When Nothing Says a Lot

When nothing says a lot.

 My 10^th grade honors history teacher used to say  that “Silence is Golden Mr. Vanderoef, perhaps we could have some Golden time”. I loved Neil Fleming, for all of his crazy hair and New England colloquialisms and for his passion for European history. When we all got our class lists everyone warned us that Mr. Fleming was mean, really mean. However when I look back, I cannot remember a class at Mahopac High School in 1991 was better. We had Mrs. Dell for honors Spanish (highlighted by Alison Pinchbeck and my inability to just ask her out…), don’t remember much except prior to teaching HS Spanish Mrs. Dell was a flight attendant. Honors English we had Mrs. Del(something) I remember she was clueless that half the class was cheating on vocabulary tests. That and I was still bothered that in 3^rd grade Amy Gruber beat me in the school spelling bee (If it is FebRuary, then people should say it Feb’R’uary… Just saying). We had Mr. Diccicio for Honors Math 3… This was the year we did stats and I fell out of love with math. I did end up scoring Continental math league honors (when is doubt the answer is 4, trust me 4). We had Mr. Dark haired soccer coach for honors Biology… Thank you to Megan Burnes (spelling) for doing all of the dissections. I recall skipping the frog version to take my driver’s license test (nailed it). I guess I remember Mrs. Kopp’s gym class…we played “no sweat basketball” as we had NO showers. Walt Sadowski and I created the “hands up defense”, basically the average high school kid is a spaz and you don’t really need to play defense, just put you hands up no matter where you are on the court and the kid will miss.

But Mr. Fleming’s class is burned into my head. His white chalk on blackboard version of “the battle of hastings” should hang in the Louvre. I can still see each volley of English arrows come from the hilltops. He’d get so excited the combover would let loose a few strands of his thinning hair. I can’t help but miss it a little. I moved after sophomore year- clear across New York State to Buffalo… Mr. Fleming said to me when he found out “You know Mr. Vanderoef, suicide is redundant in Buffalo!” I think he was the first adult to ever give me sh1t like I was a peer. It was the reason Darren Mahoney, Mike Fennessy, Daniel Sumber and I all wanted to yell “Neil” when he walked into the room like Norm from Cheers. That and because you’d get something great from Neil everyday when he first talked to us (like these from Mr. Peterson).

I guess this has very little to do with running and so I should just focus…

Today Patrick Makau ran the world record in the Marathon. 

An insane new World Record of 2 hours 3minutes and 38 seconds. He ran so fast reigning world record holder Haile G quit, not once, but twice. And the talk of the boards and notes of our team at adidas running (the adidas running team, we make the stuff) is that it is the World record in the very first wearing of the adizero adios 2, the adizero adios 1 was the worn in the former WR and by this year’s Boston Marathon winner Geoffrey Mutai in the fastest marathon ever run.

So the footwear guys are pretty excited, as they have created the fastest marathon shoe ever (again)… Of interest to those that care about such things or for those able to see the images here. The shoes have changed and I have to tell you the new shoe is amazing, worthy of world record praise, but what I notice is that the World record and World’s fastest marathon both seem to have been run in the same uniform. I guess you can figure out what the fastest marathon gear in the world is without a post or self-adulation.

The adizero singlet and adizero split short have been a part of both world’s fastest and world’s best, without a post.

I guess Mr. Fleming was right, Silence is Golden, but Fast is Green.

Thanks Neil.