Life Outside the Oval Office: The Track Less Traveled

by Nick Symmonds

  When the cocaine was gone I grabbed all the beer I could find and the party headed to the elevators. We made plenty of noise as we walked through the apartment complex––to the huge frustration of the neighbors, I’m sure. Our host led us to a door that appeared identical to the others in the complex, and knocked. Before long a tall, stunning woman answered the door. She introduced herself and then welcomed us inside before introducing her roommates, who were equally beautiful.

  We spent the next few hours chatting up these lovely foreign neighbors, but eventually the cocaine wore off of all who had taken it, and we returned home.

  I had a restless night and woke up after just a few hours to the rising sun. I felt as terrible as most of my friends and a buddy and I decided to sweat out the effects of the night before. We laced up our trainers and stepped out into the bright California sun.

  Outside, the light seemed overly bright and harsh and slammed into my retinas. I took my first few tentative steps. As my foot struck the cold, hard pavement I felt the concrete reverberate through my bones. My dehydrated muscles fought me each step, even though I tried to focus on the beauty of the marina as I plodded along. Eventually, my body warmed up and I felt more like myself. I started to sweat and felt very good about that. Not knowing about my night’s activities, Coach Gags had previously suggested I run twelve miles that morning. Wanting to punish myself for the night before, I figured I would do at least that.

  As we clicked off the miles, my body adjusted to what was being asked of it. I made it to mile seven feeling pretty good, but that’s when things took a turn for the worse for my friend. He had been overly enthusiastic with the Bolivian marching powder and reached for his nose. When his hand came back, it was covered in blood. We stopped running, as he pinched his nose and tipped his head back.

  We walked for a few minutes and then resumed running. Blood, however, continued to pour out of his nostrils. He stripped off his white cotton t-shirt and held it to his nose as we walked and jogged back toward the marina. For the next thirty minutes we did our best to jog back to the apartment while the T-shirt held to my friend’s nose slowly turned from white, to pink, to deep red. As we passed people on the bike path they looked at him like he was a leper. A few asked if he was okay. He nodded and we pressed on

  When we finally got back to the apartment the bloody shirt was tossed in the garbage, and my buddy’s nose was packed with tissue. When it was my turn to use the bathroom I stripped down and stared at the mirror. What a stupid drug! I thought to myself. I looked at myself and realized that if I wanted to become one of the best in the world drugs like that could not be a part of my life. I made a promise to myself to avoid that dangerous, corrosive white power, and it is a promise I have kept.

  Later that day I said goodbye to my friends and boarded a plane for Eugene. I was grateful to be going home and excited to get back to my routine. As the plane cruised over California at thirty-five thousand feet I looked out the window and replayed the events of the weekend. There had been some really fun moments, but I knew that the Los Angeles party scene was not for me.

  The plane touched down in rainy Eugene, and I caught a cab back to my home. As soon as I saw my front door I was reminded that I needed to update the USADA of my whereabouts. I am required to do this at all times to keep in good standing with the various federations that hold professional track and field competitions. Once inside I pulled out my laptop and sent an email to alert them that I would be at my Springfield, Oregon residence for the next week.

  Back at home I fell into my normal routine of training hard and eating healthy. It felt good to be back home, living the pure lifestyle I had come to love. When a DCO (doping control officer) caught up with me several weeks later, I provided him with the samples he requested. As always, I breathed a sigh of relief when the samples came back negative– –for everything. In the course of my eight-year career as a professional runner I have been tested more than one hundred times, and I have never once tested positive for a banned substance.

  The procedure of collecting a sample from an athlete is rather invasive. First, I am required to tell USADA where I am at all times. There is a website where I list my place of residence and my training location. I must do this for all 365 days in the year. I am also required to provide them one sixty-minute time slot every day, with an exact location of my whereabouts during that slot. If a DCO comes to this location and I am not there, it is an automatic missed test. Athletes are only allowed three missed tests in an eighteen-month period. Three missed tests results in a doping failure and typically a two-year ban from the sport. When a DCO does find and identify me, I am required to provide them with a sample of urine, blood, or both. Failure to provide them with the samples they are after also typically results in a two-year suspension.

  When the DCO arrives, he or she asks for a form of identification, and then tells me what samples he or she is required to collect. If they need blood, the rep will have brought along a phlebotomist to draw several vials of the precious red blood cells I have been working so hard to build. If they want urine, then a DCO follows me into the bathroom and asks me to wash my hands. The DCO then asks me to pull my pants down to my ankles and lift my shirt up to my armpits while he stands inches away to watch the urine leave my body and enter the little plastic cup they have provided me with. Needless to say, this can take some getting used to. I absolutely hate this part of my job. I find it to be a huge invasion of my privacy.

  I frequently list my sixty minute time slot as being from six to seven A.M., typically because that is the only hour I know where I will be: at home in bed. When the knock on my door inevitably comes it jolts me awake and I know that my peaceful night’s rest has been ruined. I am not the most chipper person in the morning, but when I am woken up by a DCO I am even less pleasant. I’m sure they dread coming to test me as much as I do seeing them in my doorway.

  Drug testing is a necessary evil though, and I try to remind myself that it is not their fault that they barge into my home uninvited. Rather it is the few dirty, cheating people in the sport who rob us all of privacy. I continue to subject myself to the monthly tests because I know that one day I will no longer be a professional athlete. Regaining my privacy will be one of the sweetest parts of retirement.

  There are, however, loopholes in the policies and protocol of the anti-doping agencies that make it incredibly easy for a cheater to dope undetected if he or she decided to do so. The many ways that crafty cheaters have beat the system are legendary.

  There is a story of Russian women who put clean urine into a condom and inserted it into their vaginal canals before being tested. When it came time to provide a sample, the women broke the condom with a fingernail, and one hundred milliliters of clean urine flowed into the cup.

  Men have been equally clever. I have heard of men who put flakes of soap under their fingernails, then flick the flakes into the sample to throw off the tests. There are also tales of athletes who use a product called The Whizzinator to beat drug tests. A Whizzinator is a fake penis attached to a plastic bladder via a catheter. This bladder can be filled with clean urine, which is then dispensed through the fake penis for a waiting doping control officer.

  Cheaters will always find ways to beat the system. The cat and mouse game between the anti-doping agencies and these fraudulent crooks will always be a part of professional sport. To keep ones sanity, a clean athlete must try to ignore this unfortunate side of sports.

  There are times when I lament the fact that I have never been ranked number one in the world, but never once have I considered cheating to get there. I take pride in the fact that at night I can collapse onto my bed after a hard, honest day’s work. I also take much joy in the fact that when I lie down in my bed, I don’t have a fake penis hidden in my underwear, along with a bag of someone else’s urine strapped to my leg.

  14

  I was enjoying life as a professional runner. I loved the travel, the lifestyle, and the sense of advent
ure. I had even grown to love the training. But in the year that followed the 2008 Olympic Games, something happened that I didn’t love. Coach Gagliano retired. It was very difficult to say goodbye to the man who had coached me to my first Olympic Team, but he promised he would always be in my corner. He also promised that Oregon Track Club would find a great replacement.

  To the credit of OTC and its visionary president, Vin Lananna, they hired the perfect man for the job. Mark Rowland had been coaching professional athletes in the United Kingdom for years, with great success. Frustrated with the politics of United Kingdom Athletics, he made it known that he was interested coaching abroad. OTC was renamed the Oregon Track Club Elite (OTCE), they hired Coach Rowland, and he and his family relocated from their home near London to Eugene, Oregon.

  Coach Rowland had been a professional runner and Olympian himself. He had even won the bronze medal at the 1988 Olympics in the steeplechase. He talked with a heavy British accent and used slang I had never heard before. To be honest, at first I could barely understand him, but what I did understand conveyed his vast knowledge and passion for coaching distance runners.

  In my first year with Coach Rowland I won the USATF Outdoor Championships and qualified to represent the United States at the world championships that summer in Berlin. With some great coaching on Mark’s part, I went on to make the finals in Berlin where I finished a disappointing sixth. I had learned from my mistakes in Beijing, and now knew what it took to make the finals at a global championship, but to learn how to finish in the top three would take even more experience.

  My next chance came in the summer of 2011. That year I was in fantastic shape. As usual, I had made many sacrifices to ensure that I was ready for the summer racing season. I had recently attempted to maintain a serious relationship, but the stresses of my career put an end to it. I had only been home perhaps two months in the previous eight, and had spent the vast majority of the winter and spring at training camps building strength. The result was that I entered the 2011 outdoor season in the best shape of my life.

  The world championships that year were set to take place in Daegu, South Korea in September. This placed the pinnacle of our season much later than usual. Coach Rowland and I expected that many of our competitors would be tired by the time the championships took place, so we decided to race sparingly during the summer season. Doing so cost me a lot of income in the form of appearance fees and prize money, but I decided it was worth it, as I desperately wanted to win a medal.

  In the sport of track and field there is a very distinct separation between those who have won medals and those who have not. Those with medals get special perks, such as increased appearance fees, rooms to themselves when traveling, and a lasting legacy. Those without a medal are often quickly forgotten.

  I knew going into Daegu that I was finally in the kind of shape it would take to finish top three and win a medal. Though I did not go into these championships as one of the top three ranked athletes, I was in the top ten, and usually did better than my ranking at championships meets.

  At this event my body propelled me through the first two rounds with relative ease. I qualified for my second World Championship finals feeling that I had wasted very little energy. Most of the medal favorites all made it into the finals along with me, but I was still confident I could be one of the first three across the finish line. It was now just a matter of running the race to see who would come out with the hardware.

  When the race went off, I positioned myself well during the first lap, tucked into the middle of the pack in fourth place. I was content to rest here, with my brain shut off, until I reached the last turn. As I approached this bend I started to make a move to get closer to the front, as Coach Gags had taught me. Just as I began to inch my way up, my friend and frequent competitor from Poland, Marcin Lewandoswki, came around me in lane three and elbowed me, nearly stopping me in my tracks. This kind of bumping is legal in middle distance racing, but is usually avoided as it often costs both runners momentum. I was unable to recover the lost momentum and faded down the home stretch to a gut wrenching fifth place.

  Despite all his effort, Marcin only managed to finished in fourth place, one spot out of the medals. He and I both walked off the track with our heads hung low. It would be one full year before we had another chance to win a medal.

  To say I was crushed was an understatement. I was so devastated that I was unable to watch a replay of that race for more than a year, due to the hopelessness it made me feel every time I tried. It wasn’t just that I had come that close to a medal, but rather that I knew I had the power in my legs that night to kick with the leaders. Watching a replay of that race now, two full years later, I still shake my head and wonder what I could have accomplished had I not been bumped. Alas, that is part of 800 meter running. I have been on both the giving and receiving end of many elbows and shoves in my career, and do not hold any hard feelings toward Marcin.

  After the race I sulked around the hotel for a day, and then begged my agent to get me on the first flight out of South Korea, despite the fact that there were several days of competition left. I just couldn’t stand being around athletics one minute longer. This time, the disappointment hit me even harder than in Beijing.

  I suppose what frustrated me the most was that I put in all that work and made all those sacrifices to finish fifth in the world. I was extremely proud of this accomplishment, but worried I would go down in history as just another guy who got close, but ultimately couldn’t get the job done and win a medal for his country.

  It hurt to think that this might be how I would be remembered. When I touched down in Eugene, I stepped out into the lush, green city of Track Town, USA and decided that although I may never be a medalist, I was damn sure going to leave a legacy. I also knew exactly what I wanted that legacy to be.

  From my very first days of running, my running idol had always been the late Steve Prefontaine. As a kid, as soon as I started to learn more about the sport of distance running, his name came up. Pre, as people called him, had lived a brief, but brilliant life as one of America’s greatest distance runners. He had been raised in Coos Bay, Oregon and had attended the University of Oregon where he set numerous school and American records. Pre finished fourth at the 1972 Olympic Games, but while preparing for the 1976 Games, he died in a car crash at the age of twenty-four. Pre never had the chance to win his medal, but he left a legacy of records, and of challenging the sport’s governing bodies that were treading on the rights of American athletes.

  Nearly three decades after his death, I looked at the sport of “professional” track and field and realized we still had a long way to go toward realizing Pre’s dream, even though the Amateur Athletic Union that Pre had battled with was no longer in existence. The United States of America Track and Field (USATF) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had replaced it. These were the entities that now governed track and field.

  For years, many of my colleagues and I had been frustrated with how these governing bodies controlled our sport. In particular, we were adamantly opposed to restrictions placed on how athletes were able to market themselves to potential sponsors. The way the IAAF had written the rules were as follows:

  3.1.1.2 Any other Advertising on or by or otherwise associated with an Athlete is prohibited, including but not limited to body painting, tattoos, jewelry, hair dying, hair shaving, the use of any flags, banners, T-shirts, hats and any other form of display of Advertising.

  3.1.1.3 No advertising or display of Sponsors of the Athletes in the form of “an Athlete x sponsored by company y” or similar may be displayed or appear on the Athletes or otherwise anywhere in the Competition Site.

  Along with these international rules, our domestic governing body, the United States Track and Field Association, had drawn up the following guidelines:

  The USATF Athlete uniform policy (hereinafter “Guidelines”) allows club names and a manufacturer’s name/logo to be display
ed on an Athlete’s competition and warm-up attire. The size of all logos must comply with the below Guidelines.

  The competition and warm-up attire of Athletes may only have advertising and/or identification as permitted under these Guidelines. Any advertising or other identification on such attire not specifically permitted under these Guidelines is strictly prohibited and will constitute a breach of these Guidelines. Any other advertising on or by or otherwise associated with an Athlete is prohibited, including but not limited to, body painting, tattoos, jewelry, hair dying, hair shaving, the use of any flags, banners, T-shirts, hats, and any other form of display of advertising.

  These rules and guidelines essentially made it impossible for any athlete to represent a company that didn’t make a piece of his or her racing attire. Many times I had approached potential sponsors and pitched to them how I could help market their products. But invariably, I was asked where they could put their logo on me during competitions. When I said that current rules prevented me from doing so, negotiations ceased. There had been a few athletes who had attempted to wear non-compliant logos in the past, but they were always forced to cover the offending logo with tape.

  Over the years I had heard this exact same story from many of my colleagues. It seemed that everyone knew of at least one company that could offer them free product, or even monetary compensation, if only the partnered corporation could place some form of advertising on the athlete during competition. During my first five years as a professional I thought, Someone is going to have to do something about this.

  That sunny September afternoon, I decided that I was going to be that someone. Having no idea where to begin, I figured I would try to make a scene on the Internet, and see what kind of attention it drew. I logged onto my Facebook account and created a group called “I’m tired of USATF and IAAF crippling our sport.” The group info read: