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Sammy Wanjiru's Dangerous Idea
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By Bryan Green
I recently started reading a book called What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
The book is a collection of short essays by prominent thinkers about "unthinkable ideas", ideas that, if true, would shake the foundation of their respective field or even society as a whole. These are questions like, "What if humans have no souls?", "Would society be better off if all drugs were legalized?" and "What if you had to have a license to become a parent?" as well as 100 or so more on topics of physics, psychology, sociology, economics and philosophy.
There are a lot of dangerous ideas that relate to track and field. Ideas that are hard to write about because they challenge the core of our beliefs: "What if we could exactly determine an individual's potential?" "What if injuries are 100% avoidable?" "What if differences in talent are not physical, but purely mental?" "What if Africans are genetically superior athletes?"
These ideas are dangerous because they are hard (even impossible) to empirically test and because the answers could challenge decades of accepted truths about ourselves and our sport. Other dangerous ideas are less controversial to write about. In his book Born to Run
, Christopher McDougall posits his own dangerous idea (for shoe companies, at least): "What if running shoes are actually the cause of many of our injuries?"
Then there are dangerous ideas that are expressed through execution. These are ideas that challenge the accepted norm but are not scientific or philosophical in nature. They can only be asked by the athletes or coaches themselves. I think of Dick Fosbury (and presumably his coach) wondering if there wasn't a better way to go over that high jump bar.
Since hearing about Sammy Wanjiru's death last Monday I've been thinking about the impact he had on the sport and how he will be remembered. Articulating what I was feeling didn't come easily, however. I'd been watching him since he was a high schooler in Japan. I felt like Sammy was more special than a discussion of his times or his talent could express.
Then it finally hit me. What Sammy was for me was the embodiment of a dangerous idea: what if we ran the marathon with no fear?
Throughout the last century, the marathon was the one distance that demanded conservatism. In sports, conservatism is the child of fear. NFL teams play the "prevent" defense because they fear the big play. Pitchers intentionally walk power hitters because they fear the home run. Golfers play for the fairway instead of the green because they fear the sand and water traps.
And marathon runners don't go out too hard in marathons, because they fear what will happen in the final miles if they do.
This fear is rational. It's sane. It's healthy. And it was shared by everyone and corroborated by years of collective experience. You don't have to be told to fear the marathon, you just do.
Sammy had another idea. He didn't get caught up in pace and splits and times. Perhaps it was his limited background on the track, having trained and developed in a Japanese system that emphasized road racing. Perhaps it was just his personality, that of a boxer in a marathoner's body. Perhaps he was, like Daniel Komen before him, simply so good that he didn't understand that he should be sharing others' fear of the race.
He gave lip-service to taking Haile Gebrselassie's world record, but I never took it to be more than that. Had he truly cared he would have entered a race with pace-setters and actually conserved some energy in the beginning. But he never did that. He preferred beating people to clocks.
In Beijing 2008 he attacked the race in a way that nobody thought possible given the conditions. He was fearless and indomitable, and left the rest of the marathon world scratching their heads in disbelief. I would argue that until that race, the marathon held a mystique equivalent to the 4:00 barrier in the 1950s. And like Bannister's great run, Sammy's performance shattered the marathon's mystique. It made the unthinkable thinkable.
The following year two unheralded runners, Duncan Kibet and James Kwambai, would run 2:04:27 in Rotterdam. Abel Kirui then gave a Wanjiru-esque 2:06 performance at the World Championships in Berlin. And most recently, Geoffrey Mutai and Moses Mosop threw caution to the wind (tailwind, more specifically) and ran absurd 2:03 lows in Boston.
It's hard to argue that any of these performances would have happened without Sammy's amazing run in Berlin. It remains to be seen whether Len Johnson is right that we will see a return to conservatism in marathoning. I think that assumes Sammy's contribution was merely a shift in marathon strategy. I disagree. I think it was the shattering of a mental barrier. And shattered barriers aren't rebuilt. Once they're gone, they're gone.
Alas, so is Sammy Wanjiru. The marathon will never be the same.
By Bryan Green
 Sammy was a fearless runner from the start, dominating the Japanese high school scene. |
The book is a collection of short essays by prominent thinkers about "unthinkable ideas", ideas that, if true, would shake the foundation of their respective field or even society as a whole. These are questions like, "What if humans have no souls?", "Would society be better off if all drugs were legalized?" and "What if you had to have a license to become a parent?" as well as 100 or so more on topics of physics, psychology, sociology, economics and philosophy.There are a lot of dangerous ideas that relate to track and field. Ideas that are hard to write about because they challenge the core of our beliefs: "What if we could exactly determine an individual's potential?" "What if injuries are 100% avoidable?" "What if differences in talent are not physical, but purely mental?" "What if Africans are genetically superior athletes?"
These ideas are dangerous because they are hard (even impossible) to empirically test and because the answers could challenge decades of accepted truths about ourselves and our sport. Other dangerous ideas are less controversial to write about. In his book Born to Run
, Christopher McDougall posits his own dangerous idea (for shoe companies, at least): "What if running shoes are actually the cause of many of our injuries?"Then there are dangerous ideas that are expressed through execution. These are ideas that challenge the accepted norm but are not scientific or philosophical in nature. They can only be asked by the athletes or coaches themselves. I think of Dick Fosbury (and presumably his coach) wondering if there wasn't a better way to go over that high jump bar.
Since hearing about Sammy Wanjiru's death last Monday I've been thinking about the impact he had on the sport and how he will be remembered. Articulating what I was feeling didn't come easily, however. I'd been watching him since he was a high schooler in Japan. I felt like Sammy was more special than a discussion of his times or his talent could express.
Then it finally hit me. What Sammy was for me was the embodiment of a dangerous idea: what if we ran the marathon with no fear?
Throughout the last century, the marathon was the one distance that demanded conservatism. In sports, conservatism is the child of fear. NFL teams play the "prevent" defense because they fear the big play. Pitchers intentionally walk power hitters because they fear the home run. Golfers play for the fairway instead of the green because they fear the sand and water traps.
And marathon runners don't go out too hard in marathons, because they fear what will happen in the final miles if they do.
This fear is rational. It's sane. It's healthy. And it was shared by everyone and corroborated by years of collective experience. You don't have to be told to fear the marathon, you just do.
Sammy had another idea. He didn't get caught up in pace and splits and times. Perhaps it was his limited background on the track, having trained and developed in a Japanese system that emphasized road racing. Perhaps it was just his personality, that of a boxer in a marathoner's body. Perhaps he was, like Daniel Komen before him, simply so good that he didn't understand that he should be sharing others' fear of the race.
He gave lip-service to taking Haile Gebrselassie's world record, but I never took it to be more than that. Had he truly cared he would have entered a race with pace-setters and actually conserved some energy in the beginning. But he never did that. He preferred beating people to clocks.
 Sammy's Beijing performance was Bannister-esque in significance. |
The following year two unheralded runners, Duncan Kibet and James Kwambai, would run 2:04:27 in Rotterdam. Abel Kirui then gave a Wanjiru-esque 2:06 performance at the World Championships in Berlin. And most recently, Geoffrey Mutai and Moses Mosop threw caution to the wind (tailwind, more specifically) and ran absurd 2:03 lows in Boston.
It's hard to argue that any of these performances would have happened without Sammy's amazing run in Berlin. It remains to be seen whether Len Johnson is right that we will see a return to conservatism in marathoning. I think that assumes Sammy's contribution was merely a shift in marathon strategy. I disagree. I think it was the shattering of a mental barrier. And shattered barriers aren't rebuilt. Once they're gone, they're gone.
Alas, so is Sammy Wanjiru. The marathon will never be the same.
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