Sportsfrog.com

…bad motherfucker.

I won’t shut my mouth.

That’s completely insane. And, of course, a new world record. Prior to this, the fastest I have ever seen a human run was that amazing 200 Michael Johnson laid down in Altanta, when it seemed like his body was splitting apart from going so fast. Bolt? It’s effortless. He may not be from this planet.

Go watch the video on here nbcsports.com (thanks to swamp all-universe turdferguson for the heads up on that in this thread).

And then, marvel. That’s simply amazing.

I know it’s not the Olympics, but, damn, media types (ESPN et al), the man dropped a 9.58 with no wind.

I mean, 9.58.

9.58.

If you have not seen the highlights of what it looks like when someone runs a 9.58, find them. Usain Bolt is almost beyond belief at this point. And his own seemingly silly goal? 9.4. So, damn.

Si.com’s Brian Cazeneuve on what transpired yesterday:

The world’s fastest man is now even faster, swifter still than the Usain Bolt who sprinted and danced to an Olympic victory at the Beijing Olympics last year. The Jamaican superstar fired off another world record at the world championships in Berlin Sunday, lowering his own 100-meter mark to 9.58 seconds from the 9.69 he ran in winning the Olympics. Unlike last summer, Bolt ran through the finish line, waiting until after his moment in history to celebrate. He was gamely chased by a rejuvenated Tyson Gay, the U.S. rival and defending world champion who was felled by a hamstring injury last year and established himself as a worthy challenger to Bolt with some strong early-season performances. Gay finished in a solid 9.71 seconds, a time only Bolt has ever surpassed in history. Jamaica’s Asafa Powell finished third in 9.84.

The superb effort by Gay was never enough to challenge Bolt. The Jamaican, who often starts slowly, had him beat after a few strides. True, Bolt measured himself by world records and levels of animation in Beijing. When he won the 200 there, he eclipsed Michael Johnson’s seemingly unbeatable world record, lowering it from 19.32 seconds to 19.30. Earlier, he set a world record 9.69 seconds in the 100 after looking around for his competition at the end of the race and losing time in the process.

The race in Berlin was different because Bolt had a worthy challenger, a defending world champion who ran like one and would have been able to repeat were he not running against a superstar for the ages. And yet the outcome was never in doubt. “I got a good start,” said Bolt. “Then I got into my drive phase and after 50 meters I knew I was in good shape.” This was like [Roger] Federer beating [Rafael] Nadal or Nadal beating Federer. It only made the victory sweeter because the runner-up would have been a champ against a lesser rival.

Some swamp chatter on the extreme craziness of Bolt’s speed here in the Swamp, including the return of long-time and missed swamper Coledog. Drop by with a thought or two.

(This is the last of the pre-Hood To Coast entries. We hope to have time/energy to post from the road during the race.)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to be a tribute to anything but the organization and logistical prowess of a group of internet strangers. It wasn’t supposed to dovetail perfectly with the larger race’s fundraising efforts. It wasn’t supposed to be one last way to pay our respects for one of our own. Now it is all of those things and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

We were supposed to be doing this on a lark. We were the “Charlatans of the Highest Order,” an homage to a team member’s clever dating ruse. Certainly a worthy name, but we got a better one while wishing that we’d never had to change. We’re now the Unknown Swampers, which is a name that works on two levels. We are, for the most part, all part of The Swamp, and also mostly Unknown to each other. That’s just a coincidence. The bigger reason is to pay a tribute to one of The Swamp’s own, Unknown, a young man from Chicago named Sean E. Healy who remains a big part of Swamp Lore.

There are a lot Swampers who have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. Telkinsjr. Lafley. Tkurkjan. Brainbo. JBCool. Smitty. I couldn’t possibly list them all. Their reasons are their own, under their control or not, it is what it is, repeat as needed. Sean’s reasons were out of his control and in the form of a battling a rare cancer.

It says something about the Swamp that when he hadn’t been around for a while, we started to get worried. Sean had told us once before about his cancer and how it had gotten better and allowed him to live his life normally. Then he slipped away from the Swamp for an extended period. We didn’t notice for a while, because people’s posting habits ebb and flow. Of course, given his history we feared the worst as the time stretched out longer and longer.

Then the news came, via the private messaging system. A Swamper had contacted Sean’s e-mail looking for news on him. Eventually two responses hit his inbox from Sean’s account. They were sent by Sean’s mother and confirmed what we suspected. Sean lost his fight with cancer on February 10, 2007.

We didn’t know Sean, other than as a message board friend. Everyone had (and still has) issues and arguments with others, even on a message board with as much civility as The Swamp has. Unknown was no different. Fiercely loyal to his Chicago teams, US Men’s Soccer, and any other topic which needed his defense, he made people mad on occasion, but he was capable of making us smile even more easily. He was, like the rest of us, a regular guy/gal looking for a place to talk about sports without the sniping and namecalling that usually accompany anonymous message boards. He was a valued member of the Swamp Community.

That’s what this is all about: this race, this board, this website. Community. A lot of websites have message boards that are an offshoot of the main content page. The Sports Frog has a front page (I Swear!) that exists because of its message board.

The Swamp is a community, the likes of which I am not sure exist anywhere else in cyberspace. So when a group of twelve relative strangers gather to run from Mt. Hood to the Pacific Ocean this weekend, we’re gathering as a part of a larger community. Unknown Swampers together, running for other Unknown Swampers, singular and plural. We’ll be thinking of all of you, the ones here still, and the ones who have passed their way through our space, leaving a bit of themselves with each of us.

So, with nothing left to add before we hit the road, this one goes out to those Unknown….

(There’s still time to donate to The Unknown Swampers’s race fund; every penny of each donation goes to the American Cancer Society. We didn’t plan on having a reason to support the ACS, but sometimes things work out like that.)

Welcome to AB’s Running Blog! Well, maybe it just seems that way as we make a final push to Hood To Coast 2008. It’s close enough to taste, and believe me, if you’ve ever licked the back of a collective someone who has just run 197 miles non stop, you’ll know that it is not a taste that can be forgotten.

When last we left off I was showing progress but I needed to ramp up the mileage. The shortest leg of Hood to Coast (incidentally, mine) is 13.55 miles, or an average of 4.52 miles per leg. I hadn’t run so much as a 5K in mid-January. So on January 25, 2008, I sucked it up. I was going four miles, pain be damned. Forty-six sixteen. Not great, not bad. The next Friday I did the same. Forty-three thirty nine. In seven days, I improved two and a half minutes. I was convinced that I wasn’t pushing myself as hard as I needed to be doing.

Only that didn’t work out. It worked exactly opposite of how I had hoped. I hit a wall and think I hurt myself a little. I ran only six times over the next month. Then another eight for the two months. I was hurting some and basically chickening out. My anemia was back; I was tired by six p.m. most days. Running wasn’t on my priority list. Soon it was May and I was well behind in training. From February 1 through April 31st I had run just twenty-two miles. I was letting the team down, though none of them said as much.

Now we were three months out and I had a lot of work to do. I bought new shoes at a specialty running store, signaling a fresh commitment. I took the advice of a store employee and implemented the 10% rule, whereby you track backwards from a target mileage and never increase weekly mileages by more than 10%. Aiming to run twenty-two miles race week (figuring for race mileage and some training miles), I found myself needing to run 7.25 miles the first week of training. Suddenly these numbers were manageable. The original spreadsheet was calling for six and eight mile runs and I simply wasn’t capable of that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now how could I forget fair Dave? Maybe because he’s neither running nor driving, but rather just showing up for the fun parts? A real team player, that Dave. OOOH, I’ll just show up when it is convenient for me. How does that fit your schedule? If he complains about his knees aching he is liable to be killed.

That said, DaveinSeaside is bringing some heat, literally. Well, not literally, unless he transports a propane tank from Seattle. He will be fricaseeing, and braising, and searing left and right making a post-race brunch. Hopefully it will have the requisite amounts of grease to combat hangovers because there’s going to be so much beer drinking Saturday night howard is gonna get a contact drunk.

Tale of the Tape:
Name: DaveInSeattle
AKA: DiS
Height: Acrophobic
Weight: Divorced, so much lighter now
Team Role: Keymaster/Chef
10K Potential: Less than Michael Phelps
Hobbies: Bacon and Vodka Trafficking, Cameron Mills Worship, Bending People over the Sail Bag
Biggest Asset to Team: Tying Bolo ties
Most Likely To: Not need ibuprofen Sunday AM

This is all his fault, really. He tricked us with his promise of booze and brotherhood. Then, once we had committed, casually mentioned that, oh yeah, we have to run 197 miles first. We should have known he was lying; he also claims to play soccer weekly in Alabama, which is obviously an outright fabrication. The only thing soccer players in Alabama are good for is for feeding to the football players. So this lying thing is pathological.

The thing is, the guy seems to be able to flat move. He didn’t let us know he was training that much, and then boom, he drops a line in our Super Secret Forum (trust me, you’ve missed nothing) and says, “What’s up guys last night I ran four miles in like 24 minutes, but I’ll try to do better, sorry to let you down.” I got a stitch in my side just reading what he had done, it was so surreal.

Bob used to play foosball collegiately at San Diego School of Mines and Technorati, where he was the third little man in the midfield. He and his two linemates synchronized their flipping as if connected by a fat metal bar. He still has the scars, both physical and mental, from this experience, and will gladly show them to you. The mental ones that is. The physical ones are his true shame.

Tale of the Tape:
Name: Bobby Pentagonz
AKA: Gonz, Bobby P, King of the Vagabonds
Height: 70.5 inches
Wait: The Hardest Part
Team Role: Runner, Leg 9 (19.68 Miles, Most Difficult Leg)
10K Potential: The Clock
Hobbies: Shopping for home security systems, not being caught because he’s f*cking innocent, Necromancy, Kegel Exercise Class Instructor
Biggest Asset to Team: Racist Joke Sounding Board
Most Likely To: Wake up without knowing where his pants went

Next: AB!

TommyBoy and Brian were the masterminds of our team. They took the time to crunch the numbers and come up with the running order that would be best for the team. After about seven minutes it was pretty clear to see that TommyBoy likes spreadsheets. He has a tatoo of an empty pivot table on his ass. Drop Data Items Here indeed.

TommyBoy spends his days doing high finance and his nights low finance, supplementing his income by giving investment advice to hobos. He eats PEG ratios for breakfast and defecates no-load mutual funds. It will shock you to know that maybe these profiles are not 100% accurate, but I’ve written this whole section and am not positive he works in finance. The way he makes love to Excel means it must be so.

TommyBoy kept us very abreast of his training regimen, including the Ipod Hits from his latest runs (he runs similar paces to Rassele). From this, we have learned that his taste in music is not very eclectic. What I mean by that is that it all, without exception, sucks.

Tale of the Tape:
Name: TommyBoy
AKA: The Thrilla Who’s Vanilla
Height: Dead Horse
Waits: Tom
Team Role: Runner, Leg #3 (17.16 miles, 6th most difficult)
10K Potential: Currently banned from the SEC”s website for soliciting runners
Hobbies: (=VLOOKUP, ‘Hobbies!’$A$1:$B$47,2,2,)
Biggest Asset To Team: Caged Wisdom DVD Set
Most Likely To: Hook up with a tranny at the afterparty

Next: Bobby Pentagonz!

If boybleu is blowing his horn, you best get out of his way, because he’s headed to next exchange point. There is something to be said about a guy who, having run the event in the past, is smart enough to volunteer to drive instead. All of the camraderie, none of the shin splints.

What we’re looking for from boybleu will be guidance. What we need is for him to give some of his sage wisdom, such as “It’s customary for the vans to stop and water their runners during the leg.” Never mind that in certain legs you can’t do that; boybleu is a bona fide rule breaker. A ruffian. A scofflaw. He’s the type of guy who will bring a keg of Corona Light onto a streetcar and dare you to question him about doing so.

We’re just hoping that his reputation as a chartlatan doesn’t mean that we are all in on his little ruse. A little ruse that involved the registering of a domain name and creating a fictional race whereby to lure twelve unsuspecting strangers to his hometown so as to murder each and every one of them. A very lazy mass-murderer, if you will.

Tale of the Tape:
Name: boybleu
AKA: Puddy (I swear!)
Haight: A neighborhood in San Francisco.
Weight: 4400 pounds (when seated in driver’s seat)
Team Role: Driver, Van #1 (197 miles, easiest leg)
10K Potential: At current pace, May 2012
Hobbies: Conoisseur of fine mouthwash, CRT Monitor Repair, Rochambeaux
Biggest Asset to Team: Grooming tips
Most Likely To: Trip the light fantastic

Next: TommyBoy!

Brian knows pain. Brian knows the pain of going long distances, hoping to finish strong. Brian knows how hard is to often start out wonderfully, only to hit the proverbial wall and screech to a halt. Brian knows the pain of constant toil, knowing that the only thing in the future is another disappointment. Such is life for Detroit sports fan.

When it comes to running, however, Brian’s story is among the best on this team. Checking in at 5-10 1/2 inches tall, Brian at one point decided he needed to lose some weight. I envision it was much like Forrest Gump. One day, he just put on some running shoes, stepped outside his Detroit home and took off. He arrived in Las Vegas four months later, shacked up with some cocktail waitress from Ned’s House of Blackjack (it’s just off the strip) and divorced his wife. Budweiser is considering him for a spot as a “Real Man of Genius.”

Brian has run several marathons and/or half-marathons (though we’ve tried to tell him that quitting a full marathon midway doesn’t really count as a half-marathon) and lost enough weight that he is also being considered for the role of body double to Subway Jared, who appears to be getting a little bit thicker in the past couple of months.

Tale of the Tape:
Name: brian
AKA: briandtw, Chippewa Chuck
Height: (omitted)
Wait: 15 minutes from this point
Team Role: Runner, Leg #2 (17.5 Miles, 3rd most Difficult)
10K Potential: One of a handful to reach this post count
Hobbies: Hitting on 15, Olde English Typesetting, Boycotting Video Games, Issuing Non-Interest Bearing Loans
Biggest Asset to Team: Body Glide Supplier
Most Likely To: Start his legs later than expected

In seriousness, Brian is our Team Captain and has put in a lot of time to help make sure things have run as smoothly as they have. He fronted a lot of money when we didn’t know who was going to be running, coordinated our paperwork with the race organizers and secured half of our vans for the race itself. I would like to extend a personal thank you to Brian for this and I think in doing so I speak for all of our team members.

Next: boybleu!

We did have twelve runners from The Swamp at one point. For one reason or another, good (JoeyClams, PresidentCerrano, GovementChedda, Brainbo) or bad (Bronto – pinnacle of health my ear), like it or not, some had to drop out. Thusly, we have had to scramble to find runners to fill their spots.

The first Non-Swamper signed up was Momma Pentagonz. A serious runner, if a suspect child-rearer, Momma Pentagonz has been on board from the start. She will be running Leg 8 (14.39 miles, 10th most difficult) and riding in Van #2. It is expected that she will compete with GPJ for the title of Bear Safety Warden, as she has more first-hand experience than the merely theoretical work of Jones. She is the front runner for the most likely to say something off-color to make everyone else breathe a bit easier in her presence.

SpongeLikeNinja found the second non-swamper, a friend of his with the absolutely stunning initials AB. AB the Unswamped, as it were, has run several 50K races, which is, and I mean this in the nicest way, stupid. I don’t think I’ve run 50K total in preparation for this race. Pork (The Other AB…get it?) is running Leg 10 (17.89 miles, 4th most difficult leg), which after running 50K is merely a warm down. It is expected he will run back to Portland to catch his flight.

The third and fourth replacements are a couple who were found by TommyBoy via a swinger’s message board. The two mentioned that they would “run to the ends of the earth” for a nice, clean, non-infected experience with a good Catholic family. TommyBoy said “How about just to the Pacific Ocean, with no promises as to the other caveats?” Their first questions after joining were “You guys like beer, right?” The Naturals. Remco (the “man” of the relationship) is a Hood to Coast veteran who will run Leg 5 (17.91 miles, 2nd most difficult) while Karen (soon to be the “man” of the relationship once the two marry, effectively ending Remco’s days as a man) will run Leg #4 (14.74 miles, 11th most difficult).

The last replacement was garnered also by TommyBoy from another message board (the man is indefatigable) and can run eight-minute miles. “Jim,” if that is his real name, will compete with howard in nyc for oldest male in Van #2. A nineteen time Hood to Coast Veteran, Jim will run Leg 11 (15.85 miles, 8th most difficult). Jim is “Most Likely to Mutter ‘What Have I Gotten Myself Into’ Under His Breath.

Next: Brian!