowl flag football game, a great American marathoner might have the race of their career today, and everyone else on the streets is partaking in one of the most memorable days of their lives. If a flickering home video reel played out in their minds, it would show their first steps, their first birthday, getting broken up with in their split shorts behind the shed next to their high school track, graduation, the day they met their significant other, this day under the hanging Spanish moss in Orlando.
The marathon has become a catcher for the lost dreams of our younger selves. The Olympic Trials Marathon specifically is a rare athletic achievement with prestigious, historical, significance that is accessible to athletes who are long past their prep days.
When we are kids and begin to realize that we might be decent at something, whether it is running or Croquet, or playing the cello, the realization comes with the possibility that we could potentially one day be great. The notion of this concept is often too large to grapple with as a younger us. We are unable to construct a bridge of consistent work in our minds sturdy enough to take us to our desired destination. But back then, If you had the dream, you had the license to daydream and let time pass because there was always tomorrow, and that was mostly enough. Until it wasn’t, and dreams were left. The dreams became lost in dusty old boxes on scraps of notebook paper and on the back of homework assignments when the commitment, the consistency and the patience weren’t there, they hadn’t yet developed. Those are things that come with maturity.
The thing most hoped for back then was that you could just surprise yourself with the accomplishment, and have it as your own even though you didn’t know if you could. The fear was that all of the work might get you so close to the achievement that it would lose its special quality, it would become flattened by its familiarity. Running the marathon in one’s late 20s, 30s and 40s is an attempt to realize the dream because of the fear that you could become extinct if you cannot fly or even try. It is a commitment to do all of the things that you didn't do when you were young, hoping that the magic of doing it will not diminish through the actual work making it happen. It is realizing that the work is the way. The marathon embodies this principle especially. What it requires are the tools and knowledge that you likely didn’t have when you were a young punk who thought you could get there on talent alone because it wasn’t cool to lay yourself bare, or you simply didn’t know any better.
These are the people in the packs. Their bodies and minds are carved from the work. They know what works for them, from their fueling strategies to their gear. They’ve found the stuff that fits them like a second skin, and the way each of them move in a unique and rhythmic fashion, even when broken and hurting belies a level of commitment that the spectators who flew down from wherever they came from hope to emulate in anything worthwhile. The weekend, it seems, for all involved is a constant attempt to live in the moment, to stop and try to remind oneself what the younger them would think of this, the one who dreamt of moments like these, running childhood routes to wind up at their parents’ house, eat a tray of chicken nuggets and fall asleep in sweaty, ill-fitting running clothes.
Standing half a foot off the sidewalk on crushed oak leaves as the runners descend deeper and deeper into the race distance, it is a study of their psychology. It is written on their faces. Watching the lantern dim, starved of oxygen. During their struggle and breaking, they question their build-ups and reflect on the recent history that got them to this moment in time, nit-picking or rationalizing what is currently happening to their bodies and why. Continuing on to the finish once the elastic has snapped sends them back further in time to grasp the things that brought them here from their beginnings, and to many, brings them to tears when they finally cross the line. The culmination of all the decisions they made and hard things they did instead of taking the easy way out. Realizing their dream. For some, it comes later, once the dust has settled and they are alone, time traveling in a booth in an Orlando dive bar after a few Yuenglings listening to Wheezer or The Strokes. Remember, the shoe companies said you would feel like a rocket ship.
A couple sharp-elbowed straw-haired astronauts shot across the line on N. Magnolia Avenue first. Conner Mantz was shown to the gold by his training partner Clayton Young, looking the fresher of the two. Lenny Korir made his way through the carnage of the 3, 4, 5 positions to grab the 3 spot, with a chance to go to Paris kept alive through evermoving goal posts placed by USATF.
First-time marathoner, Fiona O’Keeffe bewildered the crowd by blitzing a 25th mile of 5:09 to claim the win at the picturesque finish line sandwiched between Lake Eola Park, the Saint George Orthodox Church, the Downtown Baptist Church and the Hoka Fly Zone. In comparison, Lenny Korir used a 5:08 to move up into third position in the men’s race.
American record holder Emily Sisson and DII alum Dakotah Lindwurm placed 2nd and 3rd in the women’s race. The two took wildly different paths to the finish line from the perspectives of their careers to this point, but possessed the same dream.
As far as I know, no one predicted all 6 placers correctly, let alone their finishing order, which is more a reason to hold the Olympic Trials race as a selection process rather than simply send the top athletes on paper to Paris. Every year people marvel that no one predicts the NCAA basketball tournament bracket perfectly, and that is with 63 decisions to make. This is 6. Seems like an argument for individual action over group decision-making to me.
After the race, we headed across Lake Eola Park from the finish line to Persimmon Hollow Brewery. Asics was throwing a party there early in the evening, so Clayton Young was in the house, as was a life-size poster of him, which stood in the corner of the bar and showed up in photos from the night with him tagged in many of them. As the night went on, the Asics party ended and the place became a meetup spot for all walks of the running industry and one could glimpse how the different bodies within the ecosystem cohabitate.
The athletes sat with their college teammates, family and agents, who excused themselves every now and then to take phone calls or talk with other agents with their hands in their pockets and their faces very close together. Coaches sit with athletes too, their eyes darting around and nervously laughing while sipping a beer. They’ll make an exit at the first moment that no one is watching. Photographers stand with other photographers and videographers, because videographers are often also photographers, but only some photographers are also videographers. The podcasters try to get a word in with each other and find ways to work a name drop into conversations. You can tell who wants to spend time together, and who wants to keep the window for an out open, by who is sitting and who is standing. The media collective types and content creators huddle around the brand sports marketing managers who are rushing to get gear to their athletes and check in with Brand Marketing on PR do’s and don'ts. Brand Marketing is always somewhere much cooler than where you are at the moment.
As I sat on a stool by the pool table with the Bandit Running crew, a photographer, an event manager and a young shoe designer, a group of floppy guys in stylish short pants, high socks and low top non-running sneakers fell into the bar. The way they moved smelled of a good time, and they rolled into the place like labradors falling all over each other and bouncing their steps. They were comfortable in their pack and probably had known each other since college running days. You can bounce around with your college buddies more confidently than any other group, especially if you ran together. There’s an art to moving in a pack, and doing it day after day with the same crew, you learn each other’s tendencies like a school of fish and can flow around corners and through narrow straits. You can be a little stumbly and rely on well-worn patterns. One of them was named Ned. I think they were Brooklyn Track Club coaches.
Fiona O’Keeffe arrived at the bar with her group of friends to applause from all areas of the space, but afterwards, most people left her to her people to soak in her first evening as marathon champion of the United States.
Late into the night, much of the Persimmon Hollow Brewing crowd made a move back across the Eola pond to the Stardust Lounge, a sticky basement bar with a dance floor under a Tiki Bar. It was dark down there, and people were letting loose all the demons they had been keeping in since the finish line.
Walking onto a dance floor with runners is like walking through the wardrobe to Narnia. In order to get to the center, you must push through what feels like coat hangers, mostly bobbing, but some wildly thrashing, head banging to early 2000’s hits from Nelly, Ja Rule, Soulja Boy, and Eminem. Moves are limited in this crowd, so you will likely get crossed up by a skinny white dude with no basketball.
The people who recognize Tracklandia, TRACKLND or anything we’re associated with are usually a bit different, which we like. They’re goofy. They have feathers tied in their hair or aren’t afraid to drop it low on the dance floor and gyrate like a choking stink bug. They come wide-eyed and without shame. It’s the best. It’s you, you’re reading this right now. Hello, stallion. Everyone in the ‘Dust is more than pleased with the music selection, which further drives home the point that they are of a generation that is more or less figuring it out and has gotten themselves to Orlando either to race or to work, or because they have the means to travel to watch people compete and fulfill their promise in the sport they love. They sway inebriated to the songs that they loved when their dreams first coalesced in their young minds, filled with the emotion of remembering. Whatever happened that day, they are happy in this moment, getting here at this point in their lives, with people like them, goofy, committed, and carrying a respect for one another who love what they love. They’re going the distance. They’re going for speed. They’re doing alright.
This is where the night ends. Eventually, the lights will come on and people will find their way back to their hotels, motels, Holiday Inns and airbnbs to fall asleep in a bed of Taco Bell wrappers. They’ll go to the Waffle House the next morning and then get on planes and fly out back to wherever they’re from. They’ll get up and go for a run the next day or maybe a few days later and feel connected to themselves as kids, as well as a community of people spread out around the country and world doing the same.
Since my early days in the biz, I’ve been skeptical of the prevailing thought that there are two separate worlds of runners- the elite and the masses that participate in road races, and the way to the sport’s utopian potential is to unlock the portal between them with a magic key. I’ve hazily thought that the way to make the sport popular is to make it interesting to anyone, like the NFL or Love Is Blind, but that also runs contrary to an aversion to losing your soul to gain a following. You have to be drawn to the primal order of it, you have to see it laid out plain in front of you and that has to make you feel something, and more often than not, through the right lens, it does. When something is niche, the more the people who love it are unashamed of it, and partake in its rituals wildly, joyously and unapologetically, the more infectious it is. Walking off the plane back in Portland, I wanted to run long. I wanted to get my body back to the dreamland state where floating is rote. The rhythm of daily running steeped with a climb of intensity. I know that the feeling would gut punch me with joy like hearing Big Pimpin’ in the ‘Dust after one too many Modelos. That is the personal place where we’re all connected. I walked away wanting to press and hurt in a way that you only can by paying the price of a daily grind. The race in Orlando was made a bigger badge of honor for the racers by the obstacles laid in their path to get there, that’s the ticket to the pond, and any self-respecting frog, once a tadpole knows the price. Being there amongst the gnarled oaks with Spanish moss, crab grass and swampy green lakes with bald cypress ringing the edges made me want to get closer, and keep coming back.
It’s a swamp of dreamers.