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Fast Women, September 2, 2019, Issue 35


The start of the 2008 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. The qualifying standard was 2:47:00 and 181 women qualified. Nearly twice as many women have already qualified for the 2020 Trials.

 

Courtney Dauwalter wins Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc

On Saturday, after running for more than 24 hours, Courtney Dauwalter won her first Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc title in Chamonix, France. Two months after having to drop out of Western States around 80 miles with an injury, she covered the 171K/106.2-mile course in 24:34:26, finished 21st overall, and was only about 6.5 minutes behind the top U.S. man. Sweden’s Kristin Berglund finished second among the women, almost exactly an hour back. China’s Miao Yao, who eventually dropped out, led for about half of the race, before Dauwalter overtook her.

Fast Women reader Nic Errol pointed out to me that this makes Dauwalter one of only two women to have won both Western States and UTMB. The other, Nikki Kimball, impressively won both in the same year (2007), and won Western States three times. This distinction favors more recent ultrarunners, however, because UTMB began only in 2003.

This was my first time watching UTMB live, and I was most impressed by the quality of the streaming coverage (including commentary in several different languages), given the terrain and ground covered. I watched off and on, and from what I saw, the coverage was more focused on the men’s race, but the quality was great, which will likely only increase the popularity of the race. It’s one thing to read about a race with epic views and crowds, and another to see it all play out in real time.

Meghan Hicks of iRunFar did a detailed post-race interview with Dauwalter, and Dauwalter’s comments about feeling so weak at the end that she was worried high fives might knock her over made me laugh. I also appreciated her shout-out to the camera person on rollerblades.

Along with the 171K race at UTMB, there are a handful of other races of varying distances. Hillary Allen of the U.S. finished second in the 145K TDS race to France’s Audrey Tanguy. This article explains the significance of Allen’s run, after her near-death experience two years earlier, and an injury earlier this year. Amanda Basham of the U.S. finished second to Rayna Debats of the Netherlands in the 101K CCC race. (Results)

 

Beatrice Chepkoech and Sifan Hassan win Diamond League finals, U.S. women hope for better showings at the world championships

The first half of the Diamond League final took place on Thursday in Zurich, and it included the women’s 1500m and steeplechase. The remaining events, including the women’s 800m and 5,000m, will take place on Friday in Brussels.

Athletes secure spots in the Diamond League final by scoring points in Diamond League races throughout the season. Once they get to the final, each athlete gets a clean slate and a chance to compete for the $50,000 first-place prize in each event.

In the steeplechase, Emma Coburn went with the early pace set by rabbit Caroline Tuigong and world record holder Beatrice Chepkoech, who went through 1,000m well ahead of world-record pace. In the end, both athletes suffered. Chepkoech was able to hang on and win in 9:01.71, but Coburn faded to sixth in 9:10.01. Coburn reflected on Instagram about finding her limits and not regretting her strategy, and she tweeted, “I’m healthy, fit, and ready for Worlds.” (Steeplechase splits/results)

The 1500m, rabbitted by Chanelle Price, also went out quickly. But shortly after 800m, Ethiopia’s Genzebe Dibaba appeared to decide she no longer wanted to lead, so she put on the breaks, dramatically slowed the pace, and everyone in the field was suddenly back together again.

With one lap to go, Jenny Simpson was within striking distance of the leaders, in sixth, but she couldn’t hang with them. The Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan won with room to spare and made running 3:57.08 look easy. Her Nike Oregon Project training partner, Germany’s Konstanze Klosterhalfen, finished second in 3:59.02, and Gabriela Debues-Stafford finished third and became the first Canadian woman to run sub-4:00, with her 3:59.59. Simpson dropped to eighth in 4:03.50.

Simpson said on Instagram that she was walking away with something to prove. She’ll get a chance to do just that at the world championships in early October, and before that, at Sunday’s Fifth Avenue Mile in New York.

At the same meet, the women’s 800m did not have Diamond League status, so some of the top runners did not take part, but Kate Grace was competitive in a solid field, and she finished a close second to Kenya’s Eunice Sum, 2:00.40 to 2:00.66. Grace wrote on Instagram after the race, “I’m feeling a bit the bridesmaid recently in races. I’m running decent but not winning, learning but not fully executing.” (Results)

Notably absent from the meet were the athletes of the Bowerman Track Club, namely Shelby Houlihan, Courtney Frerichs, and Colleen Quigley. The BTC athletes clearly made a decision to prioritize peaking and running their best at the world championships one month from now, and we’ll find out soon if their strategy pays off.
 

A new course for the Olympic marathon trials, because so many women are running fast

Okay, the press release announcing changes to the Olympic marathon trials course in Atlanta last week didn’t explicitly blame women, but if you look at the numbers, as Fast Women editor Sarah Lorge Butler did in this Runner’s World article, all of the growth at this point is in the women’s field. In 2016, 246 women and 211 men qualified for the marathon trials. Thus far, 341 women and 181 men have qualified. The qualifying window is open until January 19, 2020.

This is great news for women’s running, but a challenge for event organizers, who will have to handle personal bottle service for an estimated 600 runners, which is 3,600 bottles, Sarah writes. The new course is slightly less hilly, but most importantly, has longer loops and fewer sharp turns on narrow roads, which will make it easier for organizers to handle a high volume of runners.

According to the article, rumor has it that the men’s race will begin around noon on February 29, 2020 and the women’s race will begin shortly thereafter. The event will be carried on live TV, and I think that covering both races well simultaneously is going to be tough. Reading about that aspect of the race made me miss the old format, where the women’s and men’s races were held in different cities, sometimes months apart. I loved attending the trials in 2000, 2004, and 2008 and having all of the attention and focus be on one race. But the men and women’s races have been combined since 2012, which apparently makes a lot of things easier, including negotiating the TV deal and ensuring the event is televised live.

 

Not so fast, Saucony

Saucony released a campaign last week in which the company praised itself for its commitment to its female athletes. The campaign read, “At Saucony we’re committed to our female athletes and the goodness they bring to running. That’s why we provide the same maternity leave policy to our female athletes as we do our employees.”

At first glance, I thought, good for them. But then I actually thought about their statement. Professional athletes need their bodies to perform at a higher level than women who work desk jobs, so giving the two groups of women the same maternity benefits makes little sense.

Saucony’s president, Anne Cavassa, was quoted in this Runner’s World article in June as saying, “We are immediately extending the contract of our female athletes to include a maternity leave that includes pre-baby downtime. And every female athlete would be guaranteed that maternity leave starting the day they find out they’re expecting to three months post-delivery, which is our standard maternity leave policy [for company employees].”

We need more information. What will Saucony be expecting of its athletes three months post-delivery? I appreciated Alysia Montano’s constructive tweet on the topic. While this policy sounds better than nothing, on the surface, it doesn’t sound praise-worthy just yet. As we learned from Nike, when a company praises itself for its commitment to women and girls, it better be delivering on that.
 

Why Briana Williams’ positive drug test should strike a little fear into the hearts of everyone in the drug testing pool

It was revealed last week that 17-year-old Jamaican sprinter Briana Williams, who attends high school in Florida, had tested positive for a banned substance. Online critics were quick to condemn Williams, but if you consider the facts of her case, and her case seems pretty strong, Williams seems likely to be cleared of wrongdoing.

Williams took an over-the-counter cold medicine, after carefully checking the ingredients and making sure it contained no banned substances. She declared that she had taken the medication when she was drug tested, per the rules. Her drug test revealed the presence of a banned diuretic in her system. An independent lab tested the cold medication Williams had taken, and found that it contained the diuretic, though it was not listed on the label.

This case has to induce a little extra fear in anyone in the drug testing pool, because Williams followed all of the rules, as far as she knew, and still tested positive. Williams is fortunate that her team was able to quickly get to the root of the issue. But there are upsides for the rest of us to not being fast enough to be drug tested regularly, because we can live with a little less paranoia about everything we consume.
 

A little Fast Women history, in podcast form

Matt Chittim of the Rambling Runner kindly had me as a guest on his podcast last week. I reveal the depths of my running nerdiness, a little bit about my own running background, and how I ended up here, writing this newsletter.

I do have to correct one thing I said, though. I said something about famed coach Jack Daniels saying when he retired that he applied for hundreds of college coaching jobs over the years and didn’t get any interviews. That was a massive exaggeration, I learned when I fact-checked my statement. He told Runner’s World’s Scott Douglas in 2008 that he stayed at SUNY Cortland for more than 15 years because, “That was the only job I was offered. I thought I would be there maybe three years. Over the years, I sent out over 40 applications for other college positions, and was given two interviews, one of them over the phone."

I may have gotten the “hundreds,” still an exaggeration, from Mario Fraioli’s 2017 interview with Brooks Beasts coach Danny Mackey, in which Mackey said, almost certainly speaking in hyperbole, “I think I applied to about 170 coaching jobs...and didn’t get any.”

Regardless of the exact numbers, the bottom line is that because they’re in high demand, the jobs that pay enough for a person to make a living in college cross country and track & field can be tough to get. As far as I know, most of the rest of what I said is true!

 

Other results

  • Israel’s Lonah Chemtai Salpeter ran the second-fastest road 10K by a woman, 30:05, on Sunday in the Netherlands. She broke Paula Radcliffe’s European record of 30:21.

  • Great Britain’s Aly Dixon, 40,  won the world 50K title in her ultrarunning debut on Sunday and set a pending 50K world record of 3:07:20, shaving 79 seconds off Frith Van de Merwe’s 30-year-old record. Four U.S. women finished in the top 15, to help the U.S. win silver in the team race. Courtney Olsen took fifth, Elizabeth Northern sixth, Caroline Veltri 10th, and Sarah Cummings 15th. (Results)

  • On Sunday at ISTAF Berlin, Shannon Rowbury ran a 5,000m post-baby PR of 15:05.99 to finish fifth. Vanessa Fraser finished seventh in 15:10.21 and Elise Cranny 15th in 15:27.41. Kenya’s Daisy Chepkemei won the race by a hundredth of a second, in 14:51.72. Later in the meet, Germany’s Gesa Krause set a “world best” in the 2,000m steeplechase of 5:52.80. It’s not considered a world record because the event is run infrequently, plus the pace of the 2,000m steeplechase world best, while still fast, is slower than the pace of the 3,000m steeplechase record. Krause set a German record of 9:07.51 at the aforementioned Diamond League steeplechase on Thursday, where she finished fifth, so it was an impressive turnaround. (Results)

  • On Sunday at the Galà dei Castelli in Switzerland, Ce’Aira Brown (2:01.57) finished second to Kenya’s Eunice Sum (2:00.94) in the 800m. Sammy Watson finished ninth in 2:02.65. (Results)

  • Rebecca Mehra won the 800m at the Tonbridge Twilight Invitational in the UK in 2:02.99. (Results | Race video) Earlier in the week, she won the 1500m at the Palio Citta della Quercia in Italy in a personal best of 4:08.14. At the same event, Mel Lawrence finished sixth in the steeplechase in 9:42.07 and Sammy Watson finished sixth in the 800m in 2:02.49. (Results)

  • Connie Gardner, 55, covered just over 420 miles in six days to win the Six Days in the Dome race. Can you imagine?
     

Other news

  • The Chicago Marathon announced its international elite field. Assuming she is healthy, Brigid Kosgei, who seems to be able to produce 2:18 marathons on demand, is a strong favorite heading into the race. The U.S. field was previously announced, but Amy Cragg said last week that she has withdrawn from the race. When Cragg committed to running Chicago, we still thought that athletes would benefit from having the Olympic standard of 2:29:30 heading into the trials. Now that the trials is considered a Gold Label event, having the standard is no longer necessary, so there’s no incentive to push it if things aren’t quite right.

  • Kate Browne did a great job of articulating what Brittany Runs a Marathon gets wrong about running while fat for Runner’s World and Madison Malone Kircher writes Brittany didn’t need to lose weight to run a marathon. I still haven’t seen the film, but you can get a sense of what they’re getting at from the preview. Jen A. Miller wrote a fun piece for The New York Times about the logistics of filming at the 2017 New York City Marathon (maybe you’re an extra in the film and you didn’t even know it). The detail about runners trying to help actress Jillian Bell when she pretended to struggle during the race was previously reported elsewhere, but I love it. Of course they did.

  • Alysia Montaño announced relay-style that she is pregnant with her third child, meanwhile Sara Vaughn’s fourth arrived on Sunday.

  • I enjoyed this episode of The Gear Show podcast with Brittany Charboneau, which includes more of Charboneau’s story than I’d heard before. She talked about truly believing in herself as a key to her breakthrough to the elite level. She told the story of jumping from 2:52 to 2:36 in the marathon in one race, and discussed the risk involved in quitting her job to pursue running and comedy.

  • This article from Vanessa Fraser about “playing the long game” in the sport is promotional content, but something I think young or new-ish runners could benefit from reading.

  • After her first three trail races, Grayson Murphy, who recently left HOKA NAZ Elite, wrote a blog post about her switch to the trails. “I knew as soon as I saw the view from the top of that first peak that it was love at first summit...Never had I been in so much pain while simultaneously having so much fun,” Murphy wrote. Murphy says she’s not done with road racing, but her focus will be the trails this fall.

  • The University of Montana’s June Eastwood, the first transgender runner to compete in NCAA Division I cross country, had some powerful things to say in this piece from the Missoulian, and this piece from Runner’s World’s Taylor Dutch was interesting as well. Given the intensity and the vitriol in the responses I’ve seen to Eastwood’s story online, it’s good to know she has a strong team supporting her. She finished seventh, and second on her team, at her first race on Saturday.

  • Mary Albl wrote a great article about New York high schooler Brooke Rauber, her goats, and the fact that Lopez Lomong used to carry her around and feed her bottles as a baby. (Was that a strange enough description to get you to read it and fill in the many blanks?)

  • Western States runner-up Brittany Peterson was the guest on Lindsey Hein’s podcast last week. I was interested to learn that she was only a 19:19 5K runner in college, which should give a lot of runners hope, though she lowered that PR to 18:04 in a workout last year. And that’s not to say that all 19:19 runners can eventually become superstar sponsored trail runners, but hey, you never know. And I loved how she spoke about the bond she now has with Clare Gallagher because of their Western States battle.

  • I’m aware that many people in the ultra/trail community are upset with Outside after the magazine published an article earlier this year calling trail runners lazy parasites. But if we can look past that, Martin Fritz Huber wrote what I thought was an interesting article for the publication last week, which raised various issues about the growth of ultrarunning, where the sport is headed, and who the sport is attempting to attract. The winners of UTMB earn only 2,000 euros, but most of the income in ultrarunning comes from sponsors, and some of the top ultrarunners are earning enough to make running their full-time jobs.

  • USATF announced the team that will represent the U.S. at “The Match,” Europe vs. USA September 9-10. Rachel Schneider is the only U.S. woman scheduled to compete in the distance events who is also on the world championships team (as of now, because Ce’Aira Brown could make it this week).

  • Though she’s gotten a decent amount of press in the past, I hadn’t heard of Chirine Njeim until I listened to this episode of Ali Feller’s You Can Run a Marathon podcast series last week. Njeim was a three-time Olympian in alpine skiing for Lebanon before running the marathon at the 2016 Olympic Games. She talks about how she lowered her marathon time from 3:07 to 2:39.

  • Nikki Hiltz is crowdsourcing her next tattoo. This kind of reminds me of the time Nick Symmonds auctioned off space on his body, in the form of a temporary tattoo, for $21,800. 

  • Morgan Uceny, a 2012 U.S. Olympian at 1500m, has been named the interim head coach of the B.A.A. High Performance team “as the organization begins a search for the next coach,” the press release read. Given the temporary-sounding nature of the arrangement, I’m not sure if this is cause for celebration just yet, but given the lack of women coaching at the professional level of the sport, it’s good to see a woman take over, if only for now. The previous coach, Ricardo Santos, is off to coach at Stanford.

  • USATF’s MUT division announced that Morgan Arritola, Ashley Brasovan, Dani Moreno, Rachel Drake, and Tara Richardson will represent the U.S. at the WMRA World Long Distance Mountain Running Championships November 16 in Argentina.

  • This Wired article by Sara Harrison looks at how elite athletes are preparing to compete in the heat, as climate change becomes more of a factor. Next month’s world championships in Doha will take place in an air conditioned stadium.

  • On Sunday, Ladia Albertson-Junkans set a FKT on the 40-mile Timberline Trail around Oregon’s Mount Hood. She ran in part to raise money in honor of her best friend, Gabe Grunewald, who passed away in June. Grunewald’s husband, Justin, and sister, Abby, supported Albertson-Junkans along the way.

  • Once Australia’s Jess Trengrove gives birth to her first child—she’s due in November—she’ll have about six months to earn an Olympic qualifying mark in the marathon. 

  • Gabrielle Russo is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, was a sprinter/hurdler in high school, and is now an Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier.

  • Stanford grad Abbie McNulty has chosen professional running over a biotech career, for now. She has joined the Reebok Boston Track Club, which is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  • The 2015 800m world champion, Marina Arzamasova of Belarus, has been provisionally suspended for a doping violation
     

Something that made me laugh, smile, or cry

Upcoming

  • The U.S. 20K Championships take place today at the New Haven (CT) Road Race. Defending champion Sara Hall headlines the field.

  • The Long Island Mile, organized by professional runner Kyle Merber, also includes a women’s 5K this year, featuring Molly Huddle and Emily Sisson. The event will be streamed live, for free, on runnerspace.com, beginning at 8:45 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 4.

  • Start lists and results for Friday’s Diamond League final in Brussels will be available here. This is the event where if a U.S. woman wins the 800m, Ce’Aira Brown will be eligible to represent the U.S. at the world championships (because the winner of this event earns an automatic spot at worlds).

  • The Fifth Avenue Mile takes place on Sunday, September 8 and is set to air live on NBC at 12:30 p.m. ET. 

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Thanks for reading, for your feedback, and for helping spread the word about subscribing to this newsletter. Special thanks to all of our Patreon supporters. I also want to extend a huge thanks to my editor, Sarah Lorge Butler, who not only takes time out of her weekends to edit this (though she hasn't seen this part, so all errors are my own). She's been invaluable, both as an editor and a sounding board.

Have a good week!

Alison

 
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