In late August, runnersworld.com's Peter Gambaccini interviewed Kevin Hanson, the co-founder with his brother Keith of the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project. The interview ended by talking about Brian Sell and his preparation for the New York City Marathon on Nov. 1. "I know he's said it a lot, but this will be Brian's swan song," Hanson said. "I'm not sure he's still in it mentally. I'm not sure he hasn't checked out. And I don't really mean that as a criticism. I don't really blame him. But one of the things for him is that he's never really run the New York City Marathon, and that was definitely one of the things he wanted to do before he was done. And I'm 95 percent sure this will be it for him."Hanson's first instinct, to acknowledge that Sell has talked about retiring "a lot," was probably understated. Sell, now 31, began training with the brothers in 2002, a year after graduating from college, and was telling reporters about his impending retirement by 2003. Except for a stretch in 2006, he has said something about quitting and going to dental school before nearly all the major races of his career. At the Olympic marathon trials in November 2007, he was a sentimental favorite to make the Beijing team in part because he had announced that, barring qualification, the trials race would be his last. He has been disappointed by his two most recent marathons, a 2:16, 22nd-place finish in hot weather at the Olympics (for which he did qualify), and another 2:16 on a windy day at the Boston Marathon in April. Through early September, his build-up for New York was going poorly and the combination of bad racing and bad training had prompted a new round of retirement talk.
"Brian's done a nice job of balancing other things in his life outside of running," Hansons runner Mike Morgan told me. "I think that's where you get the whole retirement thing coming in, maybe." Whether this is Morgan's logic or Sell's is not clear, but Sell has said similar things, about taking care of his family and moving on, for years. When the topic approaches quitting in interviews he very often mentions getting a "real job." "You can't blame it all on the elements," he told me in late September. "Sometimes you just have to look at the numbers and say, ‘Hey, you know, it's time to move on and get a real job,’ or continue my education and think about the future."
In 1965, the writer John McPhee published a book about a basketball player at Princeton University named Bill Bradley. McPhee's first visit to see the future NBA star play was in 1962, Bradley's freshman year. "I watched the general flow on the court for awhile," McPhee wrote in the book, which he titled A Sense of Where You Are, "and it was soon clear enough who had drawn the crowd, and that he was the most graceful and classical basketball player who had ever been near Princeton, to say the very least."
This is a difficult standard to apply to Brian Sell, whom nobody has regarded as one of the most talented (or graceful) runners in the sport and whose claim to fame, a fame that is limited more or less to a small, very devoted base of running fanatics, is rather opposite Bradley's. Nobody knew Sell's name when he was a freshman in college, and certainly nobody wrote a book about him. Nobody knew much of anything about Sell until 2004 when he led the Olympic trials marathon by a wide margin until 22 miles and then faded badly. After that he became famous; his boldness made him a cult hero, and even though it was poor race strategy it was essential to the creation of the myth of Brian Sell. His myth, which has been borne out no less than Bradley's, though on a smaller stage, is backwards: it is the myth of the underdog, not the superstar.
Sell is well-suited to his role, temperamentally and otherwise, and for its part the marathon rewards underdogs. The Hansons have been marathon-oriented since the group's formation in 1999; their idea is that marathoners, unlike shorter-distance athletes, can be built from scratch. They lived through the golden age of American marathoning in the 1970s and 1980s, and they wanted to bring that era's style of group training and high mileage back to the U.S. Running is a peculiar sport in that precocious talent is often idealized far less than determination. It is at least understood that where an unskilled basketball player cannot really ever overcome poor coordination, a slow runner can simply train his way out of mediocrity, and this has become the Hansons mantra. Being talentless is not dishonorable, and ability is far less important than consistency and dedication. Hard workers are canonized.
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