Friday, July 06, 2007
There is a piece in this month's Runner's World about the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project. Hanson's is a small chain of running stores in the metro Detroit area that decided it was going to underwrite a group of runners in order to improve the US success rate in distance racing. They house the team members, and give them jobs in the stores, but the big innovation is that the team trains together. They looked at what the Kenyans and other successful nations do, and determined that training as a group was the trick. The team has been doing pretty well, (this guy won the Turkey Trot,this guy finished fourth at Boston)and it has a snappy name-- anything with "Project" in the title sounds like it should be cool, even if the project turns out to be Alan Parsons' or Joe Perry's. One of the ways that they recruit is to look for runners who had some success at the DIII level. It was kind of a treat to see that a current member is a fellow Geneseo alum
