I'm up in Mammoth, CA with my cross-country team, which longtime reader will know as sort of a hallowed pilgrimage. Long before I became a coach I would run the trails here, laying out the places I would run and the workouts I would lead when I got myself a team. And long before that, I was wondering how it would be to coach.

Mark Spitz is a wuss. Not that Michael Phelps thinks such a thought, but the constant comparisons between him and Spitz must get tiresome. On the one hand you have Phelps, perhaps the most complete swimmer in history. On the other you have Spitz, a phenom in his own right, but whose accomplishment of seven gold medals in a single Olympic Games took place almost forty years ago. Forty!

In watching the Track and Field Olympic Trials this past week, I was constantly struck by the inordinate amount of attention dedicated to the sprint events. Tyson Gay's cramp in the 200 received more air time than the Men's 10,000 meter final, Alyson Felix's desperate desire to qualify in the 200 after failing in the 100 was treated as a national emergency, and NBC just couldn't get enough of those sprint heats, showing every last one of them ad infinitum.