Paav Nurmi Biography in English

You'd think that the guy who was possibly the single greatest pre-WWII track & field athlete would have a biography in English. But according to Cam Bowie at the T&FN message board, there's only one and it's relatively new.

Paavo Nurmi was the greatest Olympic athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. Winner of nine gold medals, he dominated longdistance races at three Olympic Games and overshadowed a fourth, having been refused a chance to crown his career with victory in the marathon in Los Angeles 1932 in one of the greatest causes celèbres of the amateur era.One of the most famous sports personalities of his time, Nurmi filled stadiums all over Europe and coast to coast in America.

It's 27 Euros (about $40) and only available through the Sports Museum of Finland. Bowie suggests e-mailing Pia Arvo (pia.arvo@stadion.fi), as negotiating online shopping through a foreign country and in Finnish is beyond all but the most international of us.

This will go on my "I'll get it sooner or later" list.

New Book on the Market

One-time Track & Field News managing editor Jeff Hollobaugh has just come out with a running novel. Blurb:

A victim of the barbarous social scene at Shiawassee High School, Riley Matthews dreams only of a normal home life, a decent mile race, and perhaps a date. Instead, Riley's final semester is marked by a mom on the brink of a breakdown, a school stunned by the bloodthirsty Kult of Fatality, and a collection of the scariest misfits in the school: mutant halfwit wrestlers, jailbirds, emo porn girls, slashers... not to mention his usual assortment of geekish friends. Can he make it to the finish line in one piece?

Me likey. A novel about an unpretentious average high school runner.

More info available at the author's website.

A Gem From Sports Illustrated

I'm fairly disappointed at the lack of any coverage of Boston at SportsIllustrated.com. While looking through the front page I found a link to the SI Vault about Patriot's Day sports, and came across a 1963 article by Hal Higdon titled "On The Run From Dogs And People".

I believe this article must have morphed into Higdon's classic 1971 book of the same title, which contains one of my favorite lines about people who just don't get running:

Occasionally you do run into a comment that is actually funny. Ted Corbitt, a distance man from The Bronx, runs to the subway on his way to work as part of his training program. One day a guy said to his friend as Corbitt jogged by, "Man, that cat's late every morning."

New Track Biography

Abel Kiviat, National Champion: Twentieth-Century Track & Field and the Melting Pot
Alan S. Katchen
$34.95, available through Syracuse University Press

I haven't read it yet, but it purports to not only tell Kiviat's life story but the history of the Irish-American Athletic Club (for which Kiviat, a Polish-American Jew, ran) and its ties to the Tammany Hall political machine. Inter-library loan, here I come!

Amazon Backhands Track Book

Amazon.com has quietly made a significant change in how it lists books.

One of these books has been removed from Amazon's sales rankings because of "adult" content; the other has not.

"American Psycho" is Bret Easton Ellis' story of a sadistic murderer. "Unfriendly Fire" is a well-reviewed empirical analysis of military policy. But it's "Unfriendly Fire" that does not have a sales rank -- which means it would not show up in Amazon's bestseller lists, even if it sold more copies than the Twilight series. In some cases, being de-ranked also means being removed from Amazon's search results.

Amazon's policy of removing "adult" content from its rankings seems to be both new and unevenly implemented. On Saturday, self-published author Mark R. Probst noticed that his book had lost its ranking, and made inquiries. The response he got from Amazon's customer service explained:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Books deemed "adult" include Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (recently made into an R-rated film) and Maurice by E.M. Forster, but do not include Playboy: Six Decades of Centerfolds and titles written by such porn stars as Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson. Books even remotely connected to the LBGT community appear to be, from Amazon's perspective, more appealing to the prurient interest than self-admitted pornography. The exceptions? The Amazon-only Kindle format, of course.

This may be appalling, but why does it belong on a track blog? Because of the possible effect on one of the most important track books of all time, Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner.

Released in 1974, it was the first widely available sports novel about homosexuals, and it was the first running novel ever to hit the New York Times best-seller list. The basic plot summary is a young superstar runner who is outed on his way to the Olympics and the resulting public hatred he receives. The novel's importance is so great among the LBGT community that "Front Runners" is a near-universally used name for LGBT endurance-sports clubs.

Reading List

Once a month or so I'll post some books you may find interesting. This month has a theme.
Nonfiction
Boston Marathon: The First Century of the World's Premier Running Event
Tom Derderian, 1998
Derderian, a 14-time Boston runner and a coach with the Greater Boston Track Club, gives a year-by-year summary of each race. Well, more than a summary--he actually tells the story of each year's race, which is a lot more than simply what happened. This is probably one of the dozen best track books in the English language.

Biography
Just Call Me Jock: The story of Jock Semple, Boston's Mr. Marathon
Jock Semple (with John J. Kelley and Tom Murphy), 1982

Semple was the trainer for the Boston Bruins and Celtics for over 40 years, but he was also basically the lone organizer of the Boston Marathon for decades. He's best known for his famous 1967 run-in with Katherine Switzer, but was also a pretty darned good runner in his day. This book gives us a rare first-hand account of the era when road racing was a sport reserved for the blue-collar working man.

I found a copy of this book for $3 at a local used bookstore. It was signed by Semple, who passed away in 1988.

Fiction
The Long Run of Myles Mayberry
Alfred Alcorn, 1999
Where is the dividing line between obsession and insanity? Mild-mannered loser Miles Mayberry's life is falling apart around him, and to keep himself focused he decides he's going to run the Boston Marathon--and win it. A spot-on portrait of single-mindedness as well as the tired bullshit of the late 70s.

Once A Runner Prequel?

Entertainment Weekly's website ran a short interview with John L. Parker to plug the upcoming rerelease of Once A Runner, probably the best track fiction ever written. He hints at an upcoming prequel to match the sequel out a little while ago.

Once A Runner Available Again

Scott Bush at US Distance Runner reports that the John L. Parker classic will be reprinted and available in April.

I never read it until about three years ago when I got it for Christmas (a few new copies were available on Amazon.com and my sister-in-law paid cover price for it). Being a runner of the late 80s / early 90s, hardly anyone I knew had even heard of it. It was probably more meaningful to read it when I was no longer a serious runner, as it brought back things I had long forgotten. I certainly didn't need it when I was 20 and put in weeks of 100 miles on top of 60+ hours at work.