Dan Brannen posted this response to several comments posted on the Ultralist since the National 24 hour Championships in Grapevine,Texas and it is interesting to place this in a context that includes the recent and ongoing publicity that North Face/Dean Karnazes have generated.
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:23:28 -0600
From: Dan Brannen
Subject: Re: 24 hour championships
I thought it might be helpful to comment on some of the issues being debated about the National Ultra Championships, and this year’s 24-Hour in particular. In doing so, I am speaking for the American Ultrarunning Association (AUA), which I serve as volunteer Executive Director.
USATF, AUA, and CHAMPIONSHIP PHILOSOPHY
First, Kris notes the difference between USATF National Championships and AUA National Championships. The Ultracentric 24-Hour was an AUA-endorsed national championship, not a USATF-endorsed national championship. In AUA’s view, it is not the endorsing body which makes a race a national championship, it is the athletes and race director who make it such. The national-body endorsement is just a rubber-stamp on what the athletes and race director themselves create. Our view is that national ultra championships, unlike 99% of ultras, are *all* about competition and performance. They exist to bring together and to showcase the nation’s top-performing athletes, and to give them a rare opportunity to compete head-to-head against one another. Ideally, this would be the case for both Open (any age) and Masters (5- or 10-year age-groups beginning at an age where performance starts to become affected by the aging process), but the primary focus is on the Open (overall) division. It is our view that the primary purpose of a national championship is to bring our nation’s top-performing athletes together, put them on the line, and give anyone else who wants to become one of them the opportunity to “have at ’em.” If an ultra national championship doesn’t bring together at least some reasonable percentage of the nation’s best- performing athletes, then it is a “Championship In Name Only” (CINO).
I’ll add that in my personal view, a CINO is worse than no championship at all. It demeans the value of the “National Championship” title and actually works against any national program which focuses on performance and competition development. Note that Alex Swenson, who won Ultracentric, spoke favorably of the event on this list. I’m sure the primary reason Alex went to Ultracentric was so that he could have a shot at racing (and beating) guys like John Geesler, Roy Pirrung, and Dean Karnazes. And the reason he ran his personal best 24-hour at Ultracentric (as did women’s winner Carolyn Smith) was because those guys were chasing him. That’s what made Ultracentric the national championship, regardless of whether it was endorsed as such by USATF, AUA, or any other organization.
Since 2003, when USATF discovered there was a 24-Hour World Championship for which it was not prepared to organize and send a team, USATF has turned the selection, management, and financing of the U.S. National 24-Hour Team over to AUA. AUA’s philosophical approach in selecting the best possible team to represent the USA at the annual World 24-Hour is, essentially, to marry the team to the national championship; to use the national championship as the vehicle to carry the team; to use it as the selection race for the team and, to the extent possible, to tie the promotion, marketing, and financing of the team to that one high-profile domestic event.
It’s our biggest job of the year, and we’ve been able to field national teams that made it onto the medals podium at the World 24 in most years since it’s been held. Some years we’ve been more successful than others in marketing and raising funds for the team.
This year Ultracentric race director Robert Tavernini knocked himself out recruiting a top American field, and then put up $12,000 in prize money directly earmarked for the top-finishing American athletes to use to fund themselves to the World 24-Hour. As such, he has become the savior of the national 24-hour team.
USATF and AUA have a long history of working together cooperatively on national championships. When USATF implemented a major upgrade to its previously almost nonexistent national ultra program in 1987, it was AUA who organized, financed, and hosted the inaugural U.S. National 100K Championship that year. In the intervening two decades since then, AUA has been involved in the management and financing of about 80% of the USATF national championships. During the past four years, some institutional philosophical differences have emerged between the two organizations, and AUA has decided, at least until these differences are resolved, it would serve the athletes better in some cases by staging its own national championships and not having USATF as a direct partner in the project. This decision is not a
rejection of or a separation from USATF. AUA remains the only national member organization of USATF (and pays its annual membership dues) exclusively dedicated to ultras. AUA requires USATF sanction and certification of its national championships, and enforcement of USATF rules at them. AUA works cooperatively with USATF’s Mountain/Ultra/Trail (MUT) Council in coordinating the relationship between its national championships and the national teams that may be involved with them. And, the Vice-Chair of USATF’s MUT Council actually serves as AUA’s team manager for the 24-hour team.
BIDDING PROCESS
Laz (Gary) mentioned that there is a bidding process for national championships. USATF mostly uses a bidding process for event directors to bid to host national championships, but it is not required to do so by its by-laws. And in some cases it has not used the bidding process. The MUT Council does currently use a bidding process, but probably only because its parent Long Distance Running Committees have usually done so (however, I do recall one of the national Long Distance Running Chairmen commenting in frustration many years ago, “We have a bid form but we don’t really have a bidding process–we have a begging process.”).
For the record, AUA does not use a bidding process to stage its national championships. We network through the ultra community looking for race directors (or potential future race directors) who we feel can come up with the resources to bring most of the top American athletes together, and maximize competition and performance.
LIGHTING, HILLS, PACING
There have been a number of comments about the lighting (or lack thereof) and hills on the Ultracentric course. For the record, a careful study of topo maps and Google Earth reveals that the difference between the highest and lowest elevations on the course was 13 feet (it had been advertised as 12 feet). Some helpful comments have been made about the darkness on sections of the course, and about the occasional use of pacers by some athletes. To confirm: both USATF and AUA national ultra championships prohibit pacers. Obviously, as with most events, there is room for some improvement in some technical and rules enforcement areas. And I’d like to thank those of you on this list who have already made helpful suggestions for next year. It was a new venue being used for the first time, and there are always some items which are less than perfect in such a situation. We’ll be sure to review these carefully for future AUA championships.
SMALL LOOP DISTANCE: 0.25 miles or 0.24 miles.
Kris asked how the small loop distance, implemented during the final hour of the race, changed from 0.25 miles to 0.24 miles after the race. In fact, all final, official distances were re-calculated and re-posted on the website the day after the race. The official, certified distance of the small loop was always 0.24 miles. The easy phrase “a quarter mile” was used casually, and the computer scorer mistakenly programmed [0.25] into his system instead of [0.24]. We caught this mistake on Sunday night and had it corrected by the next day.
For those of you who had an interest in this topic, thanks for listening.
-Dan Brannen,
Executive DIrector, AUA
danbrannen(at)earthlink.net
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