The Olympics are over—I enjoyed the shit out of those ridiculous closing ceremonies—but if your appetite for all things Olympics hasn't quite been sated, Perfect Day publisher Michael Heald has a nice three-part essay on married Oregon runners Ian Dobson and Julia Lucas over at Propellor Magazine. Lucas was a favorite to make it to London—Heald clearly expects that she will when he begins researching the piece, which begins at the Olympic Trials in Eugene—while Dobson's chances of making the team are much slimmer. Despite the fact that we know how Lucas and Dobson's Olympic bids ended, the piece is a nice balance of the personal, the technical, and the obsessively fannish:

“My weakness as a runner is kind of giving myself outs,” Dobson says. “Telling myself, Oh, all I really need to do is this. It’s a really mentally weak way of running, and I do that a lot. But the Trials is so easy for a guy like me to run—you don’t have that out. You run probably the way guys who are really good run all the time.”

I think to myself that there must be runners out there saying the exact opposite thing: it’s the fact that guys like Ian Dobson are at their best at the Trials that makes them so difficult. But I manage not to interrupt him. And then I think, Did he just say guys who are really good? A guy who has run 13:15 seconds for the 5k, which works out to 3.1 miles at a 4:16 pace, a guy who ran in the Olympics, is making a distinction between himself and guys who are really good?

Read the whole thing here.