The new LA Marathon mission statement talks the talk: “Harnessing the transformational power of sport to inspire athletes and connect communities.”
But does the organization walk the walk?
You can
compare the current LA Marathon Situation to the momentous impact of
Wall Street lobbyists and free market evangelists pushing for and getting
deregulation.
In this case,
it was churches with inconvenienced parishioners rather than greedy financiers,
and perhaps a bit of arrogance on the part of the new race owners, but the
inevitable outcome is just as clear.
The LA
Marathon is dead as surely as we are in a deep recession. If the 2009 Marathon isn’t canceled, it will
be the last. The churches certainly didn’t do it scuttle the LA marathon. It
will just be an unforeseen side effect of lobbyists being granted favors.
If you don’t care about the details, I know you won't read the rest of this post. Just
be aware that this blog will continue to follow the situation with this pledge: If I’m wrong about its demise, I’ll run the
2010 LA marathon dressed as Woody Allen.
Heck, I’ll try to recruit a whole brigade of Woody Allens, and we’ll
race the Elvis Presleys.
The sad story
of the demise of the LA Marathon begins when Devine Racing Los Angeles LLC bought
rights to the LA Marathon in 2004 for a reported $15 million. Due to financial
problems, Devine famously delayed payments to pay top finishers of the 2006
event for almost a year, resulting in a boycott by top runners of the 2007 event. Less famously, Devine failed to pay the city
more than $500,000 owed for services in support of the 2006 through 2008
editions of the race.
When he sold
the race in an attempt to bring solvency to his remaining holdings and in order
to pay his LA debt, Chris Devine took responsibility: “To own the L.A. Marathon
and screw it up is a monumental failure.”
A group headed
by media moguls David Kingsdale and Russ Pillar and now fronted by LA Dodger
owner Frank McCourt as LA Marathon LLC took over the contract after agreeing to
a motion from LA Council members Parks and Reyes that the event be held on a
holiday Monday so “people of all faiths can observe their Sabbath.”
A few
commentators, recognizing the LA Marathon was far from a destination event,
suggested it would have been better to change the date to a Saturday, when many
major marathons are held. That would have allowed many more locals who do not
get President’s Day off to run while satisfying the churches along the route
who had lobbied their council representatives for the change.
LA’s sensitivity
to the fact that Saturday is the Sabbath for the Jewish community kept the date
set to holiday Mondays in general and to President’s Day Monday specifically ...
at least for a few weeks.
There were a
few complaints about the change’s impact on training schedules. For example the LA Roadrunners officially
endorsed program, scheduled for 27 weeks, was suddenly going to be 25 weeks. But
LA Marathon LLC reportedly said Runner’s World editors backed the change to 25
weeks as a more optimal training schedule.
Right, like two weeks less training is clearly better.
The new
owners of the event also characterized the change to President Day’s holiday Monday
on February 16, 2009 as part of a transformation of the LA Marathon into one of
the premiere marathons in the world, a reference to the storied Boston Marathon
being run every year on Columbus Day, a holiday Monday.
Then came the
second change, to Monday May 25, Memorial Day.
The outrage
in the community grew. As an anonymous commentator put it on the LA Times blog “So
the trade off is between the inconvenience to a few churches on one Sunday
morning a year vs. the inconvenience to the entire metro area's work force that
doesn't have a Memorial Day holiday?”
Suddenly the
impact on training programs was huge, from 27 to 39 weeks. Anyone whose family was adjusting to the
impact of a marathon training program, particularly if running is not already a
part of that family’s life, faced an additional 3 months of runner’s in absentia. And let’s not even get into how tough it is
to keep up a training regimen that long, nor the potential problem of
overtraining.
Why Memorial
Day? The statement Russ Pillar, President
of LA Marathon LLC, made in a phone interview with the LA Times made it pretty
clear. They needed to stay with a holiday Monday, the next holiday was Memorial
Day, and “…while there’s never a good
time to be changing race dates, the fact is that this will give us enough time
to put on a great event.”
Okay, President’s
Day was coming up too fast. But what about the issue of temperature
Perhaps the
LA Marathon LLC planners went to the trouble of checking average temperature
for May 25th and thought it wasn’t going to be the huge issue that
commentators in the blogosphere have made it out to be, since the median high
for that day is 70. Not great for
marathon performance, which favors 50 degree conditions, but almost tolerable.
But what LA
Marathon LLC didn’t seem to do was think about what COULD happen. In both 2003 and 2005 there were heat waves
during that week in May. High
temperature in LA on May 23, 2003 was 101!
High temperature on May 22, 2005 was 102!
LA won’t have
the humidity that made 88 degrees problematic for last year’s Chicago Marathon,
which had to be halted before most runners finished, and even then resulted in
400 runners being hospitalized. On the other hand, even with low humidity, temperatures
approaching 100 degrees would risk the well being of runners or the
cancellation of the event.
Hey, if you’re
not overly concerned about putting your real constituents, the people who run
the race, through two date changes and a massive impact on training programs,
what should a little matter like the potential need for cancellation at the last
minute be a concern?
Already, people
are organizing a boycott of the May 25 race on Facebook.
The Pasadena
Marathon, which had to be canceled because of poor air quality caused by
November fires, has rescheduled for March 22, glad to fill the March timeframe
abandoned by LA Marathon LLC.
The San Diego
Marathon, scheduled for a week after Memorial Day in the scenic and temperate
beach area of that city rather than the hot commercial corridors of LA’s interior,
is clearly superior for anyone looking for a late May marathon.
And if all of that plus the impact of the
recession on people plunking down $100 for a marathon PLUS travel and lodging aren’t
enough, consider the fact that the new contract stipulates that the city,
without any input from runners, is going to review the event each year. Given the likelihood that the LA Marathon
will see attendance plummet right at a time when the city is in financial
crisis, do you think the city will continue to back the event?
Maybe, in
which case I’ll see you in the starting line crowd in 2010. Just look for the group of Woody Allens trying to run under 3 hours.
