The Longest Race by Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon Review by Michael Lee Palmer
The Longest Race by Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon
Review by Michael Lee Palmer
Publisher: Gallery Books /an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Publication Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-7914-4
Pages: 288
Finding Agency
The Longest Race is the best book on running I’ve read precisely because it isn’t about running. It’s about youthful aspirations, about how exceptional running talent is utilized by a financially dominant athletic shoe corporation to market itself. If you want a “running book” that describes detailed training programs, or ecstatic descriptions of races, look elsewhere. If you’ve fantasized being a professional athlete, The Longest Race is a cautionary tale about what that lifestyle is really like.
Kara Goucher gives a candid account of how she became infatuated with running at a young age when her grandfather took her to a race after the tragic death of her father, who was a talented soccer player from Croatia.
Under the guidance of coach Mark Wetmore at the University of Colorado, she ran fast enough to qualify for the Olympic Trials in the 5K. When she and her husband, Adam, are noticed by John Capriotti, a Nike executive who acted as the corporation’s talent scout, they accept a Faustian offer to enter Nike’s Oregon Project: a place that would pay their living expenses and provide housing. Most importantly, they would get the expert training they, and the other American runners needed, if they were to ever hope to run faster than the Kenyans, the Ethiopians, and the other runners from the Global South who dominated international competition.
Kara and Adam would learn that the Oregon Project was hermetically controlled by the athletes’ abnegation to Nike’s contractual obligations. It was a cult-like environment with Alberto Salazar as the presiding leader. He made it clear to his athletes that you didn’t question his “authority.” As in many cults:
…………..…Alberto was beginning to establish a sense of “us against the world” at the Oregon
…………..Project. It helped bond us as a group of athletes and coaches, but it was also isolating.
…………..Though I had made some friends on the international racing circuit, Alberto didn’t like
…………..it—he made it clear that he wanted his team to stick together and not talk to other people.
Kara Goucher’s relationship with Alberto Salazar was complex: he was described as a charming man who “can light up the room.” He convinced Kara to race longer distances where she performed so well, she was suddenly thrust into the surreal, insular, world of international competition.
Salazar was also adept at psychological manipulation. He insisted on giving Kara massages after a workout or a race even though he was not a certified massage therapist. On more than one of these occasions, his hands went where she didn’t want them to go: “When it came to Alberto, the gatekeeper to my dreams, I was able to rationalize anything.”
Kara witnessed Alberto Salazar publicly fat shaming a runner, Amy Begley, telling her that she’s too overweight to make the Olympic team for the 10K. (Afterwards, Amy qualified to run in the Beijing Olympics by finishing third in the Olympic Trials 10K.)
The full text of a letter Kara sent to Alberto after she had placed third at the 2007 World Championship 10K in Osaka, Japan—the first international podium finish for an Oregon Project runner—is printed in the book. In the letter, Kara declares her love for him because under his tutelage she was running times that she never imagined she could run.
Outside of her relationship with Alberto, Kara became increasingly aware of how she, as a young white woman with “girl next door” looks, was being favored by Nike’s marketing. When she was in New York in 2008 for the Millrose Games, she saw her image on a giant Nike billboard as she emerged from a taxi cab.
…………..An image of me from Osaka crying and holding the American flag was also appearing in
…………..Nike ads and I laughed when they sent them to me, but I never got totally used to it. It
…………..was on the sides of buses, atop subway entrances, and on banners outside of stadiums. It
…………..was in the Nike employee store in Beaverton, Oregon, and at the Mall of America. I liked
…………..seeing myself as a representative for female athletes getting more mainstream exposure,
…………..but with many of the promotional images that Nike produced of me, I felt like I was
…………..looking at someone else. The gloss was typically dialed up, the pictures were heavily
…………..photoshopped, and I was usually shown with a calm and peaceful expression—not how I
…………..ever looked or felt as I pushed to the finish line of a race.
Kara realized that she was being used extensively and aggressively in their marketing because she was white:
…………..More disturbing yet was what felt like the racist message that came through during
…………..contract negotiations. The Nike executives openly discussed that I was not only the
…………..first “American” but the first “white person” to have won a distance running medal at a major …………..international competition in years. I was told that I was more “relatable.” It became hard
…………..not to see the amplification of my own image on Nike billboards and a certain version of
…………..my story as a “fighter” as a way to try and protect whiteness in the sport.
When she became pregnant:
…………..[After a photo shoot for the Oregon Project] …I was surprised to see my pregnant belly
…………..had been photoshopped out and nonpregnant abs had been substituted in, while my
…………..breasts, which had grown significantly during the pregnancy, were left as they were. The
…………..combination leaves an impression of a fake body, because it is one.
…………..On May 9, 2010, Mother’s Day weekend, my pregnancy announcement ran on the front
…………..page of the sports section of the (New York) Times. This was part of a carefully
…………..controlled initiative to market me and Nike to female consumers, and from that point it
…………..became useful for Nike to emphasize my pregnancy.
While pregnant, Kara went to Nike stores and public events, speaking to audiences consisting mostly of young women, many of whom contacted Nike, commending the shoe company for taking a supportive “feminist” stance. Kara was shocked when she learned that because she wasn’t competing in races during this time, Nike suspended her contract:
…………..…I also learned the depressing news that this kind of pay suspension during pregnancy
…………..was commonplace for (female) runners sponsored by other shoe companies as well. It
…………..seemed like no matter where you went as a female runner, you were in a man’s world,
…………..subject to contracts written by men, for men.
Kara describes her difficult pregnancy and childbirth with more detail than she devotes to any description of her training or races.
In the final chapters, Kara describes the nerve-wracking experience of giving testimony at an arbitration hearing about allegations of doping and abuse at the Oregon Project while she sat in the same room as Alberto Salazar, who was surrounded by Nike’s lawyers. Though she was sweating and her teeth were chattering, she found her agency, the courage to speak.
At its core, The Longest Race is not a book about running but a book about finding this agency—her voice. That is ultimately more important than being able to run faster than someone else. As Kara says, “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that change starts when good people refuse to stay quiet.”
Kara Goucher is an American long-distance runner and the 10,000-meter silver medalist in the 2007 World Championships in Athletics, representing the USA. She also competed for the University of Colorado and was a three-time NCAA champion (once in cross country and twice in track).
Mary Pilon is a journalist who focuses mainly on sports and business. She is the author of The Monopolists and The Kevin Show and co-editor of Losers: Dispatches From the Other Side of the Scoreboard. Additionally, she is the co-host and co-author of the audio series Twisted: The Story of Larry Nassar and the Women Who Brought Him Down. Her work has appeared in Esquire, the New Yorker, Vice, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and The New York Times, among others.
Michael Lee Palmer received an AB in English from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. He has had poetry published in The Berkeley Poetry Review, the Berkeley Times, Milvia Street, sPARKLE and bLINK, Ultrarunning magazine and the online journals, esque, Living Waters, and Backroom Live. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.
11 October 2023
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