'Dunaway's Worlds'

'I'm beginning to believe that running very fast can be dangerous to your health' -  Jim Dunaway takes his own very personal look at life in and around events at the Stade.

That thought occurred to me while watching three-time World 100-metres champion Maurice Greene suffer a quadriceps muscle injury in the semi-finals of the today's men's 100. And it also brought to mind Michael Johnson.

You'll probably recall the electrifying race in the Atlanta Olympic 200-metres final in 1996, when Michael ran an impossible-seeming 19.32. I was there, and I remember saying to a friend, "Michael almost ran right out of his skin."

Michael withdrew from the U.S. relay team in Atlanta, and in fact as I remember it cancelled the rest of his races that year. That cost him a lot of money, but he seemed to have injured himself in some vague way.

In 1997, he had an up-and-down year, which for an athlete as consistent (and as proud) as MJ was quite unusual. He did win the one that counted the most, the World Championships 400 in Athens, but he lost about as many as he won (I'm doing this without any reference books or back issues of Track & Field News, so cut me some slack on the exact numbers, but the point is that '97 was not a vintage year for Chateau Michael Johnson).

Surprisingly, 1998 was more of the same - consistently inconsistent for a runner who had always been consistently consistent.

As it turned out, it took almost three years for MJ to recover fully from that 19.32 race.

After a lot of medical poking and prodding, an imbalance was discovered in Michael's back - his spine, I believe. After that, MJ always travelled with a chiropractor, who was there to "adjust" his spine when things started to go out of whack a bit.

And he went on to win the 400 in the Seville Worlds and set a second "for the ages" world record of 43.18, and then to win another Olympic 400 gold medal in Sydney.

Now, think back to Maurice Greene and his 2001 World Championships 100 metres victory in Edmonton. It's pretty well agreed among knowledgeable people I've talked to that he was on the way to running no worse than 9.75 when his left quad (the same one as tonight) gave way at about 75 metres and he 'slowed' to a 9.82 time.

Afterwards he said, "I tried to take my body to a place where it wasn't prepared to go." And I thought to myself that Maurice, like MJ, had almost run "out of his skin."

Since then, Maurice has had two inconsistent years, last year and this one, and a lot of nagging injuries and unexplainable failures from a runner who absolutely hates to fail.

It's amazingly parallel to what happened to Michael --  and I'm beginning to think that Michael's 19.32 and Maurice's almost-9.75 are perhaps instances of, in Maurice's telling phrase, "taking the body where it isn't prepared to go."  Literally.

Maybe, I'm thinking, that at a certain level of effort (i.e., 19.32 or 9.75), what happens is not just a specific injury, but an "insult" (in the medical sense) to the whole system.

That would explain why it's so hard to pin down, and takes so long to pin down, exactly what has gone wrong with the physiques of such splendidly fit and well-trained athletes as Michael and Maurice.

What do you think?