Running News Daily

6 Benefits You Gain from Slowing Down Your Runs

Pumping the brakes on your runs can boost your performance in a number of ways. 

For many runners, embracing the concept of slow and easy runs is a game of mental gymnastics. Can you really become a better, faster runner if you’re consistently going at a pace that feels easy and relatively slow to you?

“It can be very hard, especially for new runners, to really understand that anything positive is happening when a run feels really easy,” South Carolina-based exercise physiologist Heather Hart, C.S.C.S., certified run coach and founder of Hart Strength and Endurance Coaching explains to Runner’s World. 

That’s to a runner’s detriment, because there are tons of awesome benefits of slow running any athlete can reap from regularly training at an easy pace. 

To convince you to pump the brakes, we tapped two experts to learn all there is to gain—both physically and mentally—from slowing down.

What “Slow Running” Really Means

Before we dig into its perks, let’s get clear on what constitutes “slow running.” Basically, it’s any run in which your heart rate is at or below about 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, Hart explains. This is typically considered zone 1 or zone 2 training.

You don’t have to track your heart rate to know if your run meets the criteria for “easy,” though. A simpler method is to tune into your own sense of what feels “easy” and what feels “hard” using the rate of perceived exertion scale (RPE). Imagine a scale of 0 to 10 where zero is no exertion at all and 10 is all-out work—an easy run should fall between a 4 and a 6, says Hart. 

Another way to monitor whether you’re striding easy enough: Try holding a conversation. If you’re able to chat without gasping, then you’re likely nailing slow running, Hart says. 

“My rule of thumb is that if an athlete [questions] am I running too fast?, then they probably are,” Hart explains. In fact, slow running is probably slower than you think. 

6 Slow Running Benefits

Here are all the amazing things—in no particular order—that can happen when you embrace a slow pace. 

1. Higher Lactate Threshold

It’s logical to think the only way to get better at running fast is to, well, run fast. But dedicating time to slow running can actually provide a physiological benefit that improves your ability to pick up the pace. 

Here’s why: Slow running increases the density of your mitochondria, the little organelles in cells that help metabolize lactate, a byproduct of glycolysis or the process of turning food into fuel for exercise. 

There’s an association between the onset of fatigue while exercising and elevated levels of circulating lactate, Janet Hamilton, C.S.C.S., exercise physiologist and coach with Running Strong in Atlanta tells Runner’s World. “That’s known as the lactate threshold,” she says. “You get more lactate production than you have consumption.” 

Boosting your mitochondrial density with slow running means you can increase your lactate threshold even during hard efforts, Hart explains. Instead of hitting your lactate threshold (and thus fatiguing out) at, say, a 9-minute mile pace, you may be able to push, say, an 8-minute mile pace. In other words, “you can run faster,” without running out of gas as quickly, Hamilton explains. 

2. Reduce Your Chances of Hitting a Wall

While runners rely on fast-twitch muscle fibers for speed work, there’s a subtype of fast-twitch fibers that are somewhat convertible—they can utilize fuel aerobically as well as anaerobically. That means you can strengthen them through high-intensity efforts or by doing long, slow aerobic runs, Hamilton explains. 

During a long, slow run, when the slow-twitch fibers start to tire, your body recruits some of the convertible fast-twitch fibers to help out. Do this enough and you are training these fibers to pitch in more reliably. This can help you run longer without getting as fatigued. 

Mitochondria also plays a role here, because aside from gobbling up lactate, it metabolizes fat. When running, your body primarily relies on glycogen (the stored form of glucose or sugar) in your muscles for fuel. Because you only have a limited supply of glycogen, that plan works well until it doesn’t. Any runner who has bonked during a distance race knows how awful this crash can feel. 

As a backup, though, your body has an almost unlimited supply of intramuscular triglyceride, also known as fat. Training your muscles to more efficiently burn fat for fuel, as you do with long, easy runs, will decrease the likelihood of hitting the wall, Hamilton explains. 

3. Happier Running

Though there are some folks who genuinely love running all out, for a lot of athletes, “speed work is hard,” says Hamilton. Not only can fast running be uncomfortable and demand a lot of focus, it can physically stress your body, she explains. And surprise, surprise: Physical stress can impact your mental health, too, says Hart. 

Easy running, by contrast, “is a nice way to let running be a stress reliever instead of a stress producer,” Hamilton says. Indeed, Hart finds that low-intensity workouts provide a chill space where you can simply enjoy running for what it is without worrying about hitting certain paces. “You can stop and smell the roses,” she says. 

And if you’re a beginner still trying to build a consistent run routine, finding this type of joy in the activity can make you more likely to stick with it. Case-in-point: A 2015 study involving 41 people concluded that experiencing more positive feelings during a training session improved participants’ adherence to their exercise program. 

4. Improved Recovery

Running hard all the time can result in cumulative fatigue, which ultimately affects performance in all your workouts, Hart explains. So regularly slotting slow runs into your schedule can help facilitate recovery and conserve energy so that when it is time for a speed workout, you’re able to run at a high level and hit your target paces. As Hart puts it: “It’s super important to keep those easy days easy so that the hard days can be hard.”

Along those lines, a lot of people don’t realize the adaptations we make from intense training occur during the recovery period following a workout—and not during workouts themselves, Hart explains. By taking it easy after hard and fast runs, you will reap the full gains of those workouts.

5. Decreased Risk of Injury

Fast running places more strain on your feet and lower legs than easy running, and research suggests a link between logging speedy paces—especially when you’re not ready for speed—and potentially higher risk of certain injuries, like plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinitis, and calf strains. Embracing slow running allows you to increase the percentage of your total weekly mileage while minimizing the amount of stress you’re placing on your body and reducing your overall injury risk, Hart explains. 

Ultimately, this can translate to better performance. As Hamilton puts it: “The only way to get faster in your races is to train well, and the only way to train well is to stay healthy.” 

6. Stronger Mind-Body Connection

Routinely alternating between hard and easy runs will encourage you to tune into your body and its relationship with different exertion levels. And this mindfulness can benefit you in a race scenario, Hart says. 

It will give you an understanding of how hard you’re working at a given pace and whether or not you should pick up, slow down, or maintain the pace, she explains. Instead of blindly following a pacing plan that may or may not be right for you on a given day, you’ll be able to adapt in real-time to how your body is actually feeling, thus becoming a more strategic competitor.

Emily Sisson, Olympic Marathon Trials favorite, is ready for Saturday

Emily Sisson is the American record holder (2:18:29) in the marathon and the pre-race favorite to win the 2024 US Olympic Marathon Trials.

At the time of publication, 64.2% of you are picking her to win the Trials in the LRC $20,024 Prediction Contest Sponsored by Relay.

Sisson talked to LRC this week via video conference, and by all accounts her buildup for Orlando has gone very well.

“Everything’s been better, all the long runs, all the tempos, and actually my long interval workouts, those have actually been better than they’ve been before.”

When Sisson was asked to compare her fitness and buildup to the 2022 Bank of America Chicago Marathon where she broke the American record, she said:

Everything’s been better, all the long runs, all the tempos, and actually my long interval workouts, those have actually been better than they’ve been before.

The workouts like on paper, like the times they’re all better. I think like I get confidence from that, but also just I’m feeling good and I’m feeling strong. So the training’s been good.

Sisson ran a 30:52 time trial on the roads in Arizona, which is just slightly slower than her official track PB of 30:49. Sisson, unlike Trials #2 contender Betsy Saina who ran a workout with 12 male pacers in Kenya, ran the workout all alone although her husband Shane was next to her on a bike. Sisson wasn’t blown away by almost setting a 10k PR in practice, as she said her track PR should be much faster. But she was pleased she could run that pace by herself. “I was happy that I was able to push myself that hard on my own,” she said.

Lessons from Chicago 2023

Chicago 2023 didn’t go as well as Chicago 2022 for Sisson, as she developed a side stitch later in the race and ran 2:22:09 for 7th place.

Sisson now views the Chicago 2023 setback as a positive experience as she learned from it. “We found some videos early on in Chicago and I just looked a little less fluid this past fall than I did in my 2022 Chicago.  It was really subtle, like there was a little bit more movement in my upper body. So, we’re trying to like stay on top of that a bit more this time just to make sure nothing like a side stitch or anything else breaks down again,” she said, adding she worked with chiropractor John Ball.

Respect for the competition and the marathon distance

Sisson enters the Trials not only fit but healthy. When asked whether she worries about the other competitors in the race, she said, “It’s not that I don’t worry about my competitors. It’s not that I don’t think about them, but, I just feel like the marathon’s different than like a half marathon or a 10k. When I go into those races, I’m just trying to be as fit as I can and try to be fitter than my other competitors. But in the marathon, you are racing your other competitors, but you’re also racing the marathon itself. So it doesn’t matter, what your competitors are doing.”

“I feel fit and I feel healthy. With a marathon, that’s not everything, but those are two big parts of it. So I am happy with that. I’m happy with how training went,” Sisson said.

Getting a Real Olympic Experience

While Sisson made the 2020 Olympic in the 10,000m, she,  like Aliphine Tuliamuk, said she missed out on the traditional Olympic experience because of the Covid protocols.  She’d like to get another shot at it. “Being an Olympian is like the biggest dream,” she said of a goal that started when she watched Olympic gymnastics with her mom as a kid.

“I was so thankful they happened in 2021, but it was definitely a different Olympic experience than Olympics prior. So I’d love to get back there.”

Of Sisson’s 5 marathons, the only one that went poorly was the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta where she dropped out.

Now with some time to reflect, Sisson has a better picture of what she think went wrong. “I think I went too hard in the buildup. I think my body, when I was standing on the start line,  I think I was tired and, and I just didn’t realize it at the time because I was so new to the marathon, I thought it was just so normal to be tired,  but there were things afterwards that I looked back on and there were signs that maybe I’d pushed it too hard in training.”

Sisson has backed off a little in her training this time. “So we did try to focus this time on getting good training in, getting in a good buildup, but just not overdoing it.  I don’t wanna leave my race in training,” she said.

Sisson does believe she can do well in a hilly marathon. If she qualifies for Paris, she’ll get the chance as the Olympic course has a massive uphill heading to Versailles.

U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials unveil huge prize pool

We are less than a week away from one of the most exciting pre-Olympic qualification events: the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials (on Feb. 3). Not only will the top three men and women have the opportunity to represent Team USA in the marathon at the 2024 Paris Olympics, they will also share a large portion of the USD $600,000 prize pool.

The winners of the men’s and women’s races will each take home $80,000, while the second and third-place finishers will receive prizes of $65,000 and $55,000, respectively. The total prize purse for Orlando 2024 has increased by $120,000 from the $480,000 that was at stake in the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta four years ago.

Beyond the top three, the prize money is distributed as follows: $25,000, $20,000, $15,000, $13,000, $11,000, and $9,000 for the fourth through ninth positions. The 10th-place finisher will receive $7,000. The 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials will be broadcast live on Saturday, Feb. 3, at 10 a.m. ET on Peacock, with additional coverage on NBC at noon from Orlando. The NBC broadcast will also stream on NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports app (subscription required).

Last year, USATF and the City of Orlando organizing committee faced some criticism when they initially announced the race would start at noon. Eventually, after pressure from athletes and coaches who were concerned about the heat, the start time was adjusted to 10:10 a.m. ET for the men and 10:20 a.m. for the women. There was also some scrutiny for not announcing prize money earlier. In previous editions, the prize purse was released at least a year before the event.

According to a Runners World article, agents and coaches had feared that the lack of news about the prize purse indicated a potential reduction in payouts for top finishers compared to previous years, but that proved not to be the case.

More than 225 men and 173 women qualified for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. However, the total number of participants will be lower, since only 380 have registered. Since the registration deadline, several qualified athletes have withdrawn due to injury or for other reasons.

Orlando Unveils 2024 US Olympic Marathon Trials Course, Announces Races Will Start at 12:10 and 12:20 pm ET

Just over six months out from race day, organizers revealed the course for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Marathon on Tuesday morning. The race, which will be held on February 3, 2024, in Orlando, Fla., will consist of one 2.2-mile loop through the downtown business district and three 8-mile loops through the city’s Milk District — so-called because it features the headquarters of T.G. Lee Dairy, which has been based in the area for 98 years. It will start and finish at the Walt Disney Amphitheater at Lake Eola Park. None of the course will run through Disney World, which is located to the southeast of the city of Orlando.

Unlike the Paris Olympic marathon course, which features considerable climbing and descending during the middle of the race, the Orlando course is relatively flat, with few small inclines but a variation of just 38 feet (11.6 meters) between the course’s lowest and highest points.

Mid-Day Start Time

Getting the actual course layout is nice but not that significant. We knew the course was going to be mostly flat as Orlando is mostly flat.

Organizers also announced something more significant: the start times for the race. The men will begin at 12:10 p.m. ET with the women to follow at 12:20 p.m. ET. Both races will be shown in their entirety on NBC.

With basically a noon start in Florida, it’s possible the race could be run in quite warm conditions. The debate of the once-rumored but now confirmed 12ish start times has been intense on the LRC forums for over a month now.

A couple of Trials veterans have already shared their thoughts, with Sara Halland Des Linden offering contrasting viewpoints. Hall, who is known to not like racing in hot weather, expressed concern about the heat and the safety of the athletes. She even challenged USATF CEO Max Siegel to run a hot weather marathon this summer.

It must be noted that Orlando has not seen a 90-degree day in February since 1962.

Meanwhile, two-time Olympian Linden had no issue with the start time and thought it could boost her chances of making the team by running smart.

For those interested in what the weather is typically like in Orlando on February 3, here’s a look at the temperature, wind, and dew point at specific times from 2012-22.

If the goal of the Olympic Marathon Trials was for every athlete to run their fastest possible race, obviously it would be better to start the race earlier, but there are other concerns. Television is the reason why the race is being held in the afternoon (there’s not a huge amount of West Coasters watching TV at 5 or 6 a.m. on a Saturday). The 2016 Trials began at 1:06 p.m. ET (10:06 a.m. local in Los Angeles) while the 2020 Trials in Atlanta began at 12:08 p.m. ET. Both races were shown on NBC in their entirety.

The fact is, in professional sports, there are often competing interests — what’s best for the athletes isn’t always what’s best for TV, and someone is going to be unhappy. USATF designed its US championships schedule this year with athletes in mind but the result was that USATF could not get the US outdoor championships shown on NBC. With the Trials, USATF is prioritizing the broadcast on NBC with the athletes a secondary consideration. You can be mad about one of those two things, but not both.

Orlando can be warm in February, no doubt about it — from 2012-22, the average temperature at 2 p.m. on February 3 was 73 degrees. But guess which race also is warm? The Olympic marathon. The Olympic marathons will be held on July 10-11, 2024. On July 10-11 this year, it was 73 degreees at 10 a.m. in Paris, which is when the marathons would be nearing their completion (8 a.m. start times).

In general, we are for athletics to be on live TV so we are fine with the races being scheduled for 12:10 and 12:20. We do believe if the temperatures are truly extreme (say 75 or higher at the start, certainly 80), USATF should move the race up and show it on tape-delay. But if you’re looking for conditions that mirror the Olympic marathon, Orlando in February is not a bad facsimile.

The one big issue we still have is with the new Olympic qualifying system. If you haven’t run under 2:11:30 for the men or 2:29:30 for the women during the qualifying window, you aren’t going to the Olympics even if you are in the top three. We think that’s ridiculous but those are the rules. That’s tough to do in warm weather. While it’s very unlikely someone who hasn’t run at least 2:11:30 or 2:29:30 in the window finishes top three, it could happen in the case of someone just moving up the marathon like Molly Seidel did in 2020 or someone coming back from injury or maternity leave like Kellyn Taylor.

We really wish WA would simply accept the top three from the Trials since the US is sending three per gender most likely no matter what happens, but we’d rather take the small risk that someone without the 2:11:30/2:29:30 times is top three and have the race be on live TV than put it early in the morning. Plus athletes could chase the time up until April 30 and we’d love to see WA have to take the PR hit of someone on the way back from maternity leave having to run a time. Maybe it would finally make them let the spots go to countries as long as the countries hold legitimate trials.

(To cover all our bases, it’s worth noting there’s a small chance on the men’s side that the US has only one or two qualified men’s athletes at the start of the Trials. We’re pretty sure we’ll have at least three but it’s not set in stone and we won’t know for sure until after the fall marathon season is over. If that’s the case, then the start time is more problematic as the US men would either have to hit the 2:08:10 auto standard or run fast enough to raise their world ranking into a qualification spot. If that’s the case and the US men don’t have three spots guaranteed, we think the men’s start time should be moved up and shown on tape delay but keep the women’s race as scheduled).

Talk about the trials on our forum:

47-Year-Old Marathoner to Run Fifth Olympic Trials

Dot McMahan qualified with a 2:35:20 at Grandma’s Marathon, averaging 5:56 per mile pace. 

In the closing miles of the 2023 Grandma’s Marathon, last June in Duluth, Minnesota, Dot McMahan struggled to calculate how close she was to the Olympic Marathon Trials standard. 

“I was just trying to run under 2:37, but you know, math, when you’re running a marathon, isn’t always so good,” she said. 

McMahan was more than fine. In her 20th marathon, she ran 2:35:20, smashing the standard and qualifying for her fifth Olympic Marathon Trials. 

Her coach, Kevin Hanson, of Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, was ecstatic. And so was her husband, Tim, and their 14-year-old daughter, El, who is also a runner. El told her mom when they FaceTimed after the race that she had run her fastest time since turning 40. “She knew all my stats,” McMahan said. “She was over the moon.” 

McMahan, 47, and Des Linden, 40, are thought to be the only female athletes in the field running a fifth marathon trials. McMahan is the oldest women’s qualifier. On the men’s side, Fernando Cabada, 41, has qualified for five marathon trials and is entered in the race. Abdi Abdirahman, a five-time Olympian, is also 47, the oldest in the men’s field. 

It was never a given that McMahan would make a fifth trials, especially after USA Track & Field announced in late 2021 the tougher entry standards for the 2024 race. For the 2020 race, held in Atlanta, women had to run 2:45 to make the Trials. This time around, they had to be 8 minutes faster. 

“I was very supportive of the fact that they needed to make it quicker, for the women, at least,” she said. “It kind of loses its luster if we make it too easy. That said, I think it was a little harder than I [predicted], which was maybe 2:40, 2:39. So 2:37 was like, woah, okay, we’ve got a real goal here. I never assumed that was going to be a walk in the park.” 

McMahan, who was eighth at the Trials in 2008 and ninth in 2012, knows she’s unlikely to finish that close to the front again, unless something unexpected happens in Orlando. While her teammates have moved to Orlando for the month to prepare for potential heat and humidity, McMahan is still training in Rochester Hills, Michigan, where she works as an assistant track coach at nearby Oakland University and has a pet sitting business. (She’s also an online coach with McKirdy Trained.)

And she wants to be home with her family. McMahan’s only warm weather preparations at the moment are the occasional treadmill run. “It’s in a space that we can enclose a little more and turn the heat up,” she said. But simulating humidity “gets a little tricky. You don’t want to grow a bunch of mold in your house.”

That’s typical of the practicality McMahan brings to her training. Her longevity, she says, is a function of doing most of the same hard work she’s always done. She’ll reach 105–110 miles per week at her peak training for a marathon, and she’ll double three or four days per week. She used to run 120. 

“I’ve tapered back a little bit, but I’m still doing the majority of it,” she said of the Hansons-Brooks training. “That’s what it takes.” On January 14, McMahan ran the Houston Half Marathon as a tuneup and finished in 1:16:02, averaging 5:48 pace. She was very happy with the result. 

Hanson said he and McMahan frequently joke that she’s old enough to be the mother to some of the athletes on the team who are fresh out of college. But he notes McMahan’s durability. She has avoided serious injuries. “That’s what becomes career-ending in your 40s,” he said. “In your late 40s, any injury that sets you back sometimes ends things, because it’s just to hard to get back into it.” 

McMahan is practical about other matters, too. 

For one, she refuses to dye her hair. “I do have a considerable amount of gray hair,” she said. “I’m not doing anything about it; I’m just going to let it come in.” Plus, she said, her husband has gray hair. They’d look silly together if she dyed her hair and he didn’t. “We’re aging,” she said. “It’s just life.”

She devotes about an hour to getting ready for her morning runs—warming up, doing mobility exercises, and “making sure things are firing.”

When her pace slows on afternoon recovery runs, she doesn’t dwell on it. On December 26, she did a hard 20-miler. The next day, she was tired, and she had 10 miles in the morning, and 4 miles in the afternoon on the schedule. She did those runs, but she ran them slowly—for her. 

“I think in the past, I would have beat myself up mentally looking at my watch and being like, ‘You’re running 8-minute pace; this is so ridiculous,’” she said. 

Now, she thinks: Are you happy? Are you healthy? Does anything hurt? This is what recovery pace is for you. “I listen to my body, and I don’t get upset thinking it should be a certain pace,” she said. “That’s my concession to age.” 

Irish runner sets two masters world records in one week

Just a few days after breaking the world M55+ 3,000m record in a stunning time of eight minutes and 47 seconds, Dublin’s Shane Healy broke yet another world record on the weekend at the Irish Masters Indoor Championships on Saturday.

Healy ran 2:02.46 for 800m indoors to break the M55+ world record, making it his second world masters record in seven days. His time shattered the previous world indoor mark by three seconds and is half a second faster than the outdoor mark for his age category, set by Germany’s Peter Oberliessen at age 56 in 2016.

Interestingly enough, the 3,000m world record he broke last week was also held by a German masters runner.

Instead of competing in his age group at the Irish champs, Healy challenged himself and ran against the M35+ category, where he placed second overall. The race was won in 2:01.45, and Healy powered his way to an even split after passing through 400m in 61 seconds. His second-place time in the 800m was also faster than the M40, M45, and M50 winners.

The actual M55 Irish title was won in a respectable 2:16.34, but almost 14 seconds slower than Healy’s time. He also dedicated his new record to his former Irish Olympic teammate David Matthews, who lost his father over the Christmas holidays.

The 55-year-old middle-distance runner has been tearing up the track for several decades. In 1996, Healy represented Ireland at the Atlanta Olympics in the men’s 1,500m, where he made the semi-final. He retired from running in 1999, but after almost a five-year hiatus, he returned to the sport and began breaking Irish and world masters records.

Healy has added three world records to his name in the last year: M55+ 3,000m, 800m, and the M50+ indoor 1,500m record of 4:01.76. It is only a matter of time until he grabs the M55+ 1,500m indoor record of 4:11.79.

A Marathon Where Victory Isn’t Reserved for the Winners

CJ Albertson and Grace Kahura-Malang won the California International Marathon while dozens more fulfilled lifelong dreams to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials in their last chance

If there’s one race where the adage ‘To the victor go the spoils” does not ring entirely true, it’s the California International Marathon (CIM). The commanding wins of CJ Albertson and Grace Kahura-Malang were certainly deserving of celebration. But they shared in the sweet taste of victory with dozens more high-level runners on last Sunday morning.

For several minutes after Albertson stormed from behind to take the men’s race in 2:11:09 and Kahura broke the tape in the women’s race with a personal best of 2:29:00, the finish line exhilaration continued to build as numerous runners sprinted their way to the finish line on M Street, adjacent to the California Capitol Mall in downtown Sacramento. 

That’s because the winning prizes extended far beyond the $10,000 to something money can’t buy. American runners who could get to the finish line in time earned a qualifying berth for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon on February 3 in Orlando, Florida. That event will determine the six U.S. runners who will compete in next summer’s Paris Olympics, but it’s also a quadrennial benchmark of domestic distance running excellence, and the chance to run in it—especially for those who have no chance at making the Olympic team—is a badge of honor that lasts a lifetime.

Sunday’s CIM was the last opportunity to grab that proverbial brass ring, and as the time ticked down to the cutoffs—2:18 for men and 2:37 for women—41 runners realized dreams that had been several years in the making. That’s a considerably smaller number than the 109 runners who qualified four years ago, but the Olympic Trials are four weeks earlier this time around and many runners opted for earlier races.

To reach the lofty Olympic Trials qualifying (OTQ) standards, many runners had to face their inner demons as they accepted the physical, mental, and emotional challenge of running 26.2 miles faster than they ever have.

“It was very hard-fought,” said Mary Denholm, a Colorado runner who lowered her personal best by more than four and half minutes to finish in 2:36:28 and earned the OTQ time. “During the race, I tried to think as little as possible, but you know those little negative thoughts creep in. I kept saying to myself, Well, you’d be happy with a 2:37 or a 2:38, which is true, but I had to not allow myself to accept that and slow down. Marathoning is so hard. It’s a process. You really have to love the journey.” 

Celebrating its 40th year, CIM has developed a reputation as one of the best domestic races for elite and age-group runners seeking personal best efforts, whether that’s chasing an OTQ or Boston Marathon-qualifying time. The race’s point-to-point, net-downhill 26.2-mile course from Folsom to Sacramento amid Northern California’s typically favorably cool, dry early December weather is ideal for running fast for any of the 10,000 participants. But what makes fast times more likely is the communal effort of the large packs of runners at nearly every pace group.

With the Trials-qualifying deadline of December 5 looming, about 200 American runners lined up at CIM to specifically chase the 2024 OTQ marks. While a few have been training with the aid of sponsorships or trying to become professional runners, the majority were amateur runners who work full-time jobs.

For some—like first-time marathoners and twenty-somethings Charlie Sweeney, Christian Allen, Ava Nuttall, and Abbie McNulty—it was the initial opportunity to meet the mark. But it wasn’t the first rodeo for many others who were back after coming up short in previous years, including thirty-somethings Denholm, Noah Droddy, Allie Kiefer, and Chad Beyer. For some who are slowing with age, or on the verge of hanging up their racing shoes for bigger career pursuits, CIM might have been the final shot of their competitive running careers.

In the moments before the race in Folsom, the nervous energy of every elite runner was palpable as they did their final pre-race strides and stretches, each one carrying with them their own long backstory that brought them to the brink of their dreams. After a brief moment of calm on the starting line, the gun went off and the enticing challenge began.

“This was my shot,” said Droddy, a 33-year-old Salomon-sponsored pro from Boulder, Colorado, who had a breakthrough 2:09:09 runner-up performance at The Marathon Project in 2020 but, because of a variety of injuries, hadn’t finished a marathon since. “I qualified on the last day in 2016, and so this was another full-circle moment to try to do it on the last day again.”

For the next two-plus hours, every runner locked into the silent rhythm of their race pace—each with their own goal in mind—holding onto the cadence of the random runners nearby. This is all the while knowing that consistent effort would gradually transition from being smooth and tolerable to eventually becoming extremely difficult by the later miles of the race. 

Allen, a marathon rookie from Salt Lake City eager to make his mark, boldly opted to run off the front from the start with New Zealand’s Matt Baxter and Kenyan Milton Rotich, while Albertson, a Fresno-based runner who has been one of the most consistent elite-level marathoners in the U.S. for the past several years, looked calm and content as he ran just off the lead near the front pack. 

While many OTQ-seeking American women grouped together in the quest for a 2:33 to 2:37 finish, Kahura-Malang, a 30-year-old Kenyan runner who lives near Boulder, started quickly and tagged along with a much-faster group of men with hopes of breaking 2:30 for the first time.

“I really didn’t know how far I was from the other women, but I didn’t want to focus on that,” she said. “I just wanted to keep running fast.”

Achieving success in a marathon can be a fickle task—one that relies on equal parts sufficient training, optimal fueling, and mental tenacity. But the magic of an elite-level marathon, especially CIM during a pre-Olympic Trials year, can be tied to finding confidence running amid the collective rhythm of a pack of like-minded runners, at least until things get difficult at the crux of the race somewhere near mile 20. 

Maintaining race pace and grinding through the final miles is something every runner experiences, each one to varying success. That’s where inspirational mantras, acknowledging motivational words written on an arm, or a variety of other mental tricks come into play.

“We had a great group for a while, and then about 20 miles, it started to thin out,” said Jacob Shiohira, 27, from Bentonville, Arkansas. He sliced seven minutes off his personal best with his 13th-place, 2:16:34 finish to make the OTQ cut. “The last three miles turned into a grind, but everyone’s in the same boat, and that’s what makes it special.” 

The 26-year-old Allen, fresh off finishing an All-American track and cross country collegiate career at Brigham Young University, spent the summer racing shorter distances on roads and trails. He stuck with his gutsy strategy to lead the race until his legs began to tighten up at the 23-mile mark. Albertson had let Allen and Rotich get ahead of him on a few of the later hills in the race but patiently stayed within himself and seized the lead late in the race to open up a two-minute advantage before the finish.

Rotich finished two minutes after Albertson in 2:13:04 for second, followed by Charlie Sweeney, a 24-year-old runner from Boulder, who completed a stunning debut marathon with a third-place, 2:13:41 finish to earn the Olympic Trials-qualifying standard. After that, Baxter, a Kiwi runner who runs for NAZ Elite, put down a new personal best of 2:14:08, followed by Eritrea’s Amanuel Mesel (2:14:11). From there, Robert Miranda (2:14:43), Jerod Broadbooks (2:14:58) and Allen (2:15:01) led a parade of 27 American men who celebrated securing their OTQ times.

Droddy made it too, finishing 17th in 2:16:56, to earn one of the celebratory golden OTQ flags CIM handed out to each of the qualifiers.

“I didn’t care about the time at all, just as long as it was under 2:18,” said Droddy, who also qualified in 2016 and 2020. “I was just happy to get it done. It means a lot because now I know I can join my teammates at the Olympic Trials.”

More than four minutes after Kahura-Malang ran away with the women’s title, Kiefer (2:33:26) led the charge of a long string of American women who cruised in under the OTQ cutoff. Once a top American runner, the 36-year-old from Austin, Texas, hadn’t finished a marathon since she placed seventh in New York in 2018. Like a lot of runners, she’s been through a lot of challenges in recent years, including injuries, races she’s dropped out of (including the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials in Atlanta), relocating to new cities, changing coaches, and general motivation.

“I’m back to the basics of having fun with it,” Kiefer said. “There’s no pressure right now. I just wanted to have a good experience, and it was a great experience. It feels validating to get back to the Trials. It’s just nice to go out there and do the part you love.” 

Nuttall, 22, was perhaps one of the positive surprises of the day. A senior at Miami University in Ohio, where she was the top cross country runner for the Redhawks this fall, she finished her debut marathon in third place in 2:35:09. After that it was Kaylee Flanagan, 28 who earned her first OTQ with a strong 2:35:24 effort to join her older sister and Asics pro Lindsay Flanagan in Orlando. After that it was professional trail runners Rachel Drake (2:35:28) and Peyton Thomas (2:35:42), who finished fifth, and sixth, respectively. (Drake is also the mother to 14-month-old son, Lewis.)

Nine more women earned the OTQ time—14 total—including Denholm, who finished 13th in 2:36:28.

But amid the joy of dreams coming true, there was also the heartbreak of near-misses. Tammy Hsieh sprinted to the finish just in the nick of time, crossing in exactly 2:37:00 to make the women’s cut, but moments later Gina Rouse (2:37:10) and Jennifer Sandoval (2:37:11) narrowly missed it and went home disappointed.

On the men’s side, Duriel Hardy dashed across the line in 2:17:56 to become the final men’s OTQ’er, but then Alexander Helmuth came across the line two seconds too late in 2:18:02. 

After a record 511 women qualified for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta—nearly double the number of male qualifiers—the women’s standard was lowered by eight minutes, down from 2:45 to 2:37. The new mark equates to a hefty 18 seconds per mile faster, down from 6:18 minute mile pace to 6 minutes flat. Denholm, who qualified in 2020 with a 2:42:02 effort at the 2019 CIM, was one of hundreds of women who spent the past several years trying to make that big leap. 

After running a personal best of 2:40:59 at the 2022 Boston Marathon, Denholm hoped to continue her progression and earn her qualifying time months ago. But the marathon is a fickle event because training never goes perfectly and something—injuries, work, life—always gets in the way. And sometimes everything goes right and it’s just not your day on race day.

After dealing with a torn labrum and then going through a divorce, career changes, and a move from California to Colorado, the 36-year-old running coach targeted last summer’s Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota—another domestic race on par with CIM when it comes to providing a competitive platform for elite and sub-elite runners to excel. 

But despite a good training block, Denholm struggled in that race and finished in 2:43:19. After that, she refocused her training with the help of coach and three-time OTQer Neely Gracey and set her sights on the September 24 Berlin Marathon, only to come down with COVID after she arrived in Germany. Not wanting to give up, she retooled her training one more time and registered for CIM as a last-ditch effort.

She was on 2:36 pace the entire way, running near-identical 13.1-mile splits of 1:18:17 and 1:18:11, but needed the encouragement of friend, Sofie Schunk, to get her through the final miles. Schunk, 31, of Albuquerque, finished six seconds ahead of her in 2:36:22.

“I went to a really dark place out there and had to fight through that,” she said. “It was awesome to have other women out there to go for it with and encourage along the way. I split some of my faster miles near the end, and I’ve never been able to do that, so that was a huge victory for me. I hope this can be encouraging to other women because I really think everyone is limitless. I’ve just worked really hard to get where I am and I just want others to feel encouraged.”

The Fight Over the Olympic Trials Start Time Has Ended. But the Real Issue Runs Deeper.

Following significant athlete pushback, USA Track & Field moved the race’s start time earlier. But the governing body also needs to offer Trials host cities a better deal to prevent similar issues in the future. 

It’s become a tradition of sorts that every Olympic Games needs to be preceded by stories of scandal and intrigue, so it’s perversely appropriate that the lead-up to the Olympic Team Trials marathon next February has been plagued with its own mini-fiasco.

It began this past summer, after it was announced that the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials marathon would take place shortly after noon on February 3, 2024. Not everyone was thrilled with the late start as the Trials are happening in Orlando. For some, staging a competitive, high-stakes marathon in the middle of the day in Florida seemed like a blatant disregard for athlete health.

In September, nearly 100 Trials participants co-signed a letter from the Athletes Advisory Committee to USA Track & Field leadership requesting that the race start time be moved to 6 or 7 A.M. to protect the participants from potential heat-related illness and injury. Following a private meeting with USATF CEO Max Siegel, the Athlete Advisory Committee was initially optimistic that the start times would be changed. However, two weeks ago, the Committee publicly reprimanded the Greater Orlando Sports Commission (GO Sports), the local organization responsible for putting on the Trials race. In a letter that was shared with the public, Trials athletes expressed their chagrin that while USATF and their television partners at NBC seemed amenable to an earlier start time of 10 A.M., GO Sports was refusing to budge on a noon start, unless they were compensated to the tune of $700,000.

“It is difficult to find words capable of expressing how angry and disappointed the athletes are to hear the ultimate hurdle they face is with the Greater Orlando Sports Commission,” the letter from the athletes read. In response, the owners of Track Shack, an Orlando-based running specialty store and event management company that is co-hosting the Trials, published an open letter of their own in which they maintained that they had been unfairly “blindsided” by the eleventh-hour request to move up the start time. The local organizers had repeatedly been told by USATF that a noon start was “non-negotiable,” largely due to the economic incentives of having a live TV broadcast of the race at a desirable time slot, and had developed their business model accordingly. This week, however, USATF announced that all parties had agreed on a 10 A.M. start after all. So much for non-negotiable.

As far as scandals go, an argument over the appropriate start time of a 26.2-mile road race isn’t exactly edge-of-your-seat type stuff. When I spoke to Rich Kenah, the CEO of the Atlanta Track Club and race director for the last Olympic Trials race, he told me that while “any opportunity for our sport to be ‘above the fold’ so to speak, tends to be good, when the challenges of our business are front and center, I think it has a detrimental effect on future opportunities for the sport to grow and flourish.”

Kenah is cautious not to make too much out of the start time debacle. He says that there’s almost always some sticking point when a local organizing committee has to coordinate with USATF in a way that satisfies the needs of their Olympic and broadcast partners. For Kenah, the larger issue, and the root cause of these more minor friction points, is a Trials business model that always puts the entire financial burden on the host.

For anyone who wants a detailed analysis of why that model is not sustainable, I’d recommend Jonathan Gault’s extensive report, published last year on Letsrun.com. In brief, the problem of the current Trials model is that it appears to mimic, albeit on a vastly smaller scale, the parasitic behavior of the International Olympic Committee, which takes in billions in sponsor and television revenue, while the host city is left to bankroll the lion’s share of the Games. While the cost of hosting the Olympic Trials might “only” be around two or three million dollars, that’s a hefty price tag for a running events company like the ATC, which has few viable ways to generate revenue from the event. (The local organizer cannot secure sponsorship agreements that threaten the exclusivity of USATF and USOPC partners, which leaves them with limited options.) In addition to being on the hook for all the operational and logistical costs of staging a world-class marathon, the local organizing committee is required to pick up the bill for stuff that, one would think, could be at least partially subsidized by USATF—like athlete prize money (at more than $500,000, this is one of the larger costs of staging the event) and event promotion ($75,000 minimum). As a final insult to injury, the Trials host needs to pay USATF a $100,000 rights fee.

With both the Olympic Games and the marathon Trials, prospective hosts are of course promised that staging the event will be a boon for the local economy. (The “Request for Proposal” guidebook for the 2024 Trials estimates that the “economic impact” of the event is around $20 million for the host city.) Arguably the bigger selling point is the sheer prestige of being associated with the Olympic brand. Hosting a Trials race can potentially elevate the profile of a city’s signature marathon.

Prestige, however, is a fickle thing. It’s no secret that the chorus of pushback against the Olympics has only grown louder in recent years, as more and more prospective host cities have retracted their bids. The Trials race—frequently touted as America’s greatest marathon—seems to be in danger of a similar fate. Only two cities were ever cited as showing any interest in hosting the 2024 edition; after Chattanooga was disqualified in another mini-scandal that is still playing out, Orlando seemed to be the winner by default. This does not bode particularly well for the future.

When it comes to fixing the Olympics, one idea that is frequently proposed is to give the Games a permanent home, or to rotate it between just a few cities; the idea is that this could help reduce costs by having a pre-set infrastructure already in place. What’s more, it could eliminate the rigmarole of the bidding process. Could something similar be the salvation for the U.S. Trials marathon? At the very least, having the race in the same location each time would allow the host to fine-tune their event with each iteration-—a win for the athletes. For better or worse, we already have a de facto permanent home for the Olympic Trials in track and field, which next summer will be staged in Eugene for the fifth consecutive time.

Brant Kotch, the former race director of the Houston Marathon who oversaw the city’s hosting of the Olympic Trials in 2012, told me that when his team tried to host the event again in 2016, part of their pitch was that they wanted to “make Houston the Eugene of long-distance road racing.”  When Houston hosted in 2012, the event was a massive success; they had perfect weather and big-time performances from the stars of the sport. And, thanks largely to a million dollar grant from the state of Texas to help subsidize large-scale sporting events, they were able to host the race without taking too much of a financial hit. According to Kotch, Houston had a solid bid to host the 2016 Trials (one that was apparently unanimously approved by USATF’s Long Distance Running Division), but USATF’s leadership ultimately decided to give the race to Los Angeles. When we spoke, Kotch still sounded slightly bitter about being passed over.

Houston hasn’t tried to host the race again. There are some logistical reasons for this—for one, massive downtown construction projects in the intervening years have made the 2012 course obsolete—but economics are a significant factor. As someone open to the idea of a permanent home for the Trials, Kotch says that the only way that this will work, long-term, is for the sport’s national governing body to help subsidize the race: “With respect to its Olympic Trials, USATF has to pony up some amount of money. This is distance running. You can’t sell any tickets.”

Kenah agrees. He thinks that it would be in everyone’s best interest if USATF would incite competition between prospective host cities by promising some kind of revenue share system from one of its marquee events. (USATF did not respond to a request for comment on the suggestion that it should shoulder more of the cost to host the Trials.)

“Right now, you cannot make money hosting the Olympic Trials marathon,” Kenah told me. “I don’t care who you are or where you are, it’s just not possible with the current model.”

When I floated the idea of hosting the Olympic Trials marathon in the same place every Olympic cycle, Kenah told me that he was still very much in favor of moving the event to different cities. He mentioned that his father took him to see the Millrose Games in New York City when he was a kid. There was a distinct physical thrill to witnessing professional track and field up close that made him fall in love with the sport for life. (Kenah made the U.S. Olympic Team in 2000 and ran the 800-meters at the Sydney Olympics.)

“There is nothing better than experiencing the sport in person,” Kenah says. “If we had an Olympic Trials marathon in cities around the country, big and small, we would expose the sport in a very real, experiential way that otherwise kids of the next generation would not get. But that can be only accomplished if the current business model is just blown up.”

Bethwel Yegon out to make amends at Fukuoka Marathon

Bethwel Yegon failed to finish the race during last year's edition of the Fukuoka Marathon and will be returning to the Japanese city to right his wrongs next month

Bethwel Yegon will be out to heal last year’s heartbreak as he gears up for this year’s Fukuoka Marathon.

During last year’s edition of the marathon, Yegon failed to finish the race but he will be heading to this year’s event with a goal to finish in the podium bracket.

He opened his season at the Publix Atlanta Half Marathon where he finished sixth before securing second place at the Vienna Marathon. He then went on to finish sixth at the Runkara International Half Marathon last month.

Yegon will be joined by compatriot Abel Kirui who finished fifth during last year’s edition of the marathon. Kirui is the oldest athlete in the field but he will be banking on his experience to improve his performance.

Commonwealth Games marathon bronze medalist Michael Githae will also be in the mix with the hope of making an impact.

The Kenyan charge will be challenged by Ethiopia’s Abebe Negewo Degefa, who is the only athlete in the field to have gone under the 2:05:50.

The race will prove to be a battle of titans since there are six athletes on the entry list, who have run sub 2:07 and they will be going for the course record of 2:05:18 that was set four years ago by Ethiopia’s Tsegaye Kebede.

The field also includes the 2017 winner Sondre Nordstad Moen of Norway, who will be hoping to get under 2:10 for the first time since 2020 after a good 1:00:20 half marathon in Malaga two weeks ago.

Shaohui Yang will lead the home charge and holds the countries second fastest-ever time of 2:07:49 that he got early this year at the Wuxi Marathon.

Geoffrey Koech reveals what he is banking on ahead of Boston Half Marathon

Defending champion Geoffrey Koech has disclosed what he will be banking on as he gears up for the Boston Half Marathon on Sunday November 12.

The 30-year-old will be banking on his past victory and mastery of the course to propel him to his second successive victory on Sunday. He had a great build-up towards the race and will hope to execute it well.

He has so far competed in three half marathons where he finished third in two races, Publix Atlanta Half Marathon and Prague Half Marathon. He finished fourth at the Principality Cardiff Half Marathon.

“It feels very nice to be coming back to Boston, knowing that I am the reigning champion. I have trained specifically for this year now that I know the course," he said. 

"Even though the course is challenging, I like it and I think my experience from last year gives me an advantage over those who will be doing it for the first time.

"We have hilly courses around my hometown of Kericho, so I have been adding some tough routes into my training, so my legs are used to it,” Koech said as per the race organisers.

Koech also explained that the fans give him a lot of encouragement and make him confident of winning the race.

He will be hoping that this time around, the fans will also play a huge role as he targets to win the race once again.

“The spectators gave me a lot of encouragement last year and made the course feel a lot easier. It’s so inspiring to be cheered all through the course," said Koech.

"The people of Boston are very friendly and welcoming to me. My goal is to win again this year so I hope I can do that and make the fans happy again.

"I like to run in temperatures between 59-64F and preferably no rain! I wonder what we will get on race day! See you soon, Boston."

Americans Kellyn Taylor and Molly Huddle Are Ready to Race the New York City Marathon

The women's professional lineup for the 2023 New York City Marathon on November 5 packs a wallop. Barring any late withdrawals, we can look forward to a showdown among a defending champion, an Olympic champion, a former marathon world record holder, the current half marathon world record holder, and the 2023 Boston Marathon champion.

While fast times aren't usually the main objective in New York, a race that traditionally favors tactics and competition over pace on an undulating 26.2-miles through the city's five boroughs, we just may see the course record--2:22:31, set all the way back in 2003--go down. 

Last year's surprise winner Sharon Lokedi of Kenya is returning to defend her title. The 2022 race was her debut at the distance and she aced her first test in 2:23:23, though since then, she's coped with a foot injury that kept her out of the Boston Marathon in April. Hellen Obiri, also of Kenya, is back, too--her first attempt at the marathon was also last year in New York, finishing sixth (2:25:49). Obiri went on to win the 2023 Boston Marathon in April, lowering her personal best to 2:21:38.

Kenyan Brigid Kosgei, who broke the marathon world record in 2019, finishing Chicago in 2:14:04 (since bettered in September at the Berlin Marathon by Ethiopian Tigst Assefa in 2:11:53) is also returning from injury after dropping out of the 2023 London Marathon in the first mile.

Joining these top contenders are 2021 Olympic marathon champion Peres Jepchirchir, also of Kenya, who won the 2021 New York City and 2022 Boston marathons and owns a 2:17:16 personal best, and Ethiopia's Letesenbet Gidey, the 2022 world champion in the 10,000 meters, ran the fastest marathon debut in history at the 2022 Valencia Marathon with a 2:16:49 effort.

The American women's field this year is small, because most athletes opted for earlier fall races, like the Chicago Marathon, to allow for more recovery time before training begins for the U.S. Olympic Trials, scheduled for February 3, 2024, in Orlando, Florida. But Molly Huddle and Kellyn Taylor are each making their return to the distance on Sunday after giving birth to their daughters in 2022--Huddle welcomed Josephine in April and Taylor welcomed Keagan in December (in addition to their eldest daughter, who is 13 years old, the Taylor family adopted a five-year-old son and almost-two-year-old daughter, growing the family to four children in the past 13 months).

Huddle, 39, and Taylor, 37, both said it was important to them to get in a healthy marathon training cycle and race experience prior to the U.S. Olympic Trials, to get back in the routine and fitness they'll utilize in preparation for 2024.

"Obviously you want to be able to finish 26.2 miles and have that fresh in your mind, but also the buildup, the marathon work--I've gotten pretty far away from that just with the pregnancy and postpartum," said Huddle, a two-time Olympian in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, who placed third at the 2016 New York City Marathon (2:28:13) in her debut at the distance. "This is supposed to be a building block toward the workload that you need for the Trials--I'm going to have to try and inch my way back a little closer to what I'd ideally do for a marathon buildup."

Huddle hasn't started a marathon since the 2020 Trials in Atlanta, which she dropped out of at the 21-mile mark. She hasn't finished a marathon since April 2019, when she lowered her personal best to 2:26:33 with a 12th-place finish at the London Marathon. However, she did run two relatively fast half marathons this year, including a fifth-place, 1:10:01 effort at the Houston Half Marathon in January.

Taylor's last marathon was two years ago in New York, where she placed sixth in 2:26:10. In September, she finished seventh in the U.S. 20K Championships in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1:08:04.

Going into the 2023 New York City Marathon, here's what the two top Americans had to say as they reflected on their postpartum experiences and goals for their first 26.2-mile race back:

They would have preferred to race the Chicago Marathon because of the timing.

Huddle, who is the former American record holder in the half marathon, 5,000 meters, and 10,000 meters, was hoping to make her postpartum comeback on a flatter, faster course like the October 8 Chicago Marathon, which would have also afforded an additional three weeks of time until the U.S. Olympic Trials. Taylor, who placed eighth at the 2020 Trials in Atlanta and owns three top-10 finishes in New York, agreed that Chicago's timing would've been more ideal. Neither of them were accepted into the professional field, however.

"We birthed humans. We were still running--it's not like we've been sitting on the couch eating Cheetos for a year," Taylor said. "It didn't work out and that's fine. I'll go where I'm wanted, so it doesn't really bother me that much--we'll still have 11 weeks until the Trials, and New York's my favorite marathon, hands down. I love the course. I love the people."

Huddle is also looking forward to racing in New York.

"They've always been happy to have me and that was important. I love racing through the city," she said. "My only concern was it's a very challenging course and there probably won't be any PRs happening, so I'll have to chase that later in the next year and a half."

A spokesperson for the Chicago Marathon said in an email message, in part, that the race officials "weigh many factors including performance standards, athlete interest, event resources, and operational considerations," when choosing athletes to accept into the professional race each year. "While our goal is to host as many athletes as possible, there are years where demand to participate exceeds the resources available and operational needs to host a professional race," the spokesperson wrote.

Huddle attributes her injury in the spring (mostly) to breastfeeding.

In March, Huddle experienced her first major bone injury of her career--a femoral stress fracture--which took her out of training for three months. After talking with her medical team, she's fairly convinced that her dietary needs weren't being met while breastfeeding. Since then, she's learned to adjust her fueling to account for what she loses not only to training, but also feeding her daughter.

"I refer to it as my body's new rules, because old me always knew how to fuel and I knew what I could handle workload-wise," Huddle said. "Now there is just more taxing the system and there's less time to mindfully refuel."

Taylor is finding much more camaraderie this time around.

When Taylor had her first daughter 13 years ago, not many fellow competitors had children. This time, however, she is finding a plethora of support from elite distance running moms.

In 2010, pro athletes also couldn't find much, if any, information about how to safely train through pregnancy and postpartum. And although solid research still lags, plenty of athletes are ready and willing to share their experiences with each other, which Taylor didn't have the first time around.

"It's become really helpful to be able to text each other and just directly ask how they handled one thing or another," Taylor says. "There isn't necessarily a lot of information, but with the network of athletes that have kids, I feel like there's more coming out now."

Huddle and Taylor each took a bit more conservative approach to training for New York this time. In the past, Taylor's peak weekly mileage could go as high as 130, but this time around she topped out around 112 miles. Similarly, Huddle's mileage prior to pregnancy would hit around 115 and this time she kept it to about 80 miles per week and substituted an Elliptigo session for a second run some days.

Their goals for Sunday run the gamut.

Despite a severe lack of sleep, Taylor's recovery from pregnancy and childbirth has gone exceedingly smoothly, she said, emphasizing that everybody's return is different and she believes she just lucked out with her genetics.

Knowing that she'll face a stellar international field on Sunday, Taylor is ready to run an aggressive race, targeting a 2:23 finish. (Her personal best is 2:24:29 from 2018 at Grandma's Marathon in Duluth Minnesota, but that was before the adventure of super shoes.)

"I think I'm in a really good position. I think I have the potential to run really well," said Taylor, who will wear Hoka Rocket X 2 shoes. "I think I can run 2:23 on a good day and that could put me in the hunt to do something, depending on how the race plays out."

Huddle has more of a wait-and-see approach, though, she notes, it is the first marathon in which she'll race in super shoes. She'll race in the Saucony Endorphin Elite shoes.

"I just don't think I'm going to be hanging with the world record holders, so I'm going to let them go do their thing," Huddle said. "I'm just focusing more on myself and just seeing what I can do."

It'll be a learning experience for the U.S. Olympic Trials.

The duo will each have a bigger fanbase than ever with their families coming to New York to support them. It's also an opportunity to see how they can organize the logistics of racing, childcare, and race prep ahead of the Trials in February.

Huddle, who is also raising money for &Mother, a nonprofit organization that supports athletes who pursue their career goals while parenting, as part of her marathon experience on Sunday, is hoping she will be done breastfeeding by February, but New York will serve as a test run in case she is not.

"I think it'll be interesting just seeing what the routine is like with my family, how we're going to shuffle everyone around with childcare and sleeping arrangements," Huddle said.

For Taylor, an additional hotel room was necessary to accommodate the whole family--and she couldn't be happier to have everybody there.

"It's going to be complete chaos," she said, laughing. "My parents are coming, so they're going to be the saving graces."

Molly Seidel Stunned the World (and Herself) with Olympic Bronze in Tokyo. Then Life Went Sideways.

She stunned the world (and herself) with Olympic bronze in Tokyo. Then life went sideways. How America’s unexpected marathon phenom is getting her body—and brain—back on track. 

On a clear December night in 2019, Molly Seidel was at a rooftop holiday party in Boston, wearing a black velvet dress, doing what a lot of 25-year-olds do: passing a joint between friends, wondering what she was doing with her life.

“You should run the Olympic Trials,” her sister, Izzy, said, as smoke swirled in the chilly air atop The Trackhouse, a retail shop and community hub on Newbury Street operated by the running brand Tracksmith. “That would be hilarious if you did that as your first marathon.” 

Molly, an elite 10K racer who’d spent much of 2019 injured, looked out at the city lights, and laughed. Why the hell not? She’d just qualified for the trials, winning the San Antonio Half with a time of 1:10:27. (“The shock of the century,” as she’d put it.) True, 13.1 miles wasn’t 26.2—but running a marathon was something to do. If only because she never had before. 

A four-time NCAA track and cross-country champion at The University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Molly had moved to Boston in 2017, where she’d worked three jobs to supplement her fourth: running for Saucony’s Freedom Track Club. The $34,000 a year that Saucony paid her (pre-tax, sans medical) didn’t go far in one of America’s most expensive cities. Chasing kids around as a babysitter, driving around as an Instacart shopper, and standing around eight hours a day as a barista—when you’re running 20 miles a day—wasn’t ideal. But whatever, she had compression socks. And she was downing free coffee and paying rent, flying to Flagstaff, Arizona, every so often for altitude camps, and having a good time. Doing what she loved. The only thing she’s ever wanted to do since she was a freckly fifth-grader in small-town Wisconsin clocking a six-minute mile in gym class. 

“I was hustling, and I loved it. It was such a fun, cool time of my life,” she says, summarizing her 20s. Staring into Molly’s steely brown eyes, listening to her speak with such clarity and conviction about her struggles since, it’s easy to forget: She is still only 29. 

After Molly had hip surgery on her birthday in July 2018, her doctors gave her a 50/50 chance of running professionally again. By summer 2019, she’d parted ways with FTC, which left her sobbing on the banks of the Charles River, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and uncertainty. Her biggest achievement lately had been being named #2 Top Instacart Shopper (in Flagstaff; Boston was big-time).

The day after that rooftop party, Molly asked her friend and former FTC teammate Jon Green, who she’d newly anointed as her coach: “Think I should run the marathon trials?” Sure, he shrugged. Nothing to lose. Maybe it’d help her train for the 10K, her best shot—they both thought—at making a U.S. Olympic team. 

“I’m going to get my ass kicked six ways to Sunday!” she told the host of the podcast Running On Om six weeks before the trials in Atlanta.

Instead, on February 29, 2020, she kicked some herself. Pushing past 448 of the fastest, most-experienced women marathoners in the country, coming in second with a 2:27:31, earning more in prize money ($60,000) than she had in two years of racing—and a spot on the U.S. trio for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, along with Kenyan-born superstars Aliphine Tuliamuk and Sally Kipyego. “I don’t know what’s happening right now!” Molly kept saying into TV cameras, wrapped in an American flag, as stunned as a lottery winner. 

Saucony who? Puma came calling. Along with something Molly hadn’t anticipated: the spotlight. An onslaught of social media followers. And two weeks later, a global pandemic and lockdown—and all the anxiety and isolation that came with it. She was drowning, and she hadn’t even landed in Tokyo yet.

The 2020 Olympics, as we all know, were postponed to 2021. An emotional burden but a physical boon for Molly, in that it allowed her to get in a second marathon. In London, she finished two minutes faster than her debut. When the Olympics finally rolled around, she was ready. 

Before the race, Molly says, “I was thinking: ‘Once I cross the starting line, I get to call myself an Olympian and that’s a win for the day.’” 

But then she crossed the finish line—with a finger-kiss to the sky and a guttural Yesss!—in third place with a 2:27:46, just 26 seconds behind first (Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir). And realized: She gets to call herself an Olympic medalist forever. Only the third American woman to ever earn one in the marathon.

Lots of kids have fleeting hopes of making it to the Olympics. I remember thinking I could be Mary Lou Retton. Maybe FloJo, with shorter fingernails. Then I decided I’d rather be Madonna or president of the United States and promptly forgot about it. But Molly held tight to her Olympic aspirations. She still has a poster she made in 2004, with stickers and a snapshot of her smiley 10-year-old self, to prove it. “I wish I will make it into the Olympics and win a gold medal,” she wrote, and signed it: Molly Seidel, the “y” looping back to underline her name. In case there was any doubt as to who, specifically, would be winning the medal.

Molly grew up in Nashotah, Wisconsin, and is the eldest of three. Her sister and brother, younger by not quite two years, are twins. Izzy is a running influencer and corporate content creator for companies like Peloton; and Fritz favors Formula 1 racing and weightlifting and works for the family’s leather-tanning business. The family was active, sporty. Dad, Fritz Sr., was a ski racer in college; Mom, Anne, a cheerleader. You can tell. Watching clips of Molly’s mom and dad watching the Olympic race from their backyard patio, jumping up and down, tears streaming, is the kind of life-affirming moment you wish you could bottle. “I’m in shock. I’m in disbelief,” Molly says into the mic, beaming. “I just wanted to come out today and I don’t know…stick my nose where it didn’t belong and see what I could come away with. And I guess that’s a medal.” When the interviewer holds up her family on FaceTime, Molly breaks down. “We did it,” she says into the screen between sobs and smiles. “Please drink a beer for me.

Molly hasn’t always been unabashedly herself, even when everyone thought she was. A compartmentalizer to the core, she spent most of her life hiding a huge part of it: anorexia, bulimia, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, debilitating depression. 

It started around age 11, when she learned to disguise OCD tendencies, like compulsively knocking on wood, silently reciting prayers “to avoid God getting mad at me,” she says. “It was a whole thing.” She says her parents were aware of the behaviors, but saw them more as odd little habits. “They had no reason to suspect anything. I was very high-functioning,” she says. “They didn’t realize that it was literally taking over my life.” 

She wasn’t officially diagnosed with OCD until her freshman year of college, when she saw a therapist for the first time. At Notre Dame, disordered eating took hold, quietly yet visibly, as it does for up to 62 percent of female college athletes, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. As recently as the Tokyo Olympics, she was making herself throw up in the airport bathroom, mere days before taking the podium. Molly hesitates to share that detail; she fears a girl might read this and interpret it as behavior to model. “Having been in that place as a younger athlete, I know I would have,” she says. But she also understands: Most people just don’t get how unrelenting eating disorders can be. 

In February 2022, she finally received a diagnosis of the root cause for all of it: ADHD. About being diagnosed, she says, “It made me feel really good, like [I don’t have] a million different disorders. I have a disorder that manifests itself in a lot of different symptoms.”

She waited to try Adderall until after the Boston Marathon in April, only to drop out at mile 16 due to a hip impingement. Initially, the meds made her feel fantastic. Focused. Free. Until she realized Adderall hurt more than it helped. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, lost too much weight. Within weeks, she devolved. “The eating disorder came roaring back,” she says, referring to it, as she often does, as its own entity, something that exists outside of herself. That ruthlessly takes control over her very need for control. “I almost think of it as an alter ego,” she explains. “Adderall was just bubblegum in the dam,” as she puts it. She ditched the drug, and her life—professionally, physically—unraveled.

In July 2022, heading into the World Championships, she bombed the mental health screening, answering the questions with brutal honesty. She’d been texting Keira D’Amato weeks prior. “Yo girl, things are pretty bad right now. Get ready…” Sobbing on the sidewalk in Eugene, Oregon, she texted D’Amato again. And the USATF made it official: D’Amato would take her spot on the team. Then Molly did what she’d been “putting off and putting off”— checked herself into eating disorder treatment for the second time since 2016, an outpatient program in Salt Lake City, where her new boyfriend was living at the time. 

Somehow (see: expert compartmentalizer) mid-meltdown, in February 2022, she had met an amateur ultrarunner named Matt, on Hinge. A quiet, lanky photographer, he didn’t totally get what she did. “I didn’t understand the gravity of it,” he tells me. “I was like, Oh she’s a pro runner, that’s cool. I didn’t realize she was, like, the pro runner!” 

Going back to treatment “was pretty terrible,” she says. At least she could stay with Matt. Hardly a honeymoon phase, but the new relationship held promise. “I laid it all out there,” says Molly. “And he was still here for it, for all the messiness. It was really meaningful.” And a mental shift. “He doesn’t see me as just Molly the Runner.”

Almost a year later, on a freezing April evening in Flagstaff, Molly is racing around Whole Foods, palming a head of cabbage, grabbing a thing of hummus, hunting for deals even though she doesn’t need to anymore. 

“It’s all about speed, efficiency, and quality,” she says, explaining the secret to her earlier Instacart success. She checks the expiration date on a container of goat cheese and beelines for the butcher counter, scans it faster than an Epson DS3000, though not without calculation, and requests two tomato-and-mozzarella-stuffed chicken breasts. Then she darts over to the beverage aisle in her marshmallow-y Puma slip-ons that Matt custom-painted with orange poppies. She grabs a case of La Croix (tangerine), then zips to the checkout. We’re in and out in under 15 minutes and 50 bucks, nothing bruised or broken.

Other than her body. Let’s just say: If Molly were an avocado or a carton of eggs, she probably wouldn’t pass her own sniff test. The week we meet, she is just coming off a month of no running. Not a single mile. She’s used to running twice a day, 130 miles a week. No wonder she’s spraying her kitchen counter with Mrs. Meyer’s and scrubbing the stovetop within minutes of welcoming me into her new home. 

The place, which she shares with Matt and his Australian border collie, Rye, has a post-college flophouse feel: a deep L-shaped couch draped in Pendleton blankets, a bar cluttered with bottles of discount wine, a floor lamp leaning like the Tower of Pisa next to a chew toy in the shape of a ranch dressing bottle. Scattered about, though, are reminders that an elite runner sleeps here. Or at least tries to. (“Pro runner by day, mild insomniac by night” reads the bio on her rarely used account on what used to be Twitter.) There’s a stick of Chafe Safe on the coffee table. Shalane Flanagan’s cookbooks on the counter. And framed in glass, propped on the office floor: Molly’s Olympic kit—blue racing briefs with the Nike Swoosh, a USA singlet, her once-sweat-drenched American flag, folded in a triangle. “I’m not sure where to hang it,” she says. “It seems a little ostentatious to have it in the living room.” 

With long brown curls and a round, freckly face, Molly has an aw-shucks look so innocent that it’s hard, at first, to perceive her struggles. Flat-out ask her, though—How are you even functioning?—and she’ll tell you: “I’m an absolute wreck. There’s no worse feeling than being a pro runner who can’t run. You just feel fucking useless.” Tidying a stack of newspapers, she adds, “Don’t worry, I’ve had therapy today.” 

She’s watched every show. (Save Ted Lasso, “too sickly sweet.”) Listened to every podcast. (Armchair Expert is a favorite.) She’s got nothing else to do but PT and go easy on the ElliptiGo in the garage, onto which she’s rigged a wooden bookstand, currently clipped with A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. “I don’t read running books,” she says. “I need something different.”

Like most runners—even the most amateur among us—running, moving, is what keeps her sane. “What about swimming? Can you at least swim?” I ask, projecting my own desperation if I were in her size 8.5 shoes. “I fucking hate swimming,” says Molly. Walking? “Oh, yeah, I can go on walks. Another. Long. Walk.”

The only thing she has on her schedule this week is pumping up a local middle school track team before their big meet. The invitation boosted her spirits. “Should I just memorize Miracle on Ice?” she says, laughing. “No, I know, I’ll do Independence Day.”

Injuries are nothing new for Molly. Par for the course for any professional athlete. But especially for women, like her, who lack bone density—and have since high school, when, according to a study in the Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine, nearly half of female runners experience period loss. Osteoporosis and its precursor, osteopenia, are rampant in female runners, leading to ongoing issues that threaten not just their college and professional running careers, but their lives.

Still, Molly admits, laughing: She’s especially accident-prone. I ask her to list every scratch she’s ever had, which takes her 10 minutes, and goes all the way back to babyhood, when she banged her head against the bathtub spout. There was a cracked spine from a sledding incident in 8th grade, a broken collarbone from a ski race in high school, shredded knee cartilage in college when a driver hit her while she was riding a bike. “Ribs are constantly breaking,” she says. In 2021, two snapped, and refused to heal in time for the New York City Marathon. No biggie. She ran through the pain with a 2:24:42, besting Deena Kastor’s 2008 time by more than a minute and setting the American course record.

Molly’s latest injury? Glute tear. “Literally a gigantic pain in the ass,” she posted on Instagram in March. Inside, Molly was devastated. Pulling out of the Nagoya Marathon—the night before her 6:45 a.m. flight to Japan, no less—was not in the plan. The plan, according to Coach Green, had been simple. It always is. If the two of them even have one. “Just to have fun and be consistent.” And get a marathon or two in before the Olympic Trials in February 2024. 

She’d been finally—finally—fit on all fronts; ready to race, ready to return. She needed Nagoya. And then, nothing. “It feels like I’m back at the bottom of the well,” says Molly, driving home from Whole Foods in her Toyota 4Runner. “This last year-and-a-half has been so difficult. It’s just been a lot of doubt. How do I approach this, as someone who has now won a medal? Like, man, am I even relevant in this sport anymore?” She pops a piece of gum in her mouth. I wait for her to offer me some, because that’s what you do with gum, but she doesn’t. She’s so in her head. “It’s hard when you’re in the thick of it, you know, to figure out: Why the fuck do I keep doing this? When it just breaks my heart over and over and over again?” 

We pull into her driveway. “I was prepared for the low period after Tokyo,” she says. “But this has been much longer and lower than I expected.” 

The curse of making it to the Olympics, let alone coming back with a medal: expectations. Molly’s own were high. “I think I thought, after the Olympics, if I win a medal, then I will be fixed, it will fix everything.” Instead, in a way, it made everything worse. 

That’s the problem that has plagued Molly for most of her running career: Her triumphs and troubles intermingle, like thunder and lightning. Which, by the way, she has been struck by. (A minor backyard-grill, summer-thunderstorm incident. She was fine.)

The next morning in Flagstaff, Molly’s feeling like she can run a mile, maybe two. It’s snowing, though, and she doesn’t want to risk the slippery track, so we meet at Campbell Mesa Trails. She loops a band around the back of her truck to stretch and sends me off into the trees to run alone while she does a couple of laps on the street.

Molly leaves for an acupuncture appointment, and we reunite later at Single Speed Coffee (“the best coffee in Flagstaff,” promises the ex-barista who drinks up to three cups a day). We curl up on a couch like it’s her living room, and she talks as freely—and as loudly—as if it was. Does she realize everyone can hear her? She doesn’t care. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve grown so comfortable sharing—in therapy, on podcasts, in a three-part video series on ADHD for WebMD—you just…share. Loud and proud. 

Mental illness is so insidious, says Molly. “It’s not always this Sylvia Plath stick-my-head-in-a-fucking-oven thing, where you’re sad all the time,” she says. “High-functioning depressed people live normal successful lives. I can be having the happiest moment, and three days later I’m in a total downward spiral.” It’s something you never recover from, she says, but you learn to manage. 

“I’m this incredibly flawed person who struggles so much. I think: How could I have won this thing when I’m so flawed? I look at all the people around me, all these accomplished people who have their shit together, and I’m like, ‘one of these things is not like the other,’” she says, taking a sip of her flat white. “I was literally in the Olympic Village thinking: Everybody is probably looking at me wondering: Why the hell is she here?” 

They weren’t. They don’t. She knows that. 

And yet her mind races as fast as she does. It takes up So. Much. Space. When she’s running, though, the noise disappears. She’s not Olympic Molly or Eating Disorder Molly, she’s not even, really, Runner Molly. “When I’m running,” she says, “I’m the most authentic version of myself.” 

Talking helps, too. Molly first shared her mental health history a few years ago, “before she was famous,” as she puts it. After the Olympics, though, she kept talking and hasn’t stopped. The Tokyo Games were a turning point, she says. Suddenly the most revered athletes in the world were opening up about their mental health. Molly credits Simone Biles’s bravery for her own. If Biles, and Michael Phelps and Naomi Osaka, could come clean... then maybe a nerdy, niche-y, unlikely medaling marathoner could, too.

“Those guys got a lot more shit for it than I did,” says Molly. “I got off easy. I’m not a household name,” she laughs. She knows she can be candid and off the cuff—and chat freely in a not-empty café—in a way Biles never could. “I’m a nobody!” she laughs.

Still, a nobody with 232,000 Instagram followers whom she has touched in very IRL ways—becoming an unintentional poster woman for normalizing mental health challenges among athletes. “You are such an incredible inspiration,” @1percentpeterson posts, one comment of a zillion similar. “It’s ok to not be ok!” says another. Along with all the online love is, of course, online hate. Molly rattles off a few lowlights: “She’s an attention-seeking whore,” “Her bones are so brittle she’ll never race again,” “She’s running so badly and posting a lot she should really focus on her running more.” Molly finds it curious. “I’m like, ‘If you hate me, you don’t need to follow me, sir.’” 

It’s Molly’s nobody-ness—what Outside writer Martin Fritz Huber called her “runner-next-door” persona, and I’ll just call “genuine personality”—that has made her somebody in running’s otherwise reserved circles. 

Somebody who (gasp!) high-fives her sister in the middle of a major race, as she did at mile 18 of the 2021 New York City Marathon. “They shat on me in the broadcast for it,” she says. “They were like, ‘She’s not taking this seriously.’” (Except, uh, then she set the American course record, so…) 

Somebody who, obviously, swears like a sailor and dances awkwardly on Instagram, who dresses up like a turkey, and viral-tweets about getting mansplained on an airplane. (“He starts telling me how I need to train high mileage & pulls up an analysis he’d made of a pro runner’s training on his phone. The pro runner was me. It was my training. Didn’t have the heart to tell him.”)

Somebody who makes every middle-aged mom-runner I know swoon like a Swiftie and say: “OMG! YOU HUNG OUT WITH MOLLY SEIDEL!!?” Middle-aged dad-runners, too. “I saw her once in Golden Gate Park!” my friend Dan fanboyed when he heard. “I waved!” Did she wave back? “She smiled,” he says, “while casually laying down 5:25s.”

And somebody who was as outraged as I was that I bought a $16 tube of French toothpaste from my hip Flagstaff motel. (It was 10 p.m.! It was all they had!) “For that price it better contain top-shelf cocaine,” she texted. Lest LetsRun commenters take that tidbit out of context: It’s a joke. It’s, in part, what makes Molly America’s most relatable pro runner: She’s not afraid to make jokes. (While we’re at it… Don’t knock her for smoking a little legal weed, either. That’s so 2009. Per the World Anti-Doping Agency: Cannabis is prohibited during competition, not at a Christmas party two months before it. Per Molly: “People would be shocked to know how many pro runners smoke weed.”)

I can’t believe I never asked to see it. Molly’s medal. A real, live Olympic medal. Maybe because it was tucked into a credenza along with Matt’s menorah and her maneki-neko cat figurines from Japan. But I think it was because hanging out with Molly felt so…normal, I almost forgot she’d won one. 

People think elite distance runners have to be one-dimensional, she says. That they have to be sculpted, single-minded, running-only robots. “Because that’s what the sport has been,” she says. 

Molly falls for it, too, she says. She scrolls the feeds, sees her fellow pros living seemingly perfect lives. She wants everyone to know: She’s not. So much so that she requested we not print the photos originally commissioned for this story, which were taken when she was at the lowest of lows. (“It’s been...refreshing...to be pretty open and real with Rachel [about] the challenges of the last year,” she wrote in an email to Runner’s World editors. “But the photos [were taken at] a time when I was really struggling and actively trying to hide how bad my eating disorder had become.”)

Molly finds the NYC Marathon high-five thing comical but indicative of a more serious issue in elite running: It takes itself too seriously. It’s too…elitist. Too stilted. “Running a marathon is a pretty freaking cool experience!” If you’re not having fun, she asks rhetorically, what’s the point? Still, she admits, she isn’t always having fun. Though you wouldn’t know it from her Instagram. “Oh, I’m very good at making it seem like I am,” she says.

She used to enjoy social media when it was just her friends. Before she gained 50,000 followers in a single day after the trials, and some 70,000 on Strava. Before the pandemic, before the Olympics. Keeping up with content became a toxic chore. “You feel like you’re just feeding this beast and it’s never going to stop,” she says. She’s taken to deleting the app off her phone, reloading it only to fulfill contractual agreements and post for her sponsors, then deleting it again. 

As much as she hates having to post, she enjoys plugging products the only way that feels natural: through parody. As does Izzy, her influencer sister, who, like Molly, prefers to skewer rather than shill (à la their idea behind their joint Insta account: @sadgirltrackclub). “The classic influencer tropes make me want to throw up,” she says (perverse pun as a recovering bulimic not intended). “New Gear Drop!’ or ‘This is my Outfit of the Day!’ Cringe. “Hot Girl Instagram is not how I identify,” she says. 

Nor is TikTok. “Sponsors tell me all the time: You should TikTok! I’m like, ‘I am not doing TikTok.’ I know how my brain works. They’ll say, ‘We’ll pay you less if you don’t’—and I’m, like, I don’t care.”

And to those sponsors who ghosted her after she returned to eating disorder treatment, good riddance. “Michelob dropped me like a bad habit,” she says. “Whatever. You have watery-ass beer anyway.”

To those who have stood by her, though, she’s utterly devoted. Pissed she couldn’t wear the Puma panther head to toe in Tokyo, Molly took off her Puma Deviate Elites and tied them over her shoulder, obscuring the Nike logo on her Olympic singlet for all the world to see. Or not see. “Nike isn’t paying my fucking bills.”

The love is mutual, says Erin Longin, a general manager at Puma. After decades backing legends like Usain Bolt, Puma was relaunching road running and wanted Molly as their guinea pig. “She’s a serious athlete and competitor, but she also has fun with it,” says Longin. “Running should be fun. Molly embodies that.” At their first meeting, in January 2020, Molly made them laugh and nerded out over their new shoes. “We all left there, fingers crossed she’d sign with us,” says Longin.

Come February, they all flipped out. Longin was watching the trials, not expecting much. And then: “We were all messaging, “OMG!!” Then Molly killed in London. Medaled in Tokyo. “What she did for us in that first year…” says Longin. “We couldn’t have planned it!” 

Then came the second year, and the third, and throughout it all—injuries, eating disorder treatment, missed races, missed opportunities—Puma hasn’t flinched. “It’s easy for a company to do the right thing when everything is going great,” Molly posted in April, heartbroken from her couch instead of Heartbreak Hill. “But it’s when the sh*t hits the fan and they’re still right there with you….” She received 35,000 hearts—and a call from Longin: “You make me feel so proud.” 

Does it matter to Puma if Molly never places—never races—again? “Nope,” Longin says. 

My last afternoon in Flagstaff, it’s cloudy skies, still freezing. I find Molly on the high school track wearing neoprene gloves, black puffy coat, another pair of Pumas. Her breath is white, her cheeks red. Her legs churning in even, elegant strides. Upright, alone, at peace, backed by snow-dusted peaks. Running itself is what matters, not racing, she tells me. “I honestly don’t give a shit about winning,” she says. All she wants—really wants, she says—is to be healthy enough to run until she’s old and gray.

Molly’s favorite runner is one who didn’t get to grow old. Who made his mark decades before she was born: Steve Prefontaine. “Pre raced in such a genuine way. He made people feel something,” she says. “The sports performances you truly remember,” she adds, “are the ones where you see the struggle, the work, the realness.” 

Sounds familiar. “I hate conversations like, ‘Who’s the GOAT?’” Molly continues. “Who fucking cares? Who’s got the story that’s going to get people excited? That’s going to make some kid want to go out and do it?” 

I know one of those kids: My best friend’s daughter, Quinn, a rising track phenom in Oregon, who has dealt with anxiety and OCD tendencies. She has a picture of Molly Seidel, and her times, taped to her bedroom wall. This past May, Quinn joined Nike’s Bowerman Club. She was named Oregon Female Athlete of the Year Under 12 by USATF. She wants to run for Notre Dame. 

“Quinn loves running more than anything,” her mom tells me, texting photos of her elated 11-year-old atop the podium. “But I don’t know…” She’s unsure about setting her daughter on this path. How could she not, though? It’s all Quinn wants to do. Maybe what Quinn, too, feels born to do. 

It’ll be okay, I tell her, I hope. Quinn has something Molly never had: She has a Molly. 

Molly and I catch up via phone in June. A team of doctors in Germany has overhauled her biomechanics. She’s been running 110 miles a week, feeling healthy, hopeful. Happy. A month later, severe anemia (and accompanying iron infusions) interrupts her summer racing schedule. She cancels the couple of 10Ks she had planned and entertains herself by popping into the UTMB Speedgoat Mountain Race: a 28K trail run through Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon—coming in second with a 3:49:58. Molly’s focus is on the Chicago Marathon, October 8th; her first major race in almost two years. 

Does it matter how she does? Does it matter if she slays the Olympic Trials in February? If she makes it to Paris 2024? If she fulfills her childhood dream and brings home gold? 

Nah. Not if—like Matt, like Puma, like, finally, even Molly herself—you see Molly the Runner for who she really is: Molly the Mere Mortal. She’s the imperfect one who puts it perfectly: What matters isn’t her time or place, how she performs on the pavement. Or social media posts. What matters—as a professional athlete, as a person—is how she makes people feel: human. 

She’d been finally—finally—fit on all fronts; ready to race, ready to return. She needed Nagoya. And then, nothing. “It feels like I’m back at the bottom of the well,” says Molly, driving home from Whole Foods in her Toyota 4Runner. “This last year-and-a-half has been so difficult. It’s just been a lot of doubt. How do I approach this, as someone who has now won a medal? Like, man, am I even relevant in this sport anymore?” She pops a piece of gum in her mouth. I wait for her to offer me some, because that’s what you do with gum, but she doesn’t. She’s so in her head. “It’s hard when you’re in the thick of it, you know, to figure out: Why the fuck do I keep doing this? When it just breaks my heart over and over and over again?” 

The Road to the Paris Olympics and here is What You Need to Know.

American runners are about to begin training for the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon

It’s early October, which means it’s the peak marathon season for many runners. But with an Olympic year on the horizon, it also means America’s top marathoners are about to hit the road to Paris.

More specifically, the men’s and women’s 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon races—scheduled for February 3 in Orlando, Florida—are just four months away. And that means the top U.S. runners hoping to represent their country at  next summer’s Olympics are about to begin preparing for the all-or-nothing qualifying race that decides which six runners will represent Team USA next summer on the streets of Paris.

Although several top American runners are racing the Chicago Marathon on October 8, even they have their eyes on a much bigger prize next February.

“There’s nothing in my mind that compares with being an Olympian and being in the Olympic Games,” says 26-year-old Utah-based Nike pro Conner Mantz, who returns to Chicago after finishing seventh last year in 2:08:16 in his debut at the distance. “So putting that first has been the plan for a long time. We’re just putting that first and we’re working backwards through the season with other races.” 

Registration will open for the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in early November for runners who have surpassed the qualifying times in the marathon (2:18:00 for men, 2:37:00 for women) or half marathon (1:03:00 for men, 1:12:00 for women). The qualifying window extends through December 3—the race date of the last-chance California International Marathon, which for decades has been one of the most popular Olympic Trials qualifying races.

In 2020, a record 708 runners—465 women and 243 men—qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta just before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. But USA Track & Field lowered the women’s qualifying standard by eight minutes from the more attainable 2:45:00 plateau, which means there will most likely be a much smaller women’s field this year.

But even so, amid the handful of runners who have a legitimate shot at making the Olympic team, there will also be dozens of dreamers, wannabes, and just-happy-to-be-there elite amateurs who have worked hard, put in the miles, and earned the chance to be on the start line of the deepest and most competitive U.S. distance-running races that only happen once every four years.

The men’s and women’s races will run simultaneously with the men beginning at 12:10 P.M. EST. and the women starting 10 minutes later. Runners have complained that a high noon start means they will be forced to race in hot, humid conditions. Over the past decade, the average temperature on February 3 in Orlando has been 69.6 degrees Fahrenheit at noon, rising to 73.3 at 4 PM. But actual temperatures have varied drastically, from 81 degrees Fahrenheit at 2 P.M. last year to 56 at the same time the year before. USATF officials have responded by saying that the start times are to accommodate live coverage on NBC and to match the expected conditions in Paris.

Here’s an update and overview of what’s next, who the top contenders are, the course, and what to expect in the next four months.

The 26.2-mile U.S. Olympic Trials course runs through downtown Orlando and consists of one 2.2-mile loop and three eight-mile loops. The marathon course will run through several neighborhoods, main streets, and business districts in Orlando, including Central Business District, City District, South Eola, Lake Eola Heights Historic District, Lake Cherokee Historic District, Lake Davis Greenwood, Lake Como, North Quarter, Lawsona/Fern Creek, SoDo District, and the Thornton Park neighborhood. It will then head east to and around The Milk District neighborhood and Main Street. (Notably, the course will come close to Disney World, which is about 15 miles to the southwest.)

Unlike the Olympic Marathon course in Paris, which will challenge runners with significant hills in the middle, the Orlando course is mostly flat. Each loop has a few minor variations in pitch, but only 38 feet separate the high and low points on the course. Ultimately, though, it’s a spectator-friendly route with chances for family, friends, and fans of runners to see the action several times. 

The top women—based on personal best times and recent race results—are Emily Sisson, Emma Bates, Keira D’Amato, Betsy Saina, and Lindsay Flanagan. But the U.S. Olympic Trials races almost always produce surprises with a few great runners having off days and a few good runners having exceptional days, so there is reason to expect the unexpected.

Sisson lowered the American record to 2:18:29 last year when she finished second in the Chicago Marathon. She’s running Chicago again on October 8 along with Bates, who has said she’s hoping to break the American record. In January, Sisson, 31, chopped her own American record in the half marathon in Houston with a 1:06:52 effort, and most recently won the U.S. 20K Championships (1:06:09) on September 4 in New Haven, Connecticut. Bates, also 31, hasn’t raced at all since her sterling fifth-place effort at the Boston Marathon in April, when she slashed her personal best to 2:22:10. 

While Chicago will be another good place to test themselves, both have unfinished business after Bates was seventh at the 2020 Trials and Sisson dropped out near the 21-mile mark.

The same goes for Flanagan, 32, who has been one of America’s best and most consistent marathoners for the past five years. She placed 12th at the trials in 2020. She had a breakthrough win (2:24:43) at the Gold Coast Marathon in 2022 followed by a strong, eighth-place finish (2:26:08) at the Tokyo Marathon earlier this year. In August, she ran perhaps the best race of her career, when she finished ninth (2:27:47) at the world championships in Budapest amid hot, humid conditions.

The 38-year-old D’Amato, meanwhile, just capped off another strong season with a 17th-place showing (2:31:35) at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, a year after finishing eighth in the world championships and setting an American record 2:19:12 at the 2022 Houston Marathon. She was 15th at the Trials in 2020 in 2:34:24, just two years into her competitive return to the sport after having two kids and starting a career in real estate in her early 20s.

“It’s such a huge goal of mine to become an Olympian,” says D’Amato, who lowered Sisson’s U.S. record in the half marathon with a 1:06:39 effort at the Gold Coast Half Marathon on July 1 in Australia. “It’s really hard for me to put words into this because my whole life, wearing a Team USA jersey has been like a huge dream. And when I left the sport (temporarily), I felt like I said goodbye to that dream and I kind of mourned the loss of being able to represent my country. I feel like it’s the greatest honor in our sport to be able to wear our flag and race as hard as possible.”

Saina, a 35-year-old Kenya-born runner who ran collegiately for Iowa State University, became a U.S. citizen in late 2021. She placed fifth in the 10,000-meters at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro while competing for Kenya. She’s spent the past several years splitting time between Kenya and Nashville, Tennessee, where she gave birth to a son, Kalya, in December 2021.

She’s returned with a strong fourth-place 1:11:40 result at the Tokyo Half Marathon last October and a fifth-place 2:21:40 showing at the Tokyo Marathon in February. In May, Saina won the U.S. 25K Championships in Michigan. Two weeks ago she broke the tape at the Blackmores Sydney Marathon in Australia in 2:26:47.

Other top contenders include but are not limited to Tokyo Olympics bronze medalist Molly Seidel (who’s personal best is 2:24:42), 2022 U.S. Olympic Trials champion Aliphine Tuliamuk (2:24:37, 11th in Boston this year), Susanna Sullivan (2:24:27 personal best, 10th in London this year), two-time Olympian and 2018 Boston Marathon winner Des Linden (2:22:38), and Sara Hall (2:20:32, fifth at last year’s world championships), plus Kellyn Taylor (2:24:29), Nell Rojas (2:24:51), Sarah Sellers (2:25:43), Lauren Paquette (2:25:56), Dakotah Lindwurm (2:25:01), Annie Frisbie (2:26:18), Sara Vaughn (2:26:23), Tristin Van Ord (2:27:07), and Jacqueline Gaughan (2:27:08).

The list of potential men’s top contenders isn’t as clear-cut, partially because there are so many sub-2:11 runners and several fast runners who are relatively new to the marathon. But all that suggests a wide-open men’s race where more than a dozen runners are legitimately in the mix for the three Olympic team spots. That said, the top runners on paper, based on both time and consistent results over the past few years, are Scott Fauble, Jared Ward, Galen Rupp, Conner Mantz, Leonard Korir, Matt McDonald, and C.J. Albertson.

The 31-year-old Fauble, who was 12th in the Olympic Trials in 2020 and owns a 2:08:52 personal best, has finished seventh in the Boston Marathon three times since 2019 and also finished seventh in the New York City Marathon in 2018. Ward is a 2016 U.S. Olympian and has three top-10 finishes at the New York City Marathon and a 2:09:25 personal best from Boston in 2019. He’s 35, but he just ran a 2:11:44 (27th place) at the Berlin Marathon in late September.

Rupp, who won the past two U.S. Olympic Trials Marathons and earned the bronze medal in the marathon at the 2016 Olympics, is nearing the end of his competitive career. He boasts a 2:06:07 personal best and has run under 2:10 more than any American in history, including when he finished 19th at the world championships (2:09:36) last year. He’s a bit of a wild card because he’s 37 and hasn’t raced since his lackluster 17th-place showing at the NYC Half Marathon (1:04:57) in March, but the world will get a glimpse of his fitness in Chicago this weekend.

Mantz followed up his solid debut in Chicago last fall with a good Boston Marathon in April (11th, 2:10:25) and solid racing on the track and roads all year, including his recent runner-up showings at the Beach to Beacon 10K in August and the U.S. 20K Championships in September.

McDonald, 30, who was 10th in the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials, has quietly become one of the best marathoners in the U.S. while serving as a postdoctoral associate in chemical engineering at M.I.T. His last three races have clocked in at 2:10:35 (Boston 2022), 2:09:49 (Chicago 2022), and 2:10:17 (Boston 2023). The only other runner who rivals that kind of consistency is Albertson, 29, who has run 2:10:23 (Boston 2022), 2:10:52 (Grandma’s Marathon 2022) and 2:10:33 (Boston 2022) in his past three marathons and was seventh in the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2020 (2:11:49).

The men’s race will likely have a mix of veteran runners and newcomers who have run in the 2:09 to 2:10 range since 2022. Among those are 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials runner-up Jake Riley (2:10:02 personal best), who is returning from double Achilles surgery; 2016 U.S. 10,000-meter Olympian Leonard Korir (2:07:56), who ran a 2:09:31 in Paris in April; Zach Panning (2:09:28, plus 13th at the world championships in August); U.S. 25K record-holder Parker Stinson (2:10.53); Futsum Zienasellassie who won the California International Marathon last December in his debut (2:11:01) and then doubled-back with a new personal best (2:09:40) at the Rotterdam Marathon in the spring; Abbabiya Simbassa, who ran a solid debut marathon (2:10:34) in Prague this spring; and Eritrean-born Daniel Mesfun (2:10:06) and Ethiopian-born Teshome Mekonen (2:10:16), who both received U.S. citizenship within the past year; and solid veterans Nico Montanez (2:09:55), Elkanah Kibet (2:10:43) and Nathan Martin (2:10:45).

Additional sub-2:12 runners who will  be in the mix are Andrew Colley (2:11:26), Clayton Young (2:11:51), Brendan Gregg (2:11:21), Josh Izewski (2:11:26), Jacob Thompson (2:11:40), and Kevin Salvano (2:11:49).

As noted previously, some top contenders will season their marathon legs one final time at the flat and fast Chicago Marathon on October 8. An even more select few will opt for the New York City Marathon on November 5. After that, nearly every American with eyes set on an Olympic berth will double-down over the holiday season for that one final, critical marathon training cycle. Expect to see a wide range in heat training, from sauna protocols, to warm weather training trips, to simply an adjusted race day strategy.

Of course, with the Olympic Marathon falling under the purview of World Athletics, qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Marathon team is not quite as simple as finishing on the podium in Orlando. Any American looking to have a breakout performance and finish within the top three at the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon will need to have run under 2:11:30 for men and 2:29:30 for women within the qualification window, which spans from November 1, 2022 to April 30, 2024. Given the possibility of oppressively hot and humid temps on February 3 in Orlando, they’re best bet is to secure that time now.

These qualification standards are in accordance with a new rule from World Athletics, which allows national Olympic committees to circumvent the typical Olympic qualification process of running under 2:08:10 for men and 2:26:50 for women, or being ranked among the top 65 in the world on a filtered list of the top three athletes from each country. The catch, though, is that three other runners from said country must have met one of these two standards. If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is.

For the hundreds of elite amateurs on the cusp of hitting that coveted U.S. Olympic Trials qualifying time, it’s do or die mode. While a few made the cut at the Berlin Marathon on September 24, one of those opportunities was lost when the Twin Cities Marathon was canceled on October 1 because of excessive heat. Temperatures are shaping up for an auspicious day in Chicago this weekend, and many more will give it a final shot at the Columbus Marathon on October 15; Indianapolis Monumental Marathon on October 28; the Philadelphia Marathon on November 18; and the last-call California International Marathon, a point-to-point race ending in Sacramento, California on December 3. 

Ultimately, only six American runners will likely continue on along the road to Paris and earn the chance to run in the men’s and women’s Olympic marathons next August 10-11. For a handful of younger runners, the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials will be a motivation to reinvigorate the Olympic dream or keep a faint hope alive, at least until the 2028 U.S. Olympic Trials that will determine the team for the Los Angeles Olympics. But for many runners, the journey to the U.S. Olympic Trials in Orlando will lead to the end of their competitive road running careers as new jobs, young families, a switch to trail running, and other priorities will take hold. 

“I think the Olympic Trials is an important part of American distance running,” says Kurt Roeser, 36, a two-time U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon qualifier who works full-time as a physical therapist in Boulder, Colorado. “I’m glad that they kept it the same event for this cycle and hopefully for future cycles because it gives people like me a reason to keep training. I’m older now and I’m not going to actually have a chance to make an Olympic team, but for somebody that’s fresh out out of college and maybe they just barely squeak in under the qualifying time, maybe that’s the catalyst they need to start training more seriously through the next cycle. And maybe four years from now, they are a serious factor for making the team.” 

Wait … Is It Okay to Run in a Cemetery?

A strongly-worded sign in Eugene, Oregon, sparked debate: Fair game or a somber spot?

Just south of the University of Oregon, sits the Eugene Masonic Cemetery—a ten-acre hilly plot that’s filled with Douglas Fir Trees and wood-chip trails. In a city renowned for its rich running history, it’s relatively common to see runners using the paths as a neighborhood cut-through or spot to work in some hills. 

But last month, some residents started to notice red signs: “Runners, this is a cemetery NOT a training area.” The signs prodded discussion on Twitter, with some users scorning them while others emphasized the need to respect the dead. Some pointed out that seven blocks north is the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery, a slightly bigger area, which is a common warm-up spot for athletes competing at nearby Hayward Field. 

Cemeteries can be a confusing middle ground between a green space and a solemn place of remembrance, and it brings up an ethical question: When is it okay to run in a cemetery?

Striking a balance

The Eugene Masonic Cemetery is private property—it’s an active burial ground. But Shawn Walker, the president of the Board of the Eugene Masonic Cemetery Association, clarifies that outsiders are still welcome in the space.

“I think it can be helpful for visitors to keep in mind that the cemetery is first and foremost a cemetery,” he said to Runner’s World in an email. “Visitors come to the cemetery to grieve, remember those who have passed on, and seek solace. Other ‘non-cemetery’ related activities are fine and encouraged as long as the activities do not disrupt the cemetery’s primary role.”

Not all cemeteries are privately owned; different types have emerged over the years. Take the Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta. Oakland is the oldest cemetery in the city, founded in 1850, but it’s also the oldest public park. 

The City of Atlanta owns the 48-acre space, but it operates differently from a church graveyard or military cemetery (don’t try to run in Arlington National Cemetery). Oakland is a “Victorian rural garden cemetery,” says Sandy White, the Director of Adult Programs and Volunteers at the Historic Oakland Foundation. Early cemeteries were connected with churches, but as cities grew, governments realized they needed more space to bury the dead, says White. But instead of a somber, religious space, these area were also used as parks.

In fact, during the Victorian period (1837 to 1901), it was common for families to visit cemeteries for leisure. During a time when diseases like yellow fever and cholera were rampant, families would pack a lunch and visit their dead relatives. Nowadays, you’re less likely to see a charcuterie board in front of a gravestone, but some cemeteries still retain those park-like qualities. 

Fifteen years ago, the Historic Oakland Foundation created the Run Like Hell 5K. “At the time, [the foundation] was really searching for things that would be good fundraisers and respectful of the grounds and of the people that are buried in Oakland, but at the same time, really serve the modern communities that were built up around,” White says.

The race—which features a costume contest—has become the largest cemetery race in the U.S. with 219 runners toeing the line at this year’s April edition. The money raised from the race helps keep the cemetery humming through beautification and preservation projects, and it’s a key part of Oakland’s identity as a public green space. 

“It’s every citizen in Atlanta’s park as much as it’s our cemetery,” White says.

Appreciation is key

Ultimately, running in a cemetery comes down to respect. 

Walker says the red signs at the Masonic Cemetery were put up after some runners started taking advantage of the open gates. He says training groups would come to the cemetery and disrupt the peace with drills like sprints and chain runs. Sometimes a coach would even shout and whistle at the athletes. 

“We felt that this type of activity and training was not consistent with the environment that we believe is important to maintain in the cemetery,” Walker says.

He admits the red signs might come off as harsh, but it’s tough to convey the message clearly.

“We love having visitors in the cemetery and part of our mission is to maintain and operate the cemetery as a resource for the community,” he says. “I believe it can be perfectly appropriate for runners to run in the cemetery as long as their activities are respectful to other visitors and to the space.”

Rob Rueff is familiar with this balance. His favorite race is a small 5K in Franklin, Indiana, called the Sparkler Sprint. Held on the 4th of July, the race is a fundraiser for the Franklin Community High School cross country team. The course meanders through a local park and the nearby Greenlawn Cemetery, and it reminds Rueff of trips to visit his grandparents as a child. In fact—the race literally goes past their graves. 

“It’s like I can feel them cheering me on as I reach the final quarter mile of the race,” he says. 

For Rueff, the cemetery is a reflective place of solace—but something he can combine with his passion for running. “When I’m training for races and I’ve hit a wall during training, I’ll drive down and run there,” he says. “I’ll make it a point to run by their graves just to check on things. It helps me clear my head and refocus on my training.”

Sarah Lorge Butler contributed to this report.

Obiri, Sisson to Face Off in ASICS Falmouth Road Race

Two high-profile and highly-competitive women in distance running will headline the international elite field at next week’s ASICS Falmouth Road Race. Hellen Obiri and Emily Sisson, both making their Falmouth debut, will face off on the roads for the third time this year when they line up for the seven-mile race on Sunday, Aug. 20.

This year, Obiri has won half marathons in the United Arab Emirates and New York City before winning the Boston Marathon in April. Since her Boston victory, Obiri has also won the B.A.A 10K and was runner-up in the Mastercard New York Mini 10K. Last weekend, she won the Beach to Beacon 10K in Maine.

“The roads and the people of Massachusetts have been good to me so far this year,” said Obiri, a two-time world champion and two-time Olympic silver medalist for Kenya. “I know it will not be easy, but I hope I can keep my record going. It will be nice to test myself before I get back into my preparations for an autumn marathon.”

For Sisson, Falmouth is part of the build up to this fall’s Bank of America Chicago Marathon where she will attempt to lower her own American record of 2:18:29 in the event. This past January, she also set the American record in the half-marathon (since broken by Kiera D’Amato) and won the USATF 15km title for the third consecutive year.

“I have not had the chance to race Falmouth before, but I have wanted to ever since I started spending summers in New England,” said Sisson, a graduate of Providence College. “I’m excited for my first Falmouth Road Race to be in the build up to Chicago. I cannot wait to line up in a few weeks time!”

Other top contenders include 2021 Falmouth champion and last year’s runner-up Edna Kiplagat, U.S. 5K Champion Weini Kelati and reigning U.S. 10 Mile champion Fiona O’Keeffe.

Fresh off a victory at last week’s Beach to Beacon 10K in Maine, Addisu Yihune will attempt back-to-back New England wins. The 20-year-old Ethiopian leads the men’s field.

Last year’s third place finisher, David Bett is returning in 2023. Other contenders include 2022 Los Angeles Marathon champion John Korir, two-time Pittsburgh Half Marathon winner Wesley Kiptoo and 2019 NCAA Cross Country Champion Edwin Kurgat.

In the Wheelchair Division, sponsored by Spaulding Rehabilitation, Daniel Romachuk, who set the course record in 2019, will chase his fifth Falmouth win. He championed last year’s race by three and a half minutes over Hermin Garic, the 2021 Falmouth winner who is also returning this year.

In the women’s race, 2022 champion and course record holder Susannah Scaroni will defend her title. Scaroni has dominated the road circuit in 2023 winning the Boston Marathon, New York Mini 10K and AJC Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta. Scaroni will face 2021 women’s champion Emelia Perry and 2022 third place finisher Yen Hoang who won the B.A.A. 10K earlier this year.

The 51st running of the ASICS Falmouth Road Race is the culmination of an entire weekend of running that kicks off with the Falmouth Elite Mile, held this year on Friday evening for the first time. The women’s field is led by former Oregon standout Susan Ejore of Kenya and three-time NCAA Champion Dani Jones. It also includes Belmont, Massachusetts high school phenom Ellie Shea.

The men’s race will welcome the deepest men’s field in its history. Olympic gold medalist Matthew Centrowitz will make his first trip to Falmouth to toe the start line with some of the nation’s top middle-distance runners. Past winner Craig Engels also returns this year as does Seekonk, MA native Johnny Gregorek, a World Championship qualifier who won the Guardian Mile in Cleveland last month and Vince Ciattei who won last weekend’s Beale Street Mile in Memphis.

In the Wheelchair division, both Romanchuk and Garic will also compete as will Scaroni, Perry and Hoang in the women’s race.

“From the track to the roads, there is going to be exciting racing to witness all weekend in Falmouth,” said Jennifer Edwards, Executive Director of Falmouth Road Race, Inc. “It’s an honor to welcome so many legends and future legends of the sport who will lead our field of 10,000 to the finish line.”

The Falmouth Track Festival which includes the Falmouth Elite Mile will be held at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 18 at Falmouth High School. The ASICS Falmouth Road Race gets underway at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 20 with athletes running the traditional course starting in Woods Hole and ending at Falmouth Heights Beach.

Defending champions Angela Tanui and Edwin Soi to return to Bogota Half Marathon

Tanui and Soi won last year’s edition of the Half Marathon in style, clocking 1:13:29 and 1:05:27 respectively.

Defending champions Angela Tanui and Edwin Soi will return to Colombia for the Bogota Half Marathon on Sunday, July 30.

Tanui and Soi won last year’s edition of the Half Marathon in style, clocking 1:13:29 and 1:05:27 in the women’s and men’s races respectively.

Soi is the fastest in the men’s field with a Personal Best time of 1:00:24 and he will be opening his season at the event. He will enjoy the company of compatriot Daniel Muteti who is also among the top entries.

On his part, Muteti will be lining up as the third fastest in the field and so far, this year, he has only participated in two Half Marathons. He opened his season with a 12th-place finish at the Nationale-Nederlanden Warsaw Half Marathon before winning the Cereales Angel Lima Half Marathon.

The Kenyan duo will face a stern test from Morocco’s Omar Ait Chitachen who will be lining up as the second fastest in the field. Chitachen has competed in three races so far. He opened his season with a 16th-place finish at the Osaka Marathon.

He then proceeded to the Xiamen Marathon where he finished third before winning the Rabat Half Marathon.

Another threat will come from Ethiopia’s Sisay Lemma. The 32-year-old Ethiopian has competed in two marathons so far this season. He started off with the Tokyo Marathon which he unfortunately did not finish and then later went for the Prague Marathon where he finished second.

In the women’s field, Tanui will be joined by compatriot Veronica Wanjiru who has also recorded good times over the 21km distance since the season started.

Wanjiru finished fourth and third at the Publix Atlanta Half Marathon and the San Blas Half Marathon respectively.

The Kenyan duo will be up against the Ethiopian duo of Zenebu Fikadu and Anchialem Haymanot who will be looking to give them a run for their money.

92-year-old Bill Thorn crosses Peachtree Road Race finish line to end 53-year streak

Bill Thorn is the only runner to have participated in Atlanta's Independence Day race every year since it began in 1970.

92-year-old runner marked the end of an incredible 53-year streak at the Peachtree Road Race on Tuesday, as the only person to have run in Atlanta’s famed Independence Day 10K every year since it began in 1970 crossed the finish line one last time.

Bill Thorn, who served as grand marshal of this year’s race, officially ended the streak Tuesday when he ceremonially broke the tape in a short walk to the finish line as crowds cheered him on.

Although Thorn now uses a walker to get around, he took his final steps toward the finish line of Tuesday’s race unaided, raising his hands triumphantly as he broke the tape.

The former high school track coach told Atlanta’s 11Alive the decision to stop running the race was “hard” but that he was “definitely at peace” with putting the streak to bed. “To be honest, I’m kind of relieved,” he said.

For Thorn, who was inducted into the Peachtree Road Race Hall of Fame in 1994, keeping the streak alive wasn’t always easy. One year, he ran the race with a sprained ankle. He also once finished the race during treatment for prostate cancer. But with his balance becoming more of an issue in recent years, Thorn said he agreed with his family that it was time to celebrate his record streak by officially bringing it to a close.

Thorn was one of 150 runners who ran the first Peachtree Road Race in 1970, and among the group of only 110 to finish that first race. He told 11Alive that the idea of a streak never occurred to him before it ballooned to the quarter-century mark. “I would just show up every year; no one said anything (about the streak) until the 25th year,” he said.

In 2019, to celebrate the 50th running of the race, Thorn crossed the finish line with four generations of his family and Julia Emmons, former executive of the Atlanta Track Club, which organizes the run. “It could’ve been just a fad,” Thorn said of his streak that year. “But as you go along through the years, people like Julia say to me every once in a while to ‘keep going’ and that was really encouraging, and so it just became a year-after-year thing.”

Since the pandemic, Thorn has completed the virtual edition of the Peachtree, running the distance around his neighbourhood.

Saying he still works out six days a week, Thorn told the Atlanta Track Club that “it’s been really exciting over the years, but there comes a time when you have to let go,” adding that “no one else will be able to say they did the first 50.”

Ethiopian runner misses Peachtree Road Race victory due to last-minute detour

In an unexpected turn of events during the AJC Peachtree Road Race 10K on Independence Day, Ethiopia’s Senbere Teferi, the reigning champion, was poised to claim victory and the USD $10,000 prize. However, a wrong turn in the final 200m foiled her plans, resulting in a third-place finish and causing her to miss out on a large sum of money.

Teferi was closely following a leading police motorcycle as it suddenly veered off the course with 200m to go. Without hesitation, Teferi followed suit, mistakenly believing that the race course took an unconventional right turn.

Despite having a nearly 10-second lead over her compatriot, Fotyen Tesfay, Teferi’s confusion led to her sprinting back to the course and finishing third, with a time of 30:47. She was only two seconds short of second place, which went to Kenya’s Jesca Chelangat in 30:45. Tesfay seized the opportunity and claimed victory, finishing four seconds ahead of Teferi in 30:43.

Tesfay also briefly followed Teferi’s detour before swiftly correcting herself and surging ahead to win the 10K title and the USD $10,000 prize.

While it’s not uncommon for runners to take wrong turns near the finish line, it is surprising that it happened to someone who won the race just last year. This a reminder that even professional runners make mistakes.

The AJC Peachtree Road Race is held annually in Atlanta on Independence Day. It is currently recognized as the world’s largest 10K race, with over 60,000 participants. Canada’s own Rory Linkletter finished 17th overall in this year’s race, posting a time of 29:12.

Charles Langat wins 2023 AJC Peachtree Road Race

Charles Langat won The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race’s men’s elite division Tuesday with a time of 27:43.

Tanzanian Gabriel Geay and Ethiopian Nimbret Melak finished second and third, respectively. Langat, Geay and Melak all finished at near identical times, officially recorded as 27:43. Race organizers later remarked that the finish may have been the closest in AJC Peachtree Road Race history.

Following his victory, Charles Langat expressed his confidence in winning the race after discussing it with his manager beforehand.

“Yesterday, I talked to my manager, and I told them that I would win the race,” Langat said after his winning performance.

Meanwhile, Andrew Colley was the top US finisher in 28:47 for 13th place.

In the women’s race, Senbere Teferi appeared to be on track to defend the title she won at the 2022 AJC Peachtree Road Race, but she took a wrong turn in the final moments, allowing Haiylu to seize on the instant and overtake the defending champion.

Jesca Chelangat from Kenya secured second place with a time of 30:46, while Teferi managed to recover and take third place with a time of 30:47.

The top American finisher in the race was Annie Frisbie, who clocked a time of 32:20 for 15th place, with Emma Grace Hurley running 32:28 to take 16th.

Bill Thorn Ends His 53-Year Peachtree Road Race Run Streak This July 4

The 92-year-old is the only runner to have completed the famous 10K every year since it began in 1970.

This year’s running of the historic Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta will mark the end of an era. Bill Thorn, the only person to have run what has become the largest 10K in the world every year since it began in 1970, is ending his 53-year race streak. At 92 years old, Thorn thinks it’s finally time. He’s dealt with balance issues over the past few years, and has been racing with the aid of a walker. 

“It’s been really exciting over the years, but there comes a time when you have to let go,” he said in an Atlanta Track Club press statement.

In a year that features the deepest women’s field in the history of the race, including five women who have personal bests faster than the course record of 30:22, it’s not just the elite runners who will be anticipated at the finish line. 

On Tuesday, Thorn will be honored as the Peachtree’s Grand Marshal, and he’ll be chauffeured down the 6.2-mile course that he arguably knows better than anyone else in history. Just before the finish in Piedmont Park, he’ll emerge from the vehicle to be celebrated as he crosses the finish line on foot for the last time. 

“There is only one way to stop worrying about not finishing, and that is to just be finished,” he said, “I’m going into a new era.” 

Thorn has been a lover and booster of running for a long time. He coached athletes across various sports for 64 years, and in 2019, he retired from Landmark Christian School in Fairburn (an Atlanta suburb) where since 1995, he’d led his teams to 42 state championships in football, track, and cross-country. 

For many years, Thorn had good company as one of the “Original 110” finishers from the inaugural 1970 road race, but those numbers dwindled over time. He and Don Gamel were the only two who ran every year through 1992, and by 1993, Thorn was carrying that torch alone. 

Every Fourth of July, he’s shown up on the start line and hustled up the infamous “Cardiac Hill” in the stifling summer heat and Georgia humidity, whether he was coping with an ankle sprain, heel gash, or something as serious as prostate cancer. In his younger years, he raced his fastest times in the 39-minute range, but over time, the race became more about having fun with his family—his 30-year-old granddaughter, Kenzie Bayman, was his “race day buddy” for several years. The senior runner has been completing the race virtually since the COVID-19 pandemic, running a carefully measured route in his neighborhood.

On the Peachtree’s 50th anniversary in 2019, Thorn said, “It could’ve been just a fad, but as you go along through the years, people like Julia [Emmons, the former Atlanta Track Club Executive Director] says to me every once in a while to ‘keep going’ and that was really encouraging, and so it just became a year after year thing.” 

This year, Thorn will be honored with his name engraved on the Peachtree Cup, an honor that up until now has been reserved for race champions, including Aliphine Tuliamuk, Stephanie Bruce, and Jeff Galloway. This distinction is all his own. “No one else will ever be able to say they did the first 50,” he said.

You can stream the AJC Peachtree Road Race on the 11Alive YouTube channel on Tuesday for free. The elite women will start at 6:50 a.m. ET and the elite men will set off at 7 a.m. ET. 

Teen Runner Gives Over 600 Pairs of Shoes to Elementary School Kids

He organized a 5K run to raise money, and partnered with a nonprofit to outfit them with new kicks

Last year, a high school sophomore in Atlanta spent his daily commute home from school brainstorming ideas for his Eagle Scout project. An avid cross country and track runner whose 4x400-meter relay team won at Nike Indoor Nationals this winter, Collin Maher knew he wanted to give back to his community with a running-related project.

Everyday, he drove past an elementary school attended primarily by economically disadvantaged students. What if he combined his passions to help those kids?

Maher came up with a two-part plan. He organized a 5K race to raise money to give new shoes to every student at Lake Forest Elementary School. He secured permits, requested road closures, and registered the race so it would be USATF-certified and an official qualifier for Atlanta’s premier annual running event, the Peachtree Road Race. He even managed to get a sponsor for the 5K, which he called the Cocoa Classic.

Maher’s event raised $18,000, and he partnered with the nonprofit Shoes That Fit to outfit all 629 students at the elementary school with new shoes. On the charity’s website, the Boy Scout said, “The families there, their priority is not buying new shoes, it’s making sure they have food on the table. I drive by that school every day. And I know a new pair of shoes can boost your confidence. A bad pair of shoes can hurt your feet.” 

Teachers sized their students, and last week, Maher arrived on the school’s campus with hundreds of shoe boxes in tow. A Fox 5 reporter wrote that some children yelled, “I love you, Collin,” as they opened their boxes.

“They’re overwhelmed with emotion, I am too just to see this,” said Principal Laryn Nelson, “I’ve never experienced this in my career, and I’ve been doing this 30 years.”

Teferi and Scaroni Headline One of the Fastest Fields in History at the 54th running of the Peachtree 10k

The two defending women’s champions of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race will return to Atlanta to defend their titles next month. Atlanta Track Club, organizers of the annual 10K, announced the Susannah Scaroni (Ubrana, IL) will headline the Shepherd Center Wheelchair division while Senbere Teferi of Ethiopia tops the list of contenders in the women’s open division at the 54th Running of the race on July 4.

Teferi – who out leaned Irene Cheptai at the line last year to claim victory before crumpling to the ground in exhaustion – will have to fend off an all-star field including  two of the fastest 10K runners of all time − if she wants to retain her title. Six-time world-record holder Joyciline Jepkosgei of Kenya has a personal best of 29:43, third on the all-time list. The winner of the New York City and London marathons, is making her Atlanta debut this summer, in her first 10K road race since 2019. Fellow Kenyan Sheila Chepkirui, who will also be making her Peachtree debut, is the fourth-fastest 10K runner of all time and coming off a fourth place finish at the London Marathon in April.

“I am excited to defend my title in the 2023 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race,”  said Teferi, the 5K world-record holder for a women-only race. “I look forward to the challenge from the best athletes in the world and am praying for cooler weather than last year; as the heat and humidity was very difficult in 2022″

Another top contender will be 2022 TCS New York City Marathon winner Sharon Lokedi of Kenya. Lokedi will return to racing this summer in a string of 10Ks that include the Peachtree. She was the upset winner in New York last fall, winning her marathon debut by seven seconds.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race course record in the women’s open division is 30:22, set by Brigid Kosgei in 2019. In the Shepherd Center Wheelchair division, that record is held by Scaroni who won the race in 21:14 to claim a $53,000 bonus. Scaroni said she looks forward to seeing how fast she can race the course in 2023.

“I am really looking forward to competing at Peachtree this year,” said Scaroni, the 2023 Boston Marathon winner. “I am always pushed to have a fun and fast race and plan to give this year’s everything I have.”

Registration for the 54th Running of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race is open through June 4. 

Rejeanne Fairhead sets new 5k record for 95 plus

Canada’s Rejeanne Fairhead can now call herself the fastest 95+ woman in the world. On Saturday afternoon in 30 C weather, the 96-year-old unofficially destroyed the women’s 95+ world record, running 51:09 for five kilometres at the Ottawa 5K.

At Friday’s press conference, she said her secret to running fast is keeping busy. “I try to be active in all sports, and take care of myself and be happy,” said Fairhead.

Fairhead received honours from the race announcers before and after the race for her attempt and new accomplishment. She is the eldest participant of the Ottawa Race Weekend for the second consecutive year.

The women’s 95+ world record Fairhead beat was that of American Betty Lindberg, who ran 55:48 at the 2022 Atlanta Peachtree 5K.

ALS Hasn’t Stopped This Woman from Running a Marathon in All 50 States

“The powers of hope and community propelled me forward and got me across every single finish line.”

Reason for Running: ALS takes away my ability to use my muscles, so I will be out there as long as possible to celebrate what my muscles can still do.

“Don’t worry,” my new husband, David, said in 2009 when I moved from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., to begin our married life. “It never snows here.” But then we were hit by three blizzards in six weeks! I got tired of being cooped up in our tiny apartment, so I found the treadmill in the basement. Fifteen minutes later, sweating and gasping for air, I felt awake and alive in a way I never had before. Add in the goal of training for a race just a bit outside my comfort zone and I was hooked.

My first race was the St. Patty’s Day 8K in downtown D.C. in 2010. I was so distracted by the scenery—running down Pennsylvania Avenue, crossing the National Mall in front of the Capitol—that I forgot to be nervous! After that, I used running as a way to explore my newly-adopted city, which was also useful for my job as an urban planner for the federal government.

In two years, I worked up to my first marathon: the 2012 Yuengling Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach. By then, I’d gotten into triathlons too and my first 70.3 (a.k.a. a half Ironman) was the 2013 Carolina Half at my alma mater in Davidson, North Carolina.

However, while training for the 70.3, my run and bike times were slowing down, and my hamstrings were incredibly tight. During the race, I had to walk a lot of the downhills because I felt like I was going to trip over my toes. I assumed I was overtraining or had a weird race injury, but the physical therapist I went to said, “your muscles just don’t seem strong enough for someone who just did that long of a race.” She referred me to a neurologist.

My blood tests, MRIs, spinal tap, CT, and first electromyography (EMG) all came back normal, but my symptoms kept getting worse. In just six months, I went from finishing the 70.3 to walking with a cane after falling in the middle of a D.C. intersection. My fifth neurologist re-did the EMG and diagnosed me with probable ALS in May 2014, which was confirmed in August. I was 33 at the time.

ALS is a death sentence—the average life expectancy is only two to five years. In that time, the person loses the ability to walk, talk, eat, move, and eventually breathe. The only approved drugs extend life expectancy by less than a year. 

But everyone is different. My “brand” of ALS seems to respond positively to low-impact, gradual, strength building. I am convinced that swimming, Pilates, weight machines, and riding a trike have all helped me live more than nine years with this disease. 

When I reached the fifth anniversary of my ALS diagnosis (a milestone that only 20 percent of people live to see), I realized that I was still waiting for the disease to catch up with me—which isn’t truly living. Living means making long-term plans, striving toward future goals, and believing that tomorrow will be better than today if you’re willing to put in the effort.

So I decided to set the craziest goal I could think of: a marathon on a trike in all 50 states. Through our foundation, the Team Drea Foundation, we decided to film a documentary to raise awareness and funds for ALS research. To date, we’ve raised $1 million! 

We began filming in May 2019, and I was at state number seven on my marathon list. Our plan was to film for a year, through Alaska (state 21), and get the film out as quickly as possible so people could actually run with me in some of the remaining states. Then of course, the pandemic hit. No one knew how long races would be canceled or if I would be strong enough to continue. So we decided to keep filming.

I hate to spoil the ending of the film, but yes, I made it! Go On, Be Brave follows my journey to become the first person with ALS to do a marathon in all 50 states. The documentary turned out more beautiful and inspiring than I could have ever imagined—and I was there! The powers of hope and community propelled me forward and got me across every single finish line.

As grateful as I am for the 50-state marathon journey, I am also enjoying the pressure of being off.

Over the next year, my husband David and I will be traveling to more than 50 planned film screenings and book events for my soon-to-be published (September 2023) memoir, Hope Fights Back, with co-author, Meredith Atwood. That doesn’t leave a ton of time for training, but we hope to partner with races along the way. I love exploring new places on the trike so I will be out there as long as I have the strength.

I never knew how truly magnificent the human body was until mine started failing me. When you think “I want to take a step,” there’s instantaneous signaling through your motor neurons and your muscles respond. It’s miraculous. When you are running, take a moment to appreciate what your body can do.

Because I move frustratingly slowly through the world on a walker, freedom is the best word to describe how I feel on the trike. When I’m training or in a race, I travel at a runner’s pace and it reminds me that I am an athlete. Breathing hard, working my muscles, these are all things I should no longer be able to do with ALS, but I can! I will never take for granted what my body is still able to do.

These three tips have made my running journey a success:

1. Live your life

Time will pass either way, whatever your mood. When I was diagnosed with a terminal illness, of course I went through a grieving process. But I realized that all I could control was my attitude.

2. Remember that tomorrow is not promised

Every day that I am out there is a good day. Whenever I start getting in my head about the weather or my knees hurting, I remember that, one day, I will no longer be able to do this. So many of my friends have died or no longer have the ability to move—that snaps things back into perspective really quickly.

3. Keep putting one foot in front of the other

When that’s too much—stop, rest, reset, and find the right motivation to keep fighting. Any forward progress is enough. One hard day, hope will fight its way right into becoming belief.

Andrea’s Must-Have Gear

→ Catrike Folding Trail: I couldn’t get anywhere without my Catrike recumbent trike. It’s great for people with back problems, balance issues, or other medical issues. Even runners must have other folks in their lives who could use some exercise but can’t run. It’s like Mario Kart for adults!

→ Rabbit EZ Tights in Gibraltar Sea Mountain: I may have a teeny obsession with fun, colorful leggings and rabbit’s buttery soft EZ Tights are absolutely the softest around. Also, my husband and I have to negotiate which color of their Jogalongs we’re going to wear—otherwise we’re liable to be twinning!

→ CLIF BLOKS Energy Chews Tropical Punch: My go-to fuel during a race. Six chews times 50 marathons equals 300 of these addictive little suckers I have consumed!

Six Best Marathon Runners of all time

The marathon is one of the toughest running events.  This event is set at 26.2 miles or 42.195 kilometers, as presented by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) in 1921.

It's a significantly long-distance race that most  people could not complete.  It takes lots of training.  One of the most famous marathon is Boston coming up Monday April 17.  And one of our top six will be running, Eliud Kipchoge.  So here are our six  marathoners as the best of all time. What are your top six? 

Eliud Kipchoge

Eliud Kipchoge easily tops this list as being the GOAT (greatest of all time!) in marathon history. He's a Kenyan runner that participated in marathons and used to specialize in the 5000-meter distance. Kipchoge has already made history and set a world record last September 2018 in Berlin after he completed the distance set for the Olympic men's race with 2:01:39.

No one else was able to defeat the record for several years until Eliud Kipchoge himself broke his own record at his fifth Berlin marathon last year, September 2022 with 2:1:9. It's a 30-second gap from his initial world record, which is a significant improvement already as a runner.

Not only that but he's also been a three-time London and Berlin champion since 2015! At 38 years old, he's already achieved so much, and he's not stopping just yet. Kipchoge also informed everyone that he'll be aiming for the Paris 2024 games, so you should also wait for that and check the updates on FanDuel Sports online.

Haile Gebrselassie

Next on the list is truly one of the marathon legends who dominated the industry when he was still active. Haile Gebreselassie is an Ethiopian long-distance runner who retired last 2015 after over 20 years of long-distance running. He's been active from the late 90s to the early 2000s, and a few of his astonishing achievements include consecutively winning the Berlin Marathon four times and the Dubai Marathon three times.

He also has four World Championship titles (1993 Stuttgart, 1995 Gothenburg, 1997 Athens, and 1999 Seville) and two Olympic golds (1996 Atlanta and 2000 Sydney) in a 10,000-meter distance run. Although he's no longer in the running scene, his legendary achievements will live long.

Abebe Bikila

If you're a huge fan of marathon events, you should already know about Abebe Bikila by now. He's a pioneer marathon runner that made significant feats in the history of the marathon. To start, he's the only athlete who ran barefoot during the Rome 1960 Olympics. He faced the cobblestones head-on, won a gold, and even set a world record. Bikila became the first Black African that ever topped at the Games in a 42.195km race.

Furthermore, his amazing barefoot run made it to the Guinness World Record as the fastest marathon run in bare feet at the 1960 Olympic Games with 2:15:16.2. Additionally, Abebe Bikila was also the first runner to win two Olympic marathon events after he grabbed another gold at Tokyo 1964

Mo Farah

Mo Farah is a British marathon runner who's only the second athlete to win 10,000-meter and 5,000-meter titles at successive Olympic Games. Throughout his athletic career, he accumulated 19 gold with nine silvers and two bronzes.

Moreover, he initially planned to retire but then changed his mind and participated in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and was even tipped by the excellent Eliud Kipchoge. He's still active to this day, but Farah shared with everyone that 2023 will be his final year after confirming that he will be participating in the London Marathon this April and giving it "one more shot."

Catherine Ndereba

Catherine, the Great Ndereba, is the first woman on this list, and she deserved it. She's one of the marathon runners that other athletes should recognize. The Olympics even regarded her achievement as one of the great.

In 2005, she was even awarded by the former Kenya president Mwai Kibaki with the Order of the Golden Aware due to her excellent accomplishments. Not only that, but she was also awarded 2004 and 2005 Kenyan Sportswoman of the Year.

Although she couldn't bring home gold from participating in the Olympic Games, she got to win silver awards for the 2004 Athen Games and 2008 Beijing Games. Additionally, she also has eight gold wins in World Championships and World Marathon Majors combined.

Paula Radcliffe

Paula Radcliffe is also one of the marathon runners that overcame her health issues as a child and became a successful athlete as an adult. Growing up, she struggled with anemia and asthma, but these were just a few bumps in the road as she continued to work hard and brought home several gold awards.

This British long-distance runner was the women's world record holder for over 16 years (2003 to 2019) for being the fastest female marathon runner with 2:15:25 until Brigid Kosgei broke it in 2020. Aside from that, she's also able to win New York City and London marathons three times and won 15 gold awards in total.

Final Thoughts

Marathon is an exciting sport, and no regular person can participate. It takes great understanding that a marathon is more than just running. Being as powerful as the runners mentioned above takes months of training and endurance. Although there are still other remarkable marathon runners, these six, in particular, made significant achievements in this field.

USA Record For Hillary Bor Yields $59,000 Payday At Cherry Blossom 10 Mile

The 50th edition of the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 Mile here this morning ended with a bang when Olympic steeplechaser Hillary Bor not only won the men’s division of the USATF 10 Mile Championships, but also claimed a $50,000 bonus for breaking Greg Meyer’s 40-year-old national record by just two seconds. 

Bor, 33, who represents Hoka One One and wore bib 13, clocked 46:11, three seconds behind overall race champion Tsegay Kidanu of Ethiopia.  Including his prize money, Bor collected a total of $59,000.

“I came here to break the record and the weather wasn’t going to stop me,” Bor told Race Results Weekly, referring to the unusually cold temperatures and  strong winds.  “It’s something I’ve been working for since October last year.”

Last October Bor won the USATF 10 Mile Championships in St. Paul, Minn.  He ran 46:06 in that race, a championships and course record, but that course was 31 meters downhill and not eligible for record setting.  However, Bor and coach Scott Simmons realized that breaking Meyer’s mark was within his capabilities, especially because a faster time run by two-time Olympic medalist, Galen Rupp, was never ratified by USATF.  Rupp ran a 10 mile split of 45:54 at the Row River Half-Marathon in Dorena, Ore., in October, 2020, but the paperwork for verifying that record was never completed or approved.

“My coach knew I was in really good shape to run 45 (minutes),” Bor said.  “But, the weather’s not good today.  The last two miles was just the wind on our face the whole time.”

Indeed, it was in those last two miles that Bor and Kidanu did their best to push each other.  Kidanu, who represents Asics, was just trying to keep up the pressure on Bor.

“The wind was very strong and it made it very tough,” Kidanu told Race Results Weekly through a translator.  He continued: “At the beginning there were a lot of us, but later only a few of us.  But the wind made it very difficult.  Two of us were able to prevail and we battled one another.  In the end, I was able to win.”

In the final sprint to the line, Bor wasn’t really sure where he stood against the clock.  The wind was so strong that the 9-mile marker blew down, despite being weighted with sandbags.  Also, Bor started the race without his watch.

“Today, I didn’t have my watch so that was not really good because I didn’t know the splits,” Bor said, looking slightly embarrassed.  “When I saw the split at 8 miles I knew I needed to run 4:45, but the wind was too much.  I just put my head down and just grind, and grind, and grind.”

Biya Simbassa (Under Armour) finished a distant third in 47:09 and finished second in the national championships division.  Kenya’s Charles Langat (Asics) was fourth in 47:25, and Jacob Thomson (Under Armour) took fifth –and third in the national championships– in 47:27.

Bor, who will return to the steeplechase during the track season, said that today’s race was all about self-belief.

“It shows if you put something in your head you can accomplish it,” he said.

The women’s competition was a tale of two races.

In the overall competition, Uganda’s Sarah Chelangat (Nike) surged away from the field just before the five mile mark.  Her six-mile split was a snappy 4:56, and that put her 22 seconds ahead at that point.  Despite running directly into the wind (and alone) in the final miles, she was able to extend her lead to 30 seconds by the ninth mile, and 33 seconds by the finish.  Her winning time of 52:04 was excellent given the conditions, but she fell well short of the 51:23 world best for an all-women’s race which would have given her a share of the race’s $50,000 bonus pool.

Behind Chelangat, there was a heated battle for both second place overall and the USATF title.  In the ninth mile, Emma Grace Hurley (Atlanta Track Club Elite), Sara Hall (Asics), Nell Rojas (Nike), and Molly Grabill (Unattached) separated themselves from the rest of the pack, all of them trying for the national title.  As they crested the final hill before the course turns slightly downhill to the finish line, Hall and Rojas were locked in a sprint for the win.  Hall, who is running the Boston Marathon in 15 days, got the best of Rojas, 52:37 to 52:38.

Hall, who turns 40 on April 15, almost skipped today’s race.  She just returned from a family trip to Ethiopia where her training didn’t go well because she got sick.

“Honestly, I feel so thankful for today because four days ago I wasn’t going to race,” Hall told Race Results Weekly.  “I had COVID last week and training was just so rough.  I had a fever.  I had two different viruses back to back.”

But like Bor, Hall had the power of self-belief working for her today.

“I think my whole career I’ve just chosen to show up,” Hall said, wrapped in an American flag.  “So, just today I decided to show up and I’m really glad I did, especially with Asics sponsoring this event.”

While the wind –which Rojas called “nasty”– was a challenge, Hall saw it as an opportunity to prepare mentally for Boston where conditions can be difficult, too. She thought about the 2018 race where temperatures were just above freezing and athletes had to run through a driving rain storm.

“I was thinking about Boston because, you know, 2018 with that headwind and the storm,” Hall said.  “I have Boston in two weeks, so this is just a good time to practice.

Like Bor, Hall had thought about trying for a share in the record bonus pool, but discarded that idea when she felt the power of the wind.

“Normally, I would have wanted to go for the record out here, but with the significant wind I didn’t know if that was going to be in the cards, so I just chose to compete,” she said.  “I think this was a great opportunity to do that with Boston coming up.”

With her win here today, Hall has won a total of 12 national titles, four at 10 miles (2017, 2018, 2019, and 2023).

Hurley finished fourth (third American) in 52:41, and Grabill got fifth (fourth American) in 52:42.  Defending champion Susanna Sullivan, who led most of the first half of the race, finished seventh (sixth American) in 53:25.  She’s running the TCS London Marathon in three weeks and has been doing heavy mileage.

“I’m ready to run a marathon,” she said, smiling, as she changed into warm clothes in the athlete recovery area.

Some 16,000 runners competed today after about 6,000 ran the companion 5-K yesterday (which took place in the rain).  Several former race champions were on hand to celebrate the 50th edition, including Kathrine Switzer (1973), Greg Meyer (1983), Eleanor Simonsick (1982 and 1983), and Bill Rodgers (1978 through 1981).  Race director Phil Stewart reflected on how the race had endured for so many years and through so many cultural and political changes.

“Through Watergate, gas crises, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the internet, the first and second Iraq Wars, the 2008 financial crisis, America’s first Black President, two impeachments, an insurrection and the War in Ukraine, runners have returned each spring for what is known as the ‘Runners Rite of Spring,'” Stewart said at last night’s pre-race dinner.

3-time champion Molly Huddle is ready for 2023 NYC Half

The United Airlines NYC Half came into Molly Huddle‘s life in 2014 and it was one of the key turning points in the now 38 year-old’s storied career.  Never a fan of cross country or indoor track, the 28-time national champion liked to de-camp from her Providence, R.I., home in the winter to put in her pre-season base miles in the warmth of Arizona.  The NYC Half, with its mid-March date, was the perfect race to close-out her winter training block.  Her long-time coach Ray Treacy, whom Huddle affectionately calls “The Guru,” gave his blessing and she signed-up for the 2014 race.  It would be her first-ever half-marathon.

With the temperature right at the freezing mark, Huddle ran the entire race with the leaders.  She went through the first 10-K in 33:01, and the second in a much faster 32:21 as the pace heated up.  Although too far behind eventual winner Sally Kipyego (1:08:31), she finished a close third to eventual 2014 Boston Marathon champion Buzunesh Deba, 1:08:59 to 1:09:04.

“It was good,” a shivering Huddle told Race Results Weekly’s Chris Lotsbom that day.  “I think I stuck my nose in it in the beginning and the distance got to me a little in the end, but it was definitely a fun experience. I definitely want to do another one.”

The rest, shall we say, is history.

For the next three years Huddle would repeat the same winter program, training in Arizona then coming to New York for the NYC Half before starting her track season*.  She won in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and in the 2016 race she set the still-standing USATF record for an all-women’s race: 1:07:41.  During her reign at the top, she beat top athletes like Sally Kipyego, Caroline Rotich, Des Linden, Aliphine Tuliamuk, Buzunesh Deba, Emily Sisson, Edna Kiplagat, Diane Nukuri, and Amy Cragg.  She also lowered her 10,000m personal best from 31:28.66 to an American record 30:13.17, a mark which would stand for more than six years until Alicia Monson broke it just 11 days ago at The Ten in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.  She also collected $65,500 in prize money from the event which is organized by New York Road Runners.

Huddle returns to the NYC Half for the first time in six years on Sunday, but she’s no longer focused on winning.  The race comes about 11 months after she, and husband Kurt Benninger, had their first child, daughter Josephine Valerie Benninger, whom Huddle calls “JoJo.”  Speaking to Race Results Weekly at a press event yesterday in Times Square, she reflected on her history with the race.

“The last time I did the Half was 2017, I think, so a long time,” said Huddle, wearing a warm hat and jacket on a cold, late-winter day.  “Great to be back.  Great to be running again seriously after having the baby in April.  So, this will be a good test.”

Huddle has been slowly building her fitness since giving birth to Josephine.  She first returned to racing last August at the low-key Bobby Doyle Summer Classic 5 Mile in Narragansett, R.I., –very close to her home– clocking 29:17.  Since then she has run in a series of local races in New England –a pair of 10-K’s, a 5-K cross country, and a half-marathon– to regain her racing chops.

Then, in January of this year, she ran the super-competitive Aramco Houston Half-Marathon and clocked a very good 1:10:01, a mark which qualified her for the 2024 USA Olympic Team Trials Marathon.  She went back to training, and the NYC Half should give her a good reading on her progress.

“I’m really happy to fit it back in the schedule,” said Huddle, who is still breastfeeding and will be pumping while she is in New York (Kurt is with Josephine at home in Providence).  “I feel like I’m having more baseline workouts now, less of a building phase and more back to normal.  I’ve had a few little injury problems last month, but I’m coming around.”

A well-traveled athlete, Huddle is sticking close to home for her races now.  New York is a three and one-half hour drive (or train ride) from Providence.

“I love racing within a drive distance of home now because of the baby, and this is an easier race for me to get to,” Huddle said.  “So that’s good.”

Sunday’s race has yet another purpose for Huddle.  It will kick-off her training for her next marathon, a distance that she hasn’t taken on since the 2020 Olympic Trials in Atlanta when she was forced to drop out with an injury.  Although she wasn’t at liberty to reveal which race it will be, she said that the timing of the NYC Half was perfect, just like it always was.

“So, I’m really focusing more on the roads now; it fits in really well with that plan now,” Huddle said.  She continued: “This is going to kick off a marathon build-up for me, so this will be a really good race to fit into my marathon block as we go forward the next two months.”

Designing a Shoe for “The Running Class”

Why Tracksmith, an apparel brand immersed in the culture and heritage of running, started making shoes 

Several times every month, Matt Taylor can be spotted wearing a well-worn gray cotton T-shirt on his daily morning runs in suburban Boston.

The “Tracksmith” lettering across the front has faded after an estimated 1,000 miles of running and more than a 100 cycles through the wash, but the original Grayboy brand produced at Tracksmith’s inception, in 2014, has otherwise held up pretty well.

To Taylor, the 45-year-old co-founder, CEO, and primary visionary for the venture capital-backed upstart, it’s a personal reminder and validation of the quality Tracksmith strives for in everything it makes, but also tied to the durable functionality necessary for the authentic daily training of a committed runner. It hearkens back to the previous generations of runners who toiled in the daily grind, another key element of Tracksmith’s vibe.

“We want to make high-quality products with the best raw materials, but we think about value, not price,” Taylor says. “If we can create a product that has a lot of value because of those things—durability, some performance characteristics, even something that aesthetically that looks and feels a lot better than anything else in the market—that’s where we put our focus.”

After eight years of making a name for itself in the apparel business, Tracksmith is making new waves at the start of 2023 with the launch of its first shoe, the Eliot Runner. It’s a retro-inspired, everyday training model with a modern Pebax midsole and insole that embodies the look and quality craftsmanship the brand has become known for, while also celebrating the culture of the sport.

The Eliot Runner is designed to be a performance-oriented training workhorse that’s capable of long runs, up-tempo workouts, recovery runs, and, well, just about any kind of running except for racing. And true to the brand’s running lifestyle aesthetic, it also looks nice with jeans.

The new shoe, like a lot of Tracksmith’s running apparel, ranks at the higher end of the price range for training models, but that’s directly related to the high-quality products it strives to produce, Taylor says. Tracksmith is focused on style, quality, and running culture. Those three tenets are baked into everything it produces—its apparel line, its thoughtful storytelling content, and now, its training shoe—by way of premium materials and a distinctive design aesthetic rooted in the heritage of the sport.

“It’s about being uncompromising on performance, but bringing more of a refined look to it, too,” says Tracksmith brand president Ryan Eckel, who previously worked alongside Taylor when both held marketing roles at Puma more than a decade ago. “When the company launched with apparel, it was able to rethink the aesthetic of what traditionally would look like for running, and we’ve tried to take that approach to footwear as well.”

When Tracksmith burst onto the scene as a premium running apparel brand in 2014, it didn’t intend to be a disruptor, but it quickly caught the attention of the marketplace with its retro vibe. It comes across as proud of its small but growing indie status, while relentlessly waving the flag of the “running class,” non-professional yet competitive runners dedicated to the pursuit of personal excellence.

At the time, the running apparel market was dominated by running shoe companies and outdoor brands focused primarily on making brightly colored nylon and spandex clothes in the midrange price point.

Tracksmith’s rise, along with Oiselle, Ciele, and Rabbit at about the same time, opened the floodgates for a wave of upstart apparel brands blending style and performance, including Roark, Saysky, Bandit Running, Satisfy, and Territory Run Co.

“Running apparel was not very inspired back then,” says Taylor, himself a former collegiate steeplechase runner. “All the resources were going into footwear, creating an opportunity to come out with product that was higher quality, with a different style and aesthetic to it, that was built from the subculture of running. That was a really powerful way to launch the brand, and it also created some reactions from people who were not sure what to make of it.”

In its early years, Tracksmith’s disruption was met with some resistance by an aging adult running population dominated by Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, but it found a connection with Millennials and Gen Z’ers who were interested in a different look and deeper meaning in their identity to running. Tracksmith has served that up continually with authentic, multi-platform storytelling.

Although runners have known Tracksmith as an apparel company, they’ve also been able to immerse in the brand’s social media posts, TV commercials, printed catalogs, and Meter magazine, all providing an immersive look into the sport. Prior to working at Puma, Taylor was an independent filmmaker who produced a series called “Chasing Tradition” about college cross country programs and athletes in pursuit of U.S. Olympic Trials qualifying times.

With Taylor’s leadership, Tracksmith has made it a point to create marketing campaigns based on real athletes doing real workouts, as opposed to having super fit models pose or do camera run-bys as most other brands do. During the 2021 U.S. Olympic Trials track championships, Tracksmith aired several TV spots during the NBC broadcast that included raw footage of amateur runners doing a workout of 400 repeats on the track. These more avant garde commercials, narrated by author and amateur runner Malcolm Gladwell, earned rave reviews from running fans for their authenticity and also because they weren’t blatantly hawking Tracksmith products.

Tracksmith also recently produced a mesmerizing long-form video called “Church of the Long Run,” in which director Emily Maye orchestrated a crew and a sophisticated camera rig mounted on a truck to film runner Sam Roecker as she did a solitary 14-mile, 80-minute run on a snow-covered road in the foothills near Rollinsville, Colorado.

“Matt has really been ahead of his time with that type of storytelling,” says running coach Mario Fraioli, creator of “The Morning Shakeout” podcast and newsletter. “He was doing that before his experience at Puma, and his experience at Puma clearly helped put him in the position to launch Tracksmith. But if you look at the storytelling that the brand does, that’s been there since day one, and that’s all Matt Taylor. It’s been very intentional on his part. He saw an opportunity that, from a brand perspective, those types of stories weren’t being told.”

Inherent to the Tracksmith’s DNA is the celebration of the daily grind, the long-term training journey toward big goals, and the community and culture built around the shared suffering it fosters. It doesn’t sponsor top-tier elites like Nike, New Balance, and Hoka, but instead embraces the amateur spirit of passionate athletes who are otherwise unsponsored but are fervently committed to training. For example, Tracksmith’s community manager, Lou Serafini, broke four minutes in the mile as an unsupported runner and lowered his marathon PR to 2:14, after starting with the company in 2017. (He eventually signed a pro contract with Puma.)

A few years ago, Tracksmith began informally supporting amateur athletes who were close to the U.S. Olympic Trials qualifying standards in the marathon and long-distance events on the track. That led to a more formal Amateur Support Program (ASP) that provided racing kits and training gear to 130 athletes who competed in the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta. The program expanded to support dozens of athletes in every discipline at the Track and Field Trials in Eugene, Oregon, in 2021, and has continued to evolve into 2023.

This year, athletes from both the U.S. and U.K. can apply to be part of the program that will provide them four quarterly stipends of $250 along with a racing kit, warmups, and Tracksmith Eliot Runner shoes, as well as virtual coaching and support through Zoom-based seminars.

That goes a long way in supporting hard-working athletes on the cusp, says Carmen Graves, a Denver-based runner in her second year with the ASP. “It’s pretty wild to see the sea of Tracksmith jerseys at the U.S. championships and Olympic Trials,” says Graves, who was seventh in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at last year’s U.S. outdoor track championships. “Tracksmith definitely stepped up to fill that gap between unsponsored and under-sponsored athletes. Just giving us something to help is sometimes enough to get to the next level, and I think that’s really important.”

Mostly, the program helps athletes sustain their careers with the chance to chase their dreams, but for several runners it has led to compete at the highest levels of the sport. For example, Keira D’Amato was 12th at the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon while racing in Tracksmith gear, which she leveraged into an eventual Nike sponsorship that led to her breaking the American record last year at the Houston Marathon. Similarly, 3,000-meter steeplechase athlete Mason Ferlic competed unsponsored in Tracksmith gear on the track and earned a spot on the U.S. team that competed in the Tokyo Olympics.

“We know as runners, there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going, but I think a lot of brands—and they would never say this explicitly—take a lot of shortcuts in how they do things, whether it’s with the products they’re making or marketing campaigns,” Fraioli says. “With Tracksmith, from the beginning, they have really prioritized authenticity and quality over quantity. They’ve never sacrificed the quality of their offerings, whether its products, events, experiences, in order to go big and appeal to a mass market. I think that was a major differentiating point, and I think that resonated with their customers and the people who feel most connected to their brand.”

Although Taylor is nearly 10 years into his role at Tracksmith, he says footwear has been on the brand’s roadmap since it set out to be a full-fledged running brand. It was always just a matter of timing and when the company would have the resources, internal team, and the bandwidth to properly develop a shoe coherent with its image and likeness, he says.

“We’re pretty particular in how we bring things to market,” Taylor says. “We wanted to make sure it was the best version of what we could achieve. To be honest, it took a little bit longer than expected. I think entrepreneurs are eternal optimists, and in my original pitch deck, I thought we’d get to footwear in year three, and we’re doing it in year eight. As we continue to execute our vision of being a global lifestyle running brand, footwear will play prominently into that strategy.”

When Tracksmith started its initial foray into the shoe business, internally, more than five years ago, the first modern marathon super shoes hadn’t even been released yet. But as soon as Nike unveiled its original models with carbon-fiber propulsion plates embedded in their midsoles in 2017, it signaled a massive shift in the industry that had every big running shoe brand consumed by the racing shoe category.

And while every brand eventually did launch their own versions of modern racing shoes, it created a hole in the training shoe category of the market. As Tracksmith worked behind the scenes on developing its new shoe, several other small brands entered the market, too, including Atreyu, Speedland, Norda, Nobull and Vimazi, while also giving rise to “athleisure” brands like AllBirds.

What sets Tracksmith’s approach to shoes apart, says product line manager product line manager Brent James, is that its focus has been more about serving the needs of dedicated runners and less about the actual products. In other words, it got into footwear on its own terms and timeline without concern for wholesale sales pressures about timing, pricing, and quantities.

“Being authentic to running and runners, it’s not always about those glamor race moments when you’re achieving PRs or winning races,” James says. “We know running is really about the work, and that’s really communicated through the imagery we share and the blood, sweat, and tears we represent through each launch. Delivering a shoe that is along for that ride and helping you through that, and equipping you for that work, is what we set out to do first.”

Launching a footwear line, even if it’s just one shoe, is no small task. In addition to gaining a company-wide competency of the footwear business and ramping up with new team members, Tracksmith also required developing new manufacturing partners and creating a distribution plan that doesn’t, at least at the outset, include running specialty stores. Most of Tracksmith’s apparel has been sold directly through its website, its original Boston retail store, and pop-up stores managed in New York and London.

Initially, the Eliot Runner will only be available through a similar network, although the brand’s presence in New York and London has evolved into exquisitely crafted retail shops with the same boutique atmosphere as its Boston location. Additional pop-up stores might become part of the brand’s marketing strategy, as well as wholesale distribution avenues.

Taylor and Eckel expect footwear to become a large part of Tracksmith’s business going forward, but not overnight. While the brand has a lot of ideas about potential future models, for the moment, there’s nothing else in the development channel. The brand will focus on pushing the Eliot Runner into the marketplace this spring and summer, while evaluating the feedback it gets from its unique distribution model.

“We want to be competitive with those brands within the mindshare of the consumers, for sure,” Eckel says. “Whether that’s at a literal shoe wall at a specialty store or somewhere else. We’re confident in our abilities to make product that is as good or better than other brands out there. So yeah, we certainly think we can compete with those brands over the long-term.”

Sheila Chepkirui eyes Boston after winning Semi De Paris

Reigning Commonwealth Games 10,000m bronze medalist Sheila Chepkirui is keen to add another feather to her cap during next month's Boston Marathon in the United States of America.

Speaking after winning the Paris Half Marathon title in France on Sunday, Chepkirui admitted that the title was not won easily because she has to battle the cold conditions in France.

“The victory here is a precursor for the Boston Marathon next month. I have to train well to ensure I get the results,” said Chepkirui, the two-time national cross-country champion.

The Kericho-based athlete won the 21km distance after clocking 66.00 minutes ahead of Ethiopian Betelihem Yemer (66.45) and Kenyan Marion Kibor (66.45), who completed the podium. Both Yemer and Kibor ran their personal bests.

“Despite the chilly condition, things were not badly off for me because it was not windy,” she said.

In the men’s race, it was a 1-2 podium finish for Kenyan athletes with  Roncer Kipkorir emerging victorious in 59:38 minutes.

Kipkorir ran his personal best and course record after beating Josphat Chumo to second place in 59:53, also a personal best. Home runner  Jimmy Gressier was third in 61:29.

In Italy, former Atlanta Half Marathon champions, Dorcas Jepchirchir Tuitoek and Isaac Kipkemboi won the Rome Ostia race.

The Kapsabet-based Tuitoek ran away with the women's title in 66:21 minutes ahead of Kenya- born turned-Israeli Lornah Salpeter and Magdalene Masai.

The 66.21 minutes was Tuitoek's personal best time as Salpeter came second at 66:56 and Masai (67:07) third.

In the men's race, Isaac Kipkemboi led a Kenyan 1-2 finish as he posted his personal best of 59:47. Wesley Kimutai (59:47) took the second place with Ethiopian Tadese Takele Bikira was third in 59:56.

Dorcas Jepchirchir Tuitoek aims higher at Rome Ostia half marathon on Sunday

Dorcas Jepchirchir Tuitoek will be seeking another title in the Roma Ostia Half Marathon set for this Sunday in Rome, Italy.

Tuitoek has a personal best of 66:33, which she set at the 2019 Istanbul Half Marathon while finishing second.

The Atlanta Half Marathon champion is confident of a  podium finish as she seeks to lower her time in the Italian city.

“I am looking beyond this event because I want to use it as a springboard to one of the marathon major races later this year,” she said.

Tuitoek, who also won the Atlanta Half Marathon in 68:22, is optimistic of lowering her time as she prepares to venture into the full marathon," he added.

She said she is currently undergoing intensive training under Gianni Demadonna in Kapsabet and hopes to head to Rome with much fitness.

This will be her first race of the year on the road after competing in cross-country meetings across the country.

"I competed at the national cross country championships in Ruiru and I finished in position 12, which was good for me," she said.

In Rome, Tuitoek will be up against home girl Giovanna Epis among other top athletes.

The men's field will feature Kenya's Wesley Kibichii who has a personal best of 59:57 and Isaac Kemboi (60:11) among others.

However, the line-up includes top runners like Ethiopian Mogos Tuemay (60:11) and Italian citizen Danielle D’Onofrio (62:32). 

Betty Lindberg sets world 5k record for age 98

At 98 years old, Betty Lindberg continues to demonstrate that age is merely a number. This past Saturday, Lindberg, the world age-group record holder in the 5K, completed the Publix Atlanta 5K in a blazing 59 minutes, 6 seconds, an accomplishment that topped her age group at the USATF Masters 5K Championships. Lindberg, who walked for the duration of the race, clocked an 11-minute per kilometer pace. 

Lindberg was greeted with flashing cameras and applause from fellow runners as she crossed the finish line. Still, the nonagenarian was oblivious to the fanfare as the first thing she did after crossing the timing mat was, of course, stop her watch.

Last year, the Atlanta native made headlines when she crushed the previous 5K world record for her age group by more than 30 minutes, running a time of 55:48. That record, set in 2017 by 96-year-old Betty Ashley, was 1:28:36. (If you are a Betty between the ages of 95-99, you have a decent shot at toppling a record.) She told local media at that race she thought the record was achievable but was amazed at her record-breaking speed. “I simply stroll, as quick as I can,” Lindberg told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Lindberg has been making local headlines for years with her racing exploits. She began running in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race, an annual 10K, after driving her children to the race’s starting line in 1988 and feeling inspired by the runners there. “I was watching all these people come running by, and I said, ‘I can do that,’” she told WXIAlast year.

“I always say I’m never going to do it again,” Lindberg, then 97, told the news outlet in 2022. “I guess I just don’t know any better. As soon as I get across that finish line, all the aches and pains just disappear.” Since her first race in 1989, she has only missed one Peachtree Road Race.

At 91, Lindberg broke the world record in the 800m for women over 90 at an All Comers Track and Field Meet hosted by the Atlanta Track Club. Her time of 6:57.56 outdid the previous record of 6:59.18 set in 2001.

Lindberg works with a personal trainer three times a week to stay in top racing form while still getting in runs around her neighborhood regularly.

With Lindberg’s inspiring story, she serves as a reminder that age should never keep anyone from running. Take it from Lindberg herself, who told Runner’s World last year: “At 97, why are you supposed to do so poorly?”

New Mom and Elite Runner Molly Huddle is Ready to Take on the NYC Half

Molly Huddle admits making time for running is considerably more challenging since giving birth to a baby girl last April, but she’s excited to be back racing at a high level as a healthy and fit mother.

The 38-year-old two-time U.S. Olympian ran so well at the Houston Half Marathon on January 15, she’s optimistic about racing a late spring marathon. Next up, Huddle will be racing in the deep women’s elite field at the United Airlines NYC Half on March 19 for the first time since taking her third consecutive victory in the event in 2017.

Huddle began to gradually increase her training late last summer under the guidance of longtime coach Ray Treacy and ran a couple of moderately fast 10Ks and a half marathon last fall. But then she had a big breakthrough when she ran 1:10:01 in Houston. Even though that was well off the 1:07:25 PR she recorded while setting an American record in 2018, it was still an impressive effort.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d get back to even doing that, so that was good,” Huddle said. “Sometimes it’s good to just start 100 percent over and slowly build back. I think that was the only way I was gonna do it. I haven’t really been tested at a level that would be like trying to PR or qualify for a U.S. team, so we’ll see how it goes. But I think there’s a lot out there. I mean, just because you’re not making the Olympic team, you can still do a lot in the sport.”

Huddle said she generally felt good while running about 40 miles a week through eight months of her pregnancy, but then backed off and did whatever she could manage in the final month before Josephine was born on April 26. After giving birth, Huddle took extra time to recover until she felt like she could run consistently, but she also consulted with a pelvic floor specialist to make sure she wouldn’t risk injury by incorporating too much training intensity too soon.

While she’s earnestly back to training at a high level, she admits she’s still managing the physical challenges of breastfeeding, as well as the new time constraints as she and her partner, Kurt Benninger, the head cross country coach and assistant track coach at Brown University, juggle their schedules to maintain their professional lives while prioritizing their efforts to care for their daughter.

Huddle is grateful for the continued support from her longtime sponsor Saucony, as well as the increased honest public and social media conversations among women athletes becoming mothers. She says she’s taken cues, inspiration and advice from fellow elite-runner moms Aliphine Tuliamuk, Faith Kipygeon and Sara Vaughn, among others.

“It’s just a long timeline, but it’s been great to see other women do it,” Huddle says. “It takes some time and some, you know, intentional exercises and some pacing yourself, but then once you get the green light after, you know, a certain amount of months, I feel like you can do everything you were doing before.”

Huddle won the NYC Half in 2015, 2016, and 2017,with her winning time of 1:07:41 from 2016 setting an event record that stood until last year. She’ll line up against Ethiopia’s two-time Olympian Senbere Teferi, who last year broke Huddle’s event record while winning in 1:07:35. She is also a two-time world championships silver medalist and the 5K world-record holder (14:29) for a women-only race.

Other Notable Runners for the NYC Half

Two-time Olympic medalist and seven-time world championships medalist Hellen Obiri of Kenya, three-time Olympian and four-time European Championships medalist Eilish McColgan of Scotland, and two-time U.S. Olympian and 2018 Boston Marathon champion Des Linden will also toe the line in New York. Other top Americans include Dakotah Lindwurm, Erika Kemp, Maggie Montoya, Annie Frisbie and Jeralyn Poe.

Huddle hasn’t announced which marathon she’ll run in late April or early May. Her last effort at 26.2 miles was four years ago this spring, when, despite having had an off day in London, she finished 12th place in a new PR of 2:26:33. She was considered one of the favorites to finish in the top three at the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta three years ago this week, but dropped out near mile 20, partially because she was still struggling with an Achilles injury.

Runners set world, state records at Publix Atlanta Marathon

ATLANTA — With nearly 8,000 participants, world and state records were set in the Publix Atlanta Marathon weekend. From distances of 50 meters to 26.2 miles, runners of all ages shattered records.

On Sunday, during the half marathon, Kenyans Nicholas Kosimbei and Dorcas Tuitoek made history. Kosimbei ran the fastest half marathon ever in Georgia shattering the previous mark of 1:03:59 and finishing more than two minutes ahead of his nearest rival with a time of 1:00:36.Tuitoek also shattered the record with a time of 1:08:22 in the women's half marathon race just seven seconds under the Georgia state record set by Molly Seidel last year, who went on to win a bronze medal in the Olympic Games marathon. 

Additionally, Matt McDonald of Cambridge, Massachusetts, finished 6th overall in the half marathon at 1:05:32 and Dakotah Lindwurm of Eagan, Minnesota, finished with a time of 1:12:27. Chris Nasser of Atlanta won the Push Assist Division at 1:17:14. 

“It’s fun to run by so many of my old spots,” McDonald said. “Almost every mile, I had some memory of some good time in that neighborhood, whether it was Georgia Tech where I did my Ph.D. or Piedmont Park where I did all my workouts.”

Shlomo Fishman of Silver Spring, Maryland, finished in 1st place in the Atlanta Publix Marathon with a time of 2:37:32.  

“At Mile 18, I just decided I needed to get out of the rain,” Fishman said, who ran a personal best in his first marathon victory. “So, I picked it up a little bit and just went for it.”

In the women's marathon race, Amanda Furrer of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, finished in 1st place with a time of 3:02:47, despite starting in Wave C, eight minutes behind the first non-elite runners. “I was alone for a while, so the cyclist on the course just started telling everyone my name. So people kept cheering for me. It was awesome!” Furrer said. 

On Saturday, the 5K was won by Luke Mortensen, 39, of Athens, at 16:11 and Ellen Flood, 24, of Atlanta, at 17:25. Flood is also a former Georgia Tech runner. 

Atlanta Track Club also hosted the USATF 5km Masters Championships, with 225 athletes ages 40 and over competing for both overall and age-group titles. Bryan Lindsey, 41, of Zionsville, Indiana, and Jessica Hruska, also 41, of Dubuque, Iowa won the overall titles. A world record was set by 97-year-old Betty Lindberg of Atlanta, a legend of the Atlanta Track Club. Her time of 55:48 set a world age-group record winning her 95+ division and destroying the previous mark by more than 30 minutes. 

The 3K Atlanta Publix Kids Marathon was won by 13-year-old Nuriel Shimoni Stoil of Atlanta and 14-year-old Valeria Zambrano of Marietta. 

Runners Will Chase Historic Times at 2023 Publix Atlanta Half Marathon

 A run for records will take place at the Publix Atlanta Half Marathon next week where some of the world’s best runners will attempt to complete the fastest half marathon ever run in the state of Georgia. This year’s elite field features eight men who have run faster than the current men’s record of 1:00:36 and four women who have run faster than the women’s record of 1:08:22. Both times were set at this event in 2022.

Nicholas Kosimbei will return to Atlanta to defend his title and his record. The 26-year-old from Kenya dominated last year’s race which was held in the driving rain, winning by more than two minutes. Fellow Kenyans Raymond Magut and Goeffrey Koech who placed second and third respectively last year are also returning. Magut boasts a personal best of 1:00:00 while Koech has broken the one-hour mark with a career best of 59:36. Koech won his most recent half marathon, the B.A.A.Half Marathon in Boston last November.

“I love the course in Atlanta,” said Kosimbei. “I am looking forward to returning and my goal is to break my own course record.”

Other top contenders include Tsegay Kidanu (Ethiopia, 59:39),  Josphat Tanui (Kenya, 59:40), Phenus Kipleting (Kenya, 1:00:08) and Bethwell Yegon (Kenya, 1:00:57), the runner-up at the 2021 BMW Berlin Marathon.

With last year’s winner Dorcas Tuitoek not returning in 2023, a new face will break the tape to win the women’s title. The fastest woman in the field is Kenya’s Cynthia Jerotich. Jerotich was a dominant force on the roads from 2013 to 2016, setting a half marathon personal best of 1:06:04 and winning a silver medal at the World Half Marathon Championships in 2016. Jerotich stepped away from racing in 2017 and gave birth to three children before returning to competition last year. At 33, she will be looking to return to the form that saw her winning road races around the world including some of the most prestigious events in the United States. 

Jerotich will face Helah Kiprop, the winner of last year’s Copenhagen Marathon and the runner-up at the Frankfort Marathon. Kirprop, a 2016 Olympian from Kenya, has a half marathon personal best of 1:07:39. Also among the fastest in the field are 2017 Houston Half Marathon winner Veronica Wanjiru (Kenya, 1:07:58) and Vibian Chepkirui (1:08:02). Chepkirui won the Vienna Marathon last year in a course record time of 2:20:59.

Athletes in the 2023 Publix Atlanta Half Marathon will be competing for a $22,000 prize purse including a first place prize of $4,000. There is an additional $2,500 bonus for the male or female winner who sets the course and Georgia all-time record. Full elite fields can be found below. The race will be streamed live on Atlanta Track Club’s YouTube page with commentary from Chris Chavez, Carrie Tollefson and Ali Feller. 

About Atlanta Track Club                                                

Atlanta Track Club is a nonprofit committed to creating an active and healthy Atlanta. Through running and walking, Atlanta Track Club motivates, inspires and engages the community to enjoy a healthier lifestyle.

With more than 30,000 members, Atlanta Track Club is the second largest running organization in the United States. In addition to the AJC Peachtree Road Race (peachtreeroadrace.org) – the largest 10K running event in the world, the Publix Atlanta Marathon, PNC Atlanta 10 Miler and Invesco QQQ Thanksgiving Day Half Marathon, Atlanta Track Club directs more than 30 events per year. Through the support of its members and volunteers, Atlanta Track Club also maintains a number of community initiatives including organizing and promoting the Kilometer Kids youth running program to metro Atlanta youth, honoring high school cross country and track and field athletes through Atlanta Track Club’s All-Metro Banquets and supporting the Grady Bicycle EMT program. For more information on Atlanta Track Club, visit atlantatrackclub.org.

You Might Be Slower Soon After Getting a COVID Booster

New research finds a temporary decrease in a key aspect of fitness.

Everyone has that friend who got their COVID-19 vaccine and bounced back the next day, with little more than a sore arm. We’ve also heard (or told) stories of being in bed for multiple days after the first, second, third, and fourth shot. 

While no one enjoys feeling unwell, runners have an added concern: How will a shot affect my upcoming training and racing?

A recent study offers some quantification to anecdotal evidence runners have been sharing for the past year and a half, where the new research found a small decline in aerobic capacity post-booster. Here’s how to incorporate that finding into your training plans.

Why Runners Care About VO2 Max

VO2max is often treated as the gold standard measurement of cardiovascular fitness. It represents the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise. This matters for runners because, all else equal, the more oxygen you can use, the harder you can work.

Given the significance of VO2 max to athletes, researchers in Belgium set out to test whether the COVID-19 booster affected it. They recruited 42 recreational endurance athletes (runners, cyclists, and swimmers) who were scheduled to receive their COVID booster—i.e., the third shot in the two-series Pfizer vaccine. Just before they got their shot, the athletes took a VO2 max test. This involved riding a stationary bike while wearing a device that measured oxygen consumption. As resistance on the bike went up, their oxygen consumption also went up until it eventually plateaued—indicating VO2max.

One week after receiving their booster, the athletes repeated the test. Compared to their performance pre-booster, their VO2max showed, on average, a 2.7 percent decrease.

Given that a decline in VO2 max reflects a decline in cardiovascular fitness, this finding is worth factoring into your training and racing plans. However, it’s worth noting that a 2.7 percent decrease in VO2 max does not necessarily mean a 2.7 percent decrease in speed. Here’s an example using Jack Daniels’s VDOT values (which are a proxy for VO2 max).

Let’s say a runner with a VDOT of 38 gets her COVID booster. This lowers her VO2 max (VDOT) by 2.7 percent, giving her a reduced VDOT value of 36.97. According to Daniels’s calculations, all else being equal, her previous 5K time of 25:12 would slow to about 25:45, or by 33 seconds—which is only 2.2 percent slower. If she’s fitter and has a half marathon time of 1:44:20 and a VDOT of 43? One week after the booster, her VDOT would be just below 42, and her half marathon time would increase from 1:44:20 to around 1:46:30, or by 2.1 percent.

VO2 Max Isn’t Everything

Admittedly, these calculations assume “all else being equal,” which is virtually impossible. Many other factors contribute to running performance, including running economy (how much oxygen you need to run a given pace), stride mechanics, and even perceived effort. Hielko Miljoen, a sports cardiologist at University of Antwerp and lead author on the paper, pointed out that in that respect, this study is only the beginning of an answer to how the booster affects performance.

“The next step in this investigation should be to do an endurance test, because VO2max is just one part of exercise capacity and athlete performance,” he says. 

Additionally, the researchers only tested VO2 max one week out from the booster shot. While it’s unknown what effects may exist further out from the shot—the researchers did not retest the athletes at later intervals—it seems unlikely that the decline is permanent. “This study is by no means an answer,” says Miljoen. “It is trying to reassure people that the effects are not huge, probably not lasting.”

Weigh the Risks

Every medical decision is a personal one, and the reality is that getting the COVID-19 vaccine, including the booster, doesn’t come with a non-zero amount of risk.

“The entire field of medicine comes with statistics,” says Miljoen. “The benefit and harm of a certain medical procedure or intervention are only known on a population basis, so individuals must make up their own mind based on the data out there.”

While life-threatening risks of the vaccine are low, getting it or the booster may interrupt your training for a few days. A recent study of more than 1,000 elite Polish athletes found that the athletes lost an average of two and a half training days around getting the COVID vaccine. However, the same study found that athletes lost an average of eight training days due to COVID-19 infection. Given these and other research data, the authors concluded in favor of vaccination for athletes, writing that “the benefit–loss ratio strongly favors vaccination.”

Time Your Shot Strategically

While it doesn’t feel great to miss any amount of training, one advantage of vaccination and booster shots is that they can be timed to have minimal impact on a racing season—whereas COVID infection can’t.

Ben Rosario, executive director of Hoka NAZ Elite, recalls two of his athletes contracting what he believes was COVID in January 2020.

“I think it really affected them in the 2020 Olympic Trials marathon, because it was a real detriment to their training at that time,” he says. “They missed a really important 10 or so days of training.”

With the initial vaccines, he observed that athletes would feel unwell for seven to 10 days; consequently, they tried not to schedule their vaccination in the week or two leading up to a race. The results of the Belgian study suggest that similar scheduling may be warranted for the booster. While you may only feel the effects of the booster for a day or two, its less discernable effects—like suppressed VO2 max—can still affect your race if you schedule it too close to the shot.

Go Light Around Your Booster

Amy Yoder Begley, coach of the Atlanta Track Club, says that what her team found worked best was to ease off training for the few days surrounding their booster. Typically, the athletes would do a light day of training on the day of the booster and then go home, hydrate, and focus on moving their arm throughout the rest of the day. They’d take the next day off to let their body recover and then, depending how they felt, they’d slowly ease back into training.

“I just kept telling people: literally you’re talking two to five days to let the body do its thing to give you more protection down the road, if possible,” says Begley.

Rosario has a similar message: “My advice to all runners would be to be patient. What’s the harm in missing some training if you’re going to come back super healthy?”

Roundabout runner does it again

When we spoke with Healdsburg, Calif., runner Tate Dobson two weeks ago, he had no intentions of getting back out and running another roundabout ultramarathon. On Dec. 11, the 21-year-old went out for another six-hour roundabout rip on the same loop, but in the opposite direction.This time around, Dobson repeatedly ran counterclockwise and bettered his time and distance, covering 61 kilometres in his six-hour time limit, with an average pace of 5:53/km. (He ran 58 km when he ran clockwise, 12 days previously.)

Dobson ran around the 140-metre loop 437 times. “I think I don’t get dizzy,” he laughs. After 851 total loops, we hope Dobson has the Local Legend and the segment record on Strava.

He has gained quite the following on his Strava and Reddit since his inaugural roundabout ultra went quasi-viral. He cleverly named his run on Strava “widdershins,” which means counterclockwise.

He once again was fuelled on only water and Motts-branded fruit gummies. “I set up a gummy’s and water fueling station on the middle of the sidewalk in the roundabout,” he laughs. “I tried to fuel every half hour but did not do a great job.”

This time Dobson did not do the challenge alone, but had a friend who jogged with him for support. He also motivated two other friends to do the same roundabout challenge in Atlanta, Ga.Dobson, 21, lives in Healdsburg with his grandfather and had no interest in running, let alone ultrarunning, until the pandemic. “I saw a few runners on Strava posting high-effort satirical runs (Strava art or vertical challenges), and one day, after a few drinks, I was walking home through the roundabout and wondered how long I could run around it for,” says Dobson. When asked whether he would return to the roundabout for another ultra, he said not for a while.

After Much Anticipation, Orlando Announced as Host of the Olympic Marathon Trials

The race will take place on February 3, 2024.

USA Track & Field (USATF) has named a host city for the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials, and it’s Orlando, Florida. 

The Trials will take place on February 3, 2024, giving the local organizing committee on the ground only 15 months to prepare for the high-profile event. 

The top three finishers in the men’s and women’s races will represent Team USA at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris (provided they have met the ever-evolving standards set by World Athletics, the sport’s worldwide governing body, to run at the Games). 

USATF was slow in naming a host city for the event. By contrast, when the Atlanta Track Club hosted the 2020 Olympic Trials, those organizers had 22 months to put together a race for about 700 men and women. 

The fields for the race in Orlando will likely be smaller, however, because the qualifying standards to get into the Trials are tougher than they were to get into the 2020 race. In December 2021, USATF announced that women had to run a marathon faster than 2:37 in order to qualify. (For the 2020 Trials, that time was 2:45.) Or, they need to run a half marathon faster than 1:12. 

Following Sunday’s NYC Marathon, only 60 women have run a marathon qualifying time. The window for half marathon qualifying opens on January 1, 2023. Men wanting to qualify for the 2024 Trials have to run 2:18 or faster (last time, the standard was 2:19) or 1:03 in the half marathon. As of mid-October, which was the last time USATF updated its list, 68 men had qualified for the Trials.

The California International Marathon, to be run this year on December 4, typically yields several Trials qualifiers. 

Orlando is the first Florida city to be awarded the event.

The 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials were one of the last elite races held before the COVID pandemic shut down the world for more than a year and postponed the Olympics. At the 2021 Olympic marathon, held in Sapporo, Japan, American Molly Seidel won a bronze medal. The 2024 Olympic marathons in Paris will be held in August of that year.

Experts Explain EPOC—the Body’s Ability to Burn Calories After You’re Done Exercising

It’s all about that after burn effect.

You probably know that during a tough workout—whether you’re running intervals or clocking long steady miles—you’re also torching calories. But the cool part? Even after you’re done with your run, your body continues to burn more energy. This process is called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), and it’s what people generally refer to as the “afterburn effect.” (If you’ve ever been to Orangetheory Fitness, it’s also what the brand’s programming is based on and why a main goal of class is to hit that orange heart rate zone—so you experience EPOC.)

We spoke with two certified strength and conditioning specialists to get the basics on what EPOC actually is and what it means for runners. Here’s what to know.

What Is EPOC?

EPOC is simply your body’s way of cooling down after exercise. Our bodies use oxygen to produce energy while we’re exercising, and exercise that uses more oxygen—anything that’s more intense, such as an interval workout—burns more calories.

After exercise, your body needs to rebalance its hormones, restock its fuel stores, and repair damaged muscle tissue and cells to help it return to its normal state, according to Janet Hamilton, C.S.C.S., owner of Atlanta-based Running Strong, which offers coaching and rehabilitation services to runners. It expends energy to help accomplish this. As a result, your body continues to burn calories even after your workout is completed.

To make EPOC easier to understand, Pete McCall, M.S., C.S.C.S., likens it to driving a car. 

“If you do a long drive and you turn your car off, your car isn’t going to become cool automatically,” he says. “It’s still going to be warm for—depending on the length of the drive—anywhere from one to five hours afterward.”

How EPOC Affects Runners

The more intense your workout is, the more EPOC you’ll likely experience. That’s because in order for EPOC to occur, your muscles have to work to a point of fatigue. So if you’re doing something like speedwork or strength training, you should theoretically deplete your muscles’ energy by the end of your session, according to McCall. 

That being said, the amount of calories the average person will burn with EPOC isn’t as much as you’d think.

“If you do a moderate to hard workout, you’re going to have an EPOC effect of maybe two to 10 hours. But it’s not significant—it might be anywhere from 150 to 200 calories in the course of that time, which is only about 20 calories an hour, maximum,” McCall says. In fact, according to research published in Applied Physiology Nutrition and Metabolism in 2014, cyclists and runners who participated in speed interval training burned between 45 to 65 calories within the first two hours following their workout. 

The EPOC effect from a longer, slower run—particularly those easy day runs—isn’t as big because you never deplete your muscles’ energy all the way. 

What EPOC Means for Your Workouts and Fueling

As a runner, it’s definitely a good idea to incorporate high-intensity workout sessions, such as speedwork and lifting, into your routine. Not only will doing so allow EPOC to occur, but strength training on a regular basis can help boost your endurance, strength, and speed when it comes to running. 

While you probably won’t burn an insane amount of calories postworkout, it’s still something. That means there still is some extra calorie burn, so you don’t want to risk under-fueling, Hamilton cautions. You need to be consuming enough to account for the number of calories you’re burning both during and after your workout. 

“If you’re already giving your body the least amount of fuel it can possibly get away with, [muscle] tissue repair and regeneration [after a hard workout] is probably going to get shortchanged, and that’s when you run into injuries,” she says.

McCall agrees, saying it’s a good idea to stagger your workouts, so that if you do high-intensity one day, you should do something with a lower-intensity the next. That’s because the day after a high-intensity workout, your muscles may not have recovered 100 percent, so you don’t want to make them work as hard as they did previously—you want your body to be able to sustain itself going forward.

Matthew Kimeli (28:38) And Fentyea Belayneh (32:06) Win Beach To Beacon 10k

Beach to Beacon returns after 2-year absence: ‘It’s great to be back!’

A carnival of calves, quads and cowbells came back to this seaside town Saturday, after an absence of 1,099 days.

More than 5,000 runners paraded over the roads of Cape Elizabeth on a warm and cloudless morning in the 24th edition of the venerable TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race. Because of the pandemic, the race was canceled in 2020 and held virtually in 2021.

“It’s great to be back!” said Joan Benoit Samuelson, the race founder who grew up in Cape Elizabeth and went on to win the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon in the Los Angeles Games of 1984.

Along the route, which winds onto Old Ocean House Road before returning to Route 77 and continuing onto Shore Road until entering Fort Williams for the finish along a well-watered strip of green grass in sight of the lighthouse, spectators were abundant if not as thick as in past years.

The folks near the Mile 5 marker who grill bacon were back, enticing runners with mouth-watering scents of breakfast. (Beach to Bacon, reads their sign.) Bands and music added merriment and encouragement.

“It was so fun,” said Amy Davis, a Wisconsin native who placed fourth among all women. “The crowds get into it and the community, and it propels you forward. You feel like you’re never alone. That was really cool.”

Davis, 25, is the daughter of Nan Doak-Davis, a former national marathon champion who competed alongside Samuelson back in the day.

Befitting the 50th anniversary of Title IX legislation that opened doors long closed to female athletes, the women’s field on Saturday featured a dramatic race led for long stretches by Standish native Emily Durgin, a graduate of Cheverus High in Portland and the University of Connecticut.

The 28-year-old Durgin, now living and training in Flagstaff, Arizona, was runner-up by nine seconds to Fentaye Belayneh of Ethiopia. In her American road-racing debut, the 21-year-old Belayneh covered the 6.2 miles from Crescent Beach to the Portland Head Light in 32 minutes, 7 seconds.

No American woman has won Beach to Beacon. The only American man to do so is North Yarmouth native Ben True, six years ago. On Thursday night, True decided for health reasons to remain home in New Hampshire.

True’s absence paved the way for Mathew Kimeli, 24, of Kenya to run away from the men’s field. Hampered only by a brief entanglement with yellow caution tape after he turned onto Shore Road in Mile 4, Kimeli crossed the line with arms upraised in a winning time of 28:39.

Belayneh and Kimeli each received $10,000 for their victories. Durgin took home $5,000 for second place and another $5,000 as the top American finisher.

Because her connecting flight was canceled Thursday night, Durgin rented a car with her boyfriend and drove to Maine from Philadelphia on Friday, stopping at her favorite Connecticut diner (in Vernon) along the way.

“It was less stress because I knew I was coming to a familiar place,” said Durgin, whose parents picked up their luggage from the Portland jetport. “If I was going anyplace else, I probably would have gotten back on the plane and gone back to Phoenix.”

Once on the course, Durgin said she was surprised by the relatively pedestrian early pace – the first mile passed in 5:12 – until she realized her competitors were playing it safe amid hot and humid conditions.

“Then I found myself leading the whole race,” she said. “This is the first time that I’ve seen myself in the lead. It was not a super-familiar feeling.”

Kimeli’s time was the slowest for a men’s champion in race history. Belayneh’s was the slowest winning women’s time since 2011.

“The race was humid, and a lot of slopes,” said Kimeli, who was forced to stop to remove the tape from his leg when he couldn’t shake free from it. “Thank goodness we were not in a group. Maybe I would fall down if we were in a group.”

Twenty seconds passed before the surprise runner-up, Athanas Kioko, passed beneath the final banner. A recent graduate of Campbell University in Georgia, the 27-year-old Kioko registered for the race on Monday, picked up his four-digit bib number Saturday morning after a travel nightmare rivaled only by that of Durgin, and picked off two runners in the final mile to beat every invited elite athlete save Kimeli.

Two flight cancellations Friday morning in Atlanta forced Kioko to accept a diversion to Chicago, endure a four-hour layover, and eventually wind up in Manchester, New Hampshire. After a brief night in a motel, some Kenyan friends from Boston picked him up at 4:30 a.m. on their way to Maine. He got his bib at Cape Elizabeth High School less than an hour before the race, hopped on a bus to the start and enjoyed a 10-minute warm-up before the gun fired.

“Due to traveling, my lower back was a bit painful,” Kioko said. “But right now, I’m not tired.”

The Maine resident category saw a pair of first-time winners. Biddeford native Sam Mills, 21, whooped with joy before crossing the finish line in 31:09. Aly Ursiny of Yarmouth, 34, a mother of two who moved here from Boston last winter, was the fastest Maine woman in 36:17.

Thirteen Benefits of Running That Make You Healthier and Happier

Never been a fan of running? This list might just change your mind. Start chasing these awesome benefits of running.

1.- Good for Your Heart

So, why exactly is running good for you? For starters, running is the king of cardio. Running even five to 10 minutes a day at a slow speed is associated with a drastically reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease, according to a landmark study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Regular runners have half the chance of dying from heart disease compared to those who never run. Every time you run, you decrease your resting heart rate, so your heart doesn't need to work as hard, says Greg Justice, an AFAA-certified personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and founder of AYC Health & Fitness in Kansas.

2.- Gets You (Runner's) High

One of the biggest benefits of running is its mood-boosting effects. When you run, your brain pumps out two powerful feel-good chemicals — endorphins and endocannabinoids — explains Justice. The latter sounds a lot like cannabis, right? That's for a reason. Chemically, the endocannabinoids your body produces during a run aren't all that different from marijuana's mood-altering chemical, THC. The most studied mid-run endocannabinoid, called anandamide, was actually discovered when scientists were trying to figure out how weed gets people high. (Related: Drug, Medicine, or Something In Between? Here's What You Should Really Know About Weed)

3.- Strengthens Your Joints

A Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise study of nearly 75,000 runners and walkers found that, nope, running doesn't up the risk of osteoarthritis — even people who cover 26.2 miles (aka a full marathon distance) on the regular. In fact, runners were half as likely to suffer from knee osteoarthritis compared with walkers, according to the study results.

Every time you pound the pavement, you stress your bones and cartilage, just like you do your muscles, causing them to spring back stronger, explains Janet Hamilton, C.S.C.S., an exercise physiologist with Running Strong in Atlanta. Low-impact exercises such as walking, biking, or swimming don't have the same bone-building benefits as running.

4.- Provides an Intense Leg Workout

You've probably caught on to this fact when you found your legs to be sore AF the day after a distance run, but here's a little background on why. Your body's biggest muscles are all in your legs, and running is advantageous to all of them: your inner and outer thighs, gluteus maximus, quads, hamstrings, and calves, says Justice. That makes hitting the pavement like a dozen leg workouts in one.

5.- Works Your Core

The lower body isn't the only part of you that feels the benefits of running. The exercise works many of your core muscles, challenging not only your rectus abdominis, but also the deeper core muscles including your obliques, erector spinae, and transverse abdominis. Those deep muscles play important roles in stabilizing your spine by transferring power between your swinging arms and legs and sucking in your gut, says Justice. (Related: How to Tone Your Abs During Any Workout)

6.- Doesn't Require a Hefty Time Commitment

Traveling for work? Don't belong to a gym? Have only 10 minutes to work out? Whatever your workout constraints, you can still run, explains Hamilton. "That's an extra advantage for busy women who can't seem to make other workouts or classes fit their lifestyle," she adds. And remember: The best workout is the one you'll actually do.

7.- Helps You Build a Community

The running community is a strong one, and the community benefits of running are often immeasurable. "I can't think of a better place to find wellness-focused people than a running group," says Debora Warner, RRCA-certified running coach and founder of Mile High Run Club, a running-only fitness studio in New York City. Whether you sign up for a running club, join a charity's running team, or just take a look around during your first half marathon, you'll be amazed at all the support and good vibes you get.

8.- Counts As Meditation

If you haven't noticed yet, the benefits of running go way beyond the physical. "Many runners find that the time alone allows them to think and problem solve," says Hamilton. "Taking a run-break from a stressful project can help you return feeling refreshed and insightful." Research shows that meditation can boost your gray matter plasticity, which can improve focus and fight depression and anxiety.

And while running is no substitute for the help of a trained human professional, an ACSM's Health and Fitness Journal study showed that physical activity acts as an effective alternative to treating depression. Combine your miles with a pre- or post-workout meditation session and the benefits are substantial, according to research published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

9.- Might Improve Your Memory

Lace up and hit the road, because one of the surprising benefits of running is that it can directly affect your brain in the short and long term. A 2014 study at the University of British Columbia revealed that regular aerobic exercise — the kind that gets your heart rate up and makes you sweat, à la spinning or running — can boost the size of your hippocampus. And that's a good thing: The hippocampus is the area of the brain involved in verbal memory and learning.

10.- Doesn't Take Lots of Practice

"With running, there's not much of a learning curve like there might be for other fitness activities like group dance classes, Olympic lifting, CrossFit, or yoga," says Hamilton. "Running's also not as form-dependent as swimming — and because running is a such a natural motion, if you don't overthink it, your reflexes will just kick in." And away you go!

11.- A Little Goes a Long Way

You don't need to be a marathon runner to reap all the benefits of running. Instead, running just 50 minutes per week — the equivalent of one six-mile run or two 5Ks — can protect the body from risk of stroke, arthritis, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and some cancers, according to a meta-analysis published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings .

12.- Burns Calories Efficiently

Running requires a lot of fuel. In fact, the average 150-pound person will burn about 12.2 calories per minute running a 10-minute mile, says Hamilton. Not too shabby, eh? And that's just on flat terrain — head outside where wind and hills up your effort, and you can expect to burn even more.

13.- Could Help You Live Longer

When taken together, all the health benefits of running could actually help you live longer. In fact, runners have a 25 to 40 percent reduced risk of premature mortality and live about three years longer than non-runners, according to a 2017 study published in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases.

What's more, runners who also regularly took up other aerobic physical activities, such as cycling, swimming, walking, basketball, and racquet sports, had the greatest benefit. These runners had a 43 percent lower risk of death, according to the study. So if you've been itching to skip your morning run and try an indoor cycling class, take this research as a reason to give it a go. 

America’s Garrett Scantling, the world’s top ranked decathlete this year, has been provisionally suspended for an anti-doping violation

It means the 29-year-old from Florida will not take part in this year’s World Athletics Championships in Eugene, where the decathlon events are due to take place tomorrow and Sunday (July 23 and 24).

Scantling, fourth at last year’s re-arranged Olympic Games in Tokyo, was provisionally suspended for a possible tampering violation stemming from a possible third whereabouts failure over missing drug tests or not filing complete information to be found for drug testing, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced.

Scantling, who previously tried out for the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars, won the US Championships in May with 8,867 points, the highest score in the world this year which put him seventh on the all-time list, ahead of Britain’s double Olympic champion Daley Thompson.

But his name was conspicuous by his absence when USA Track & Field announced its team earlier this month for the World Championships.

"Under the provisional suspension, Scantling is prohibited from competing in any competitions under the jurisdiction of World Athletics, USA Track & Field, or the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, pending the resolution of his case," USADA said.

"As such, he will not compete in the decathlon event at the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon."

Athletes face suspensions if they have three whereabouts failures in an 18-month period.

Whereabouts failures can be not being present for a drug test or not providing complete and accurate information to be found for drug tests.

"Unfortunately, there’s no leniency for being forgetful, you have to accept responsibility and move on," Scantling said on Instagram.

"What’s next?

"We shall see!"

USADA said Scantling agreed to have his provisional suspension made public while his case is pending.

He is the second high-profile American athlete to be ruled out of Eugene due to missing drugs tests.

Randolph Ross, who won Olympic gold last summer as part of the United States 4x400 metres relay team, was prevented from taking part after the Athletics Integrity Unit were unable to conduct an out-of-competition test on him last month.

South African Olympic champion Wayde van Niekerk gets confidence boost ahead of 2022 World Athletics Championships

Olympic champion Wayde van Niekerk claimed a commanding victory in his first men's 400m race of the 2022 track season at the Stars and Stripes Classic meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday (July 2).

South African Van Niekerk looked comfortable leading the race from gun to tape, clocking 44.58 seconds to give himself a much-needed confidence boost ahead of the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in less than two weeks.

The two-time world champion came out of the final bend well in front, with the rest of the field following in a v-formation, before crossing the line nearly a second ahead of nearest rival Rusheen McDonald (45.43s) of Jamaica. Demish Gaye, another Jamaican, raced home in a time of 45.47s.

"The plan was to try and execute my race as comfortably as possible coming off of consecutive niggles and injuries," Van Niekerk told the World-Track website.

"I tried to keep it as smooth as possible for as long as I could, but as you know, as you get to the home straight, you have to pick it up a bit and finish strong, so it gave me a reason to fight to the finish line, and I am quite satisfied with the results."

The time ranks him just outside the top 10 in the world this year, with American ace Michael Norman leading with the 43.56s he clocked at the 2022 USATF Outdoor Championships at the end of June.

Van Niekerk's comeback from a severe knee injury has been fraught with setbacks, including an early exit at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 2021. His lousy run of misfortune spilt into 2022 when he withdrew from the ASA Senior Track and Field Championships in Cape Town in April as a precaution before pulling up in a 200m race in Italy in May.

"I'm disappointed. I was excited to compete, but unfortunately, things have not been going my way over the last few weeks," Van Niekerk said in a statement before the South African championships.

"My spirits are still high, and I will keep putting in the hard work. For now, I'm looking forward to getting back to work."

Van Niekerk was named in South Africa's team for the world championships starting on 15 July courtesy of a 44.87s he ran in Switzerland in June 2021. But the South African has raced sparingly since his comeback in 2020 from a three-year hiatus.

The lack of race time – with only a single competitive event to his name this year – may again be a factor at a major competition like the world championships, where he would have to go through the rounds for a shot at redemption.

Senbere Teferi wins women’s elite division at AJC Peachtree Road Race

Two-time Olympian Senbere Teferi of Ethiopia won the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race women’s elite race with a time of 30:49. The two-time Olympian just narrowly edged Irine Cheptai.

Immediately after finishing, Teferi was sent to the medical tent, suffering a post-run sickness.

Rhonex Kipruto and Kibiwott Kandie Added to Fastest Field in Peachtree History

Rhonex Kipruto is returning to Atlanta for two reasons: Vindication and to protect his event record at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race. The 10K world record-holder was announced Thursday by Atlanta Track Club, organizers of the Peachtree, as a late addition to the elite field at Monday’s 53rd Running of the race.

The 2019 Peachtree champion isn’t the only Kenyan superstar joining the field: Also making the trip to Running City USA will be Kibiwott Kandie, whose personal best of 26:50 gives him the second-fastest 10K in the world this year and fifth fastest all time. Kandie, the 2020 World Athletics Half Marathon champion and 2022 Kenyan 10,000m champion, will be making his Peachtree debut.

Kipruto’s winning time of 27:01 here in 2019 is not only the Peachtree record but also the fastest 10K ever run in the United States. To hold on to his event record – and perhaps be the first man to ever break 27 minutes on American soil – he’ll have to battle five other men with road personal bests under 27:15. In addition to Kandie who defeated Kipruto when they raced on the track earlier this month, that speedy group includes Bravin Kiptoo, who was the runner-up to Kipruto, his brother, in 2019.

Kipruto was not planning to race the Peachtree this year. As one of the top-ranked 10,000- meter runners in the world, he was expected to make the Kenyan team for the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, later in July. However, he finished a disappointing sixth in the Kenyan Championships and now hopes to redeem himself by making history on the Fourth of July.

“Chasing after the course record, weather permitting, is on my mind, especially as I failed to make Team Kenya this past weekend,” said Kipruto. “What comes after the defeat is always more important than the defeat itself.”

Kirpruto’s 2019 course record came with a $50,000 bonus for the 50th Running of the Peachtree. This year, the bonus is $53,000 to be split among any men or women in the footrace or Shepherd Center Wheelchair Division who set a record. With two other division record-holders returning – Brigid Kosgei in the women’s footrace and Daniel Romanchuk in the men’s wheelchair division – anyone who sets a record this year may find themselves sharing the purse. There will be plenty of competition. For Kosgei – whose 30:22 course record is also the fastest time ever run in the U.S. – the path to victory has become slightly easier, as Sheila Chepkirui withdrew after finishing second in the 10,000 meters at the Kenyan Championships. However, Irene Cheptai, the 2017 World Cross Country champion who finished 6th in the 10,000m in Tokyo last summer, has been added to the field.

There have been several other notable withdrawals from the elite field. Eight-time Peachtree winner Tatyana McFadden, 2017 Peachtree winner Leonard Korir and 2022 Publix Atlanta Half Marathon winner Nicholas Kosimbei are no longer racing on Monday.

95-year-old woman sets Canadian 5K age group record

In what was her first-ever road race, Rejeanne Fairhead, a 95-year-old runner from Ottawa, made history on Saturday at the Ottawa Race Weekend 5K. Fairhead set a new women’s 95+ national record of 58:52 over five kilometers.

Although Fairhead set a new Canadian record for her age group, she was second in her 80+ age category. She was beaten by 80-year-old Marie Mullally of Ottawa, who clocked a speedy 5K of 48:01. Mullally’s time is 20 minutes back of the 80+ 5K record set by Alice Cole of Montreal in 2015 (28:38).

Fairhead received honors from the announcers before and after the race for her attempt and accomplishment. She was also the eldest participant of the entire 2022 Ottawa Race Weekend.

Her time was only a few minutes shy of the women’s 95+ world record of 55:48 set by American Betty Lindberg at the Atlanta Peachtree 5K in February. Lindberg smashed the previous record of 1:28:36, which was set in 2017 by 96-year-old American Betty Ashley.

Fairhead ran the 5K to raise money for Perley Health, a community care project that empowers seniors to live life to the fullest. You can contribute to her fundraiser here.

She can now rightfully call herself the second-fastest 95+ woman in the world.

18-year-old U.S. sprint star Erriyon Knighton becomes fourth fastest man over 200m

On Saturday afternoon in Baton Rouge, La., American Erriyon Knighton, who last year, at age 17, broke Usain Bolt’s junior sprint records, shattered his U20 world record in the 200m at the LSU Invite to become the fourth-fastest man in history over 200m. 

Knighton clocked 19.49 seconds, which is the fastest time recorded since the 2012 Olympics, where Usain Bolt clocked 19.32 at age 25. Knighton now only trails Bolt (19.19s), Yohan Blake (19.26s) and Michael Johnson (19.32s) on the all-time list.

The 18-year-old sprint star lowered his personal best and U20 record from 19.84 seconds, which he set at last year’s U.S.Olympic Trials. He went on to finish fourth in Tokyo, becoming the youngest U.S. male track and field runner to reach an Olympic final.

Knighton turned pro last year as a high school junior, signing a professional contract with Adidas. He is now the second-fastest American 200m runner after Johnson’s then-world record of 19.32 at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

He will next have his eyes on the U.S. Outdoor Championships in June and the World Championships in July, which are both in Eugene, Ore., where he ran his previous PB of 19.84 seconds last summer.

Another world U20 record was broken on Saturday at the Gaborone International Meet, a World Athletics Continental Tour Bronze meeting in Botswana. U20 world champion Letsile Tebogo became the first man from Botswana to break 10 seconds for 100m. The 18-year-old pulled away from an experienced international field to win in 9.96 seconds (+1.9m/s), taking 0.01 off Trayvon Bromell’s world U20 record of 9.97 set in 2014.

Boston Marathon's unique running history honored with World Athletics Heritage Plaque

The Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.), which organizes the B.A.A. Boston Marathon (1897), the world’s oldest annual marathon, officially unveiled the World Athletics Heritage Plaque awarded to the race in 2019.

The World Athletics Heritage Plaque is a location-based recognition, awarded for 'an outstanding contribution to the worldwide history and development of the sport of track and field athletics and of out-of-stadia athletics disciplines such as cross country, mountain, road, trail and ultra-running, and race walking'.

The official presentation of the plaque by World Athletics Heritage, which had been on hold due to the pandemic, took place in the race museum at B.A.A.’s HQ on Dartmouth Street, Boston, Massachusetts, where the plaque will be permanently displayed, and is adjacent to the finish line of the race.

The plaque was unveiled by Thomas S. Grilk, B.A.A. President & Chief Executive Officer, and World Athletics Heritage Director Chris Turner, in the company of Jack Fleming, B.A.A. Chief Operating Officer, and fellow colleagues from the B.A.A. organization.

The tough one

Boston’s notoriously demanding course, with its final incline ‘Heartbreak Hill’ 20 miles into the race that has gone down in marathon folklore, has floored many a world beater.

Amby Burfoot, the 1968 Boston Marathon champion, confirmed on Boston.com that the challenge is also “the downhill from the top of Heartbreak Hill to Cleveland Circle. This is called ‘Cemetery Mile’ for two good reasons: Evergreen Cemetery to the runners’ right, and the way the steep downhill deadens the legs, specifically the quadriceps muscles.”

Notably, despite the stature of the race, only five Olympic champions have ever managed to win in Boston.

Four women, firstly two-time Boston victor Joan Benoit (1979, 1983), who won the 1984 Olympic title in Los Angeles, and two three-time winners in Ethiopia's Fatuma Roba (1997, 1998, 1999), the Atlanta 1996 champion; Portugal's Rosa Mota (1987, 1988, 1990), who took the Olympic title in Seoul in 1988; and Kenya's 2022 Boston winner Peres Jepchirchir, who was the Olympic victor in Tokyo.

The sole male runner so far to accomplish the rare double is Italian Gelindo Bordin (1990), the Seoul 1988 Olympic champion, who took first place in Boston two years later.

The ‘American Marathon’

The racing singlets, running shoes, medals and trophies and hundreds of pieces of historic memorabilia in the B.A.A.'s museum pay tribute to the city’s famous marathon, which was inspired by and founded a year after the running of the inaugural Olympic marathon at the 1896 Games in Athens.

The B.A.A. itself had been established 10 years before. It was one of the association’s members, John Graham, who, as USA team manager at those 1896 Games witnessed the marathon race, proposed creating a similar long distance race in Boston.

The race, originally called the American Marathon, has an annual Monday date which makes it unique among elite international marathons. The Boston Marathon has always been held on the holiday commemorating “Patriots’ Day”, which since 1969 has become officially recognized as the third Monday in April.

The B.A.A., which has a mission to promote a healthy lifestyle, especially through running, has its HQ and museum virtually located at the finish line of the marathon.

Running treasure trove

The plaque, which is mounted on a wall in its own showcase in the museum, has joined a verifiable treasure trove of distance running artefacts associated with the race’s storied history.

The B.A.A.’s collection of memorabilia and its archive is always growing. In fact, they recently received a gift of a rare finisher medallion from the 1903 Boston Marathon. The competition bib number of last week’s Boston winner Jepchirchir is the very latest acquisition.

The perpetual Champions’ Trophy, which the winners receive immediately following the Boston Marathon, and the second place award (mounted plaque) from the first B.A.A. Boston Marathon in 1897 are standout exhibits.

Poignantly, the 2013 champion's medallion won by men’s victor Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia was gifted back to the City of Boston in the summer of 2013, shortly after the notorious bombings which occurred on marathon day that year.

The collection, which contains hundreds of artefacts and thousands of images, has recently been renamed as the Gloria G. Ratti Collection in posthumous recognition of their long-time archivist and historian. Ratti was a B.A.A. Vice President on the Board of Governors.

Fan-Favorite Molly Seidel Dropped Out of the 2022 Boston Marathon Between 25K and 30K of the Race

Molly Seidel hit her first racing setback as a marathoner when she dropped out of the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 18. In her Boston debut, the Olympic bronze medalist walked off the course between 25K and 30K. 

Seidel was running with the lead pack of elite women until the 9-mile mark, where 2020 Olympic champion Peres Jepchirchir dropped the pace with a 4:59 split. The aggressive move broke up the front pack significantly, and Seidel was among the group of competitors who fell behind. 

At halfway, Seidel was in 11th place and running as the top American ahead of Nell Rojas. But in the following miles, she started to slow down. Her final split was 1:25:29 at 25K. She didn’t record a split at 30K. 

Boston is Seidel’s fifth marathon in about two years, which have been highlighted by incredible performances over 26.2. The 27-year-old made her debut with a runner-up finish at the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta. She finished sixth in London (2:25:13) in 2020. On a blistering day in Sapporo, Seidel claimed the Olympic bronze medal at the Tokyo Games last summer. 

Thirteen weeks later, she followed up her historic Olympic run at the 2021 New York City Marathon, where she finished fourth in 2:24:42, the fastest time by an American on the course. The personal best was especially impressive given that Seidel broke two ribs about a month before the race. In the postrace press conference, she didn’t share what caused the injury, but said it was so painful that she considered not lining up at all. 

“It was hard coming off the Olympics and hard mentally getting back into that build,” she said after the race on November 7, 2021. “I’ve invested too much in this, I really want to do it. It means a lot to me to do it, regardless of what it turns out to be.”

Heading into the Boston Marathon, Seidel was considered a heavy favorite to make the podium. In addition to her accolades on the world stage, she came in with more experience than most on the prestigious course. 

Before moving to Flagstaff, Arizona, last April, she lived in Boston for almost five years. During the elite athlete press conference on April 15, Seidel said she’s done a lot of training on the Boston course after living in the Fenway neighborhood and running the route regularly. She also babysat for a family in Wellesley and trained near the halfway point, running to Heartbreak Hill and back for about 14 miles. 

Before the race, Seidel told Runner’s World that after a few “hiccups” in her training early on, including a hip impingement that curtailed her training for a few days, the last five weeks of her Boston buildup were “about as good as I could have hoped.” 

“You almost have to reconcile the marathon buildup you want with the one that you get,” Seidel said. “But I think we’re in a really good place now, not only for Boston, but for world champs in the summer, focusing on a lot of strength as we build for the rest of the year.”

Molly Seidel despite being a favorite for the 2022 Boston Marathon, still struggles with confidence

The 27-year-old battled with an eating disorder to qualify for the USA Olympic team in her first ever marathon. Despite winning bronze at Tokyo 2020 and being a favorite for the 2022 Boston Marathon, she still struggles with confidence.

Molly Seidel is a rare kind of marathon talent.

The Wisconsin native first made athletics headlines when she qualified in second place for the U.S. Olympic team for Tokyo 2020, in her first ever marathon.

Despite this, many onlookers thought that her inexperience would show at the Olympic race in Sapporo. And how wrong they turned out to be.

In what was just her third career marathon, she finished on the podium with an Olympic bronze medal around her neck. The only runners to beat her were a triple world half marathon record holder in Peres Jepchirchir, and marathon world record holder Brigid Kosgei.

Using that momentum, Seidel finished fourth at the New York City Marathon in November 2021. Her time of 2:24:42 made her the fastest American woman ever.

On April 18, 2022, she goes to the 2022 Boston Marathon as one of the favorites, seeking the host nation's first win since Desiree Linden in 2018.

But despite her recent successes the American star still struggles with 'imposter syndrome'.

"I struggle with confidence and I struggle with wondering whether or not I belong at this level, whether I belong as a competitor on the world stage," Seidel told CNN.

The making of a front runner

Growing up in Wisconsin, Seidel was always a front runner in school sport. She broke course records and won several state track titles.

The first time her school's cross-country coach Mike Dolan first saw her attack an uphill run, he knew she was special.

“She would be a minute ahead of all the guys and all the girls," Dolan told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

"I knew at that time she would be a heck of a runner."

Seidel proved her coach right as she went on to win an NCAA cross country title in 2015, two NCAA indoors (3,000m & 5000m) and an outdoor 10,000m title to become the most decorated distance runner in state history.

Some onlookers even thought she could be a potential U.S. Track Olympic Team athlete for Rio 2016.

Mental health struggles

From the outside, Seidel seemed to be in the best shape of her life, but underneath she was experiencing a deep inner turmoil.

She first went public on her struggles with depression, OCD, crippling anxiety and bulimia in a podcast ran by her close friend Julia Hanlon called "Running On Om", just two months before the 2020 Olympic Trials.

“People who are close to me knew what I was going through during my time at Notre Dame (University), from 2012 to 2016. They knew my OCD had manifested itself into disordered eating,” she revealed in a follow-up interview with ESPN.

“When I was in the NCAA, it was obvious I was battling an eating disorder. It was so obvious that people would write on track and field message boards that I looked sick." - Molly Seidel to ESPN.

“They knew I struggled to eat anything I deemed unhealthy They knew I thought I had to be super lean and super fit all the time, never even allowing myself to eat a bowl of mac and cheese or go out to eat with friends without worrying about what I would order. I've never tried to hide what I went through with my family and friends.”

In 2016 she went into a treatment program for her eating disorder, which she’s still dealing with alongside the anxiety and depression.

When Seidel returned to training, she decided to stop running 5k and 10k and stepped up to the marathon.

“I always kind of dreamed of doing the marathon," Seidel told CNN.

"I think there's just this kind of like glamor and mystery around it, and especially for a younger runner who enjoys doing the distance events in high school, that's kind of the ultimate goal. Everybody wants to do the marathon."

From first marathon to Olympic medal

Her debut 42km race at the USA Trials in Atlanta landed her a place on her nation's Olympic team with race winner Aliphine Tuliamuk and third placed Sally Kipyego.

"I struggled with this kind of imposter syndrome after the trials, specifically as probably the person no one expected to make the team and the person that got probably the most criticism like: Hey, why is this girl on the team?" she continued.

"I think I really struggled with that, and I struggled going into the Games and feeling like I belonged there and trying to prove that I wasn't a mistake on that team."- Molly Seidel to CNN.

Her second marathon effort was the daunting 2020 London Marathon, where she finished sixth .

Then, just 18 months after her first marathon Seidel, who is affectionately known as “Golly Molly” earned bronze and became the third American woman ever to medal in the Olympic marathon.

In November 2021, a broken Seidel returned for her fourth marathon in New York, where she placed fourth with a personal best time despite fracturing two ribs as she prepared for the event.

It was an absolute disaster of a build up,” she recalled.

"It was really hard, not only with the mental stress that we had going on after the Games of just feeling, frankly, no motivation. And just trying to find that drive to re-up for another hard race right after an enormous race that I'd been training effectively two years for.”

Those injuries are now behind the 27-year-old, who has been training in Flagstaff.

Though she dropped out of the New York Half in March due 'setbacks in training', Seidel heads back to Boston where she lived for four years with high hopes for something special.

“Boston was like the place that made me a pro-runner. It was the first place I moved after I finished college.It was the place that kind of like rebuilt me as a runner after going through a lot of challenges through college,” she said to CBS Boston.

“Just getting to do the race in the place that made me the runner that I am and with the people that helped me become the runner that I am, it’s just enormously meaningful to me. That what makes it a lot more special than any other race.”

The future of women's sport is very fragile, says Sebastian Coe

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said the state of women's sports is "very fragile" and sports federations need to get it right when writing rules for transgender female athletes.

Coe's comments come after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender NCAA champion in Division I history by winning the women's 500-yard freestyle in Atlanta last week.

"The integrity of women's sport – if we don't get this right – and, actually, the future of women's sport, is very fragile," Coe was quoted as saying in British paper The Times on Monday.

"These are sensitive issues, they are societal issues – they go way, way beyond sport. I don't have the luxury to get into endless discussions or the school of moral philosophy."

Thomas competed on the men's team for three years before transitioning and moving to the women's team and setting multiple program records.

Last month, USA Swimming unveiled a new policy to allow transgender athletes to swim in elite events by setting out criteria that aim to mitigate any unfair advantages.

The rules include testing to ensure testosterone is below a certain level – five nanomoles per litre continuously for at least 36 months - in transgender athletes who wish to compete against cisgender female swimmers.

World Athletics requires transgender athletes to have low testosterone levels for at least 12 months before competition.

"We are asking for a greater length of (time) before competition because the residual impact of transitioning like that is more profound," Coe said.

"There is no question that testosterone is the key determinant in performance."

Transgender rights have long been a controversial and politically divisive issue in the United States from sports to serving in the military, and even what bathrooms people are allowed to use.

Coe said he understands the sensitive nature of the issue and said he wants to focus on the science.

Sebastian Coe "It's really difficult to keep the emotion out of this and subjectivity, so we do have to really stick as closely as we can to the science –and that's what we've always tried to do when it's been uncomfortable," he said.

"You can't be oblivious to public sentiment ... but science is important. If I wasn't satisfied with the science that we have and the experts that we have used and the in-house teams that have been working on this for a long time ... if I wasn't comfortable about that, this would be a very different landscape."