A Sunday in Providence
Some Romance left in this dry old world. Ken Nason decided to give up his job for a year and bust his gut trying to get to the Olympics. Didn't want to get old and think of what might have been. He told his old friend Mark Carroll what he was doing and how he hoped to do it. Carroll said not to worry about a thing and went out and bought bunk beds and put them in the spare room of his house. Any of the lads who want to spill sweat going for the Games are welcome. Rent free. Ken and Mark are on the first hill of Jimmy Harvey's course, a 1,000 metre leg stretcher which reminds them of home. Back in Cork they first began to know what sort of animal Carroll was when it came to the hills. They'd be out hammering away, a gang of them, friends from North Mon and Leevale, and when they'd come to a decent hill Carroll would devour it whole.
Always the same. Carroll remembers times not too long ago when he'd be driving his car and he'd come to a decent hill and he'd have to stop and park and run the hill a dozen times before he could drive on.
Today Ken and Mark have a few hills ahead of them.
Harvey, too. Jimmy must be a serial killer in his spare time. It's impossible surely to be so nice and obliging and not have a dark side. Harvey is a displaced Brummie living in athletic heaven in a sweet woodframed house in Providence. Carroll came to him a few years ago after he'd decided he needed more individual attention than Ray Treacy could give him at Providence. They had a year or so of informal work together, a period when leery acquaintance grew into fast friendship.
Now Carroll says that Jimmy is his coach for life and Jimmy's mild English midlands accent has absorbed some of the Corkman's patois - "Those hills will take it out of you today, boy."
Ken and Mark's route this morning take them up three hills, the second a rhythmbreaking series of small, steep hills and the last another 1,000-metre killer which ends all conversation and filches your breath. Obeying a little twinge, Ken Nason drops out after the third hill. Carroll pounds onwards. Sixteen miles in about an hour and 45 minutes.
"Nothing strenuous the day after a race. Just goin' easy, boy."
Young, gifted and, er, Cork
When he thinks about Sydney, he sees a room. Well, first one room, then another room. All the Olympic finalists ushered in silence from one holding area to the next while the clock ticks loud and slow. Finally they are let loose on to the track, liberated to the noise, surrendered to their own adrenalin. In the room, though, mostly it's nervy silence and undetonated energy. The Kenyans huddle together and the Ethiopians huddle together and the Moroccans whisper. Carroll and the American middle distance runner Bob Kennedy might sit beside each other. The Africans will be talking.
"What would you say they're talking about?" Carroll will say.
"About how they're going to kick our asses," Bob will reply.
"Yeah."
Hard not to think about it. In Monaco last year, Carroll came through 1,500 metres in 3:41, through the mile in 3:59. Phenomenal pace. Yet he was 12th and Kennedy was 11th. Everyone beyond that was African. He's cocky, but he ain't no fool. He looks around the starting line sometimes and, yeah, of course he feels intimidated.
You want him to say he doesn't? "When it's one of those days, and I know that by the second half of the race I'm going to be hurting like no man on earth, when I know I'm just going to be pulled along for as long as I can keep going, then I'm intimidated. Yeah, that intimidates me. Other days they might be watching each other and the Moroccans might decide to wind it up from a long way out and I know I can take anyone in a race like that. On days like that I fancy my chances."
He has few illusions left, just plans. He holds with no kooky theories of anatomical apartheid which would bestow all of nature's distance-running gifts on Africans. He works instead to replicate the African culture of running, to lay down a base of work over a period of years which will give him the conditioning he needs. In the three days after his 13:21 in Dedham, he will lay down 50 miles on the road.
The task is daunting, though. His friend, Bob Kennedy, is one of only two white runners ever to have run under 13 minutes for the 5,000 metres. The other is Dieter Baumann, who is fighting a drug ban just now. The next will be Carroll, who thinks he can hit the 12:55 region if he gets in the right race this season.
When he thinks about Sydney he thinks about the room, he thinks about the faces of his African rivals. He thinks of the start line, the bang of the gun and the pain of the race. Sometimes it's a runaway train. Sometimes it's his kind of day. He has his plan now. He'll stay in America till late July after the US trials and then hit Europe running, taking a couple of 1,500 races to sharpen the pace and then running maybe one 5,000.
In Sydney, he won't be looking for any "special considerations" as the artists formerly known as BLE like to call it. He's an athlete's athlete. He'll be in the village, enjoying the company of guys he likes.
"There's nothing they could have there that would shake my concentration," he says. "Nothing."
