Fast Women, September 16, 2019, Issue 37

Vin Lananna, featured below, helped build this Stanford distance running dynasty before departing for Oberlin, and later Oregon, shortly before this photo was taken. L-R: Sara Bei (now Hall), Katy Trotter, Teresa McWalters, Alicia Craig (now Vargo), and Arianna Lambie, who were coached by Dena Evans, swept the top seven spots at this meet in the fall of 2003. They won the NCAA title later that season.

U.S. distance women end their seasons on high notes

The USA vs. Europe meet, the Match, took place last Monday and Tuesday in Minsk, and the U.S. women had a strong showing in the distance events. (Results)

In the 3,000m, Elise Cranny outkicked some good kickers to win in 9:00.70. Rachel Schneider (9:00.77), Great Britain’s Eilish McColgan (9:01.03), Shannon Rowbury (9:01.12), and Vanessa Fraser (9:02.34) were close behind. (Here’s a good video of the finish.)

Shannon Osika set a fast pace in the 1500m, hoping to hit the Olympic standard of 4:04.20. She didn’t quite get it, as she finished second in 4:04.92, but she ended up pacing winner Kate Grace to a personal best of 4:02.49 to end her season, with McColgan doubling back in third in 4:05.58. Here’s a video of Grace’s finish, and Grace had some interesting reflections on her race and season.

Osika would have her own big moment later in the week, as she tacked an extra 1500m race onto her schedule and ran a personal best (and Olympic standard) of 4:01.80 to win the Skolimowska Memorial in Poland on Saturday. She won by nearly nine seconds, which makes her run all the more impressive. (Results)

Mel Lawrence, who has had an up and down season, ended on a high note in Minsk by running away from the steeplechase field to win in 9:33.24, not far off her personal best. In her post-race interview, Lawrence attributed some of her success to finding the fun in competition again.

In the 800m, Ce’Aira Brown grabbed bronze, running 2:05.38 in a race that went out slowly. Great Britain’s Alexandra Bell won in 2:04.81 and Ukraine’s Olha Lyakhova was second (2:04.90).

The Match was a first-time event and it did not generate a lot of buzz here in the U.S., but from what I saw of it, it’s a cool concept. The athletes gave the facility and execution rave reviews, and it was live on national television, which is more than we can say of many events.

The event had a combined women’s and men’s team score, which pulled all of the events together and gave fans more to cheer for, something often missing from professional track and field. Europe won and it wasn’t all that close, but the team competition seemed to provide the athletes with a little extra motivation. Some athletes doubled, and some seemed to find an extra gear, perhaps for the sake of the team. Kudos to the organizers for trying something new, and I can imagine this catching on, particularly with more publicity.
 

Mixed results on a hot day at the Rock ’n’ Roll Philly Half Marathon

Sunday’s Rock ’n’ Roll Philly Half Marathon is a popular fall marathon tuneup, and a good reminder to learn from but not read too much into the results of any race you run while preparing for a marathon.

Caroline Rotich won the race, running 1:10:59 in hot and humid conditions, and a slew of U.S. runners finished behind her. Becky Wade Firth, who might not have seemed like the most obvious pick to lead the U.S. runners in this field, finished second in 1:12:13. Canada’s Emily Setlack (1:12:34) edged out Jordan Hasay for third (1:12:35), and Des Linden finished 13th in 1:16:08. Both Hasay and Linden are going to have to run faster than their half marathon pace to hit their goals in Chicago and New York, respectively, but they have done so before, and better weather will certainly help.

When professional runners run their tuneup races, they often train right through them at high volume. Linden acknowledged her challenging race after the fact on Instagram. (Results)
 

Vin Lananna becomes the Director of Track & Field and Cross Country at the University of Virginia

If you know who Vin Lananna is, you may have had the same reaction I did to this news, which came out last Monday. It’s one of the more surprising things to happen in the sport in quite a while. And if you don’t know who Lananna is, you might wonder why a man getting hired for a coaching job makes it into a newsletter about women’s running. This is big news for the sport, period.

Ken Goe wrote one of the more informative articles on this topic and Jonathan Gault did a good Q&A with Lananna shortly after he arrived in Charlottesville last week. In short, Lananna was a highly successful coach who built both Stanford and Oregon into major powers. He restored the reputation of Eugene, Oregon, as Track Town USA, helped get the city four consecutive Olympic Trials and the 2021 World Championships. He is president of USA Track & Field, but he was placed on “temporary” administrative leave in 2018. He has filed a grievance, which is scheduled to be heard this fall. Read Goe’s article if you want more background and context.

The bottom line is that Lananna, 66, gets things done in this sport like no one else. He hasn’t coached since 2012, and no one expected him to get back into coaching, or to resurface at the University of Virginia. He says he’s making this move because he missed coaching and specifically saw potential to build something special at UVA. I’ve seen plenty of speculation that there’s more to it. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but he presents convincing arguments for his decision in the interview with Gault.

I’m most interested to see if Lananna can do it once again—take a good Division I program and make it great. I have a little extra interest in this having ever so briefly spent time as part of the UVA coaching staff. I’m also interested to see what this means for UVA’s current coaching staff, because these scenarios rarely end with everyone getting to keep their jobs, and Lananna didn’t commit either way when asked about it.

If Lananna brings in a new coaching staff, that’s likely to have a ripple effect elsewhere in the NCAA. Now, more than ever, student athletes really need to choose their schools for the school, not the athletics or the coach, because there is just so much coaching turnover at the Division I level.

I wouldn’t expect to see immediate change, especially because the season is already underway, but if Lananna is going to upend the hierarchy of NCAA programs once again, it shouldn’t take too long.
 

Other results

• The Kenyan world championships trials took place last week in Nairobi. This IAAF recap of the event doesn’t mention any of the issues raised in this article. According to the latter article, in order to be named to the world championships team, Kenyan athletes had to undergo a minimum amount of drug testing, but quite a few of the athletes who qualified have not met those criteria. It sounds like Athletics Kenya will ask the Athletics Integrity Unit for leniency. Results of the trials are here, and in the steeplechase, the top three women crossed the finish line holding hands. After the race, the trio talked about avenging their 2017 loss to Emma Coburn and Courtney Frerichs, and Beatrice Chepkoech had some fighting words, saying, “This is a sign of unity and it's our plan to go and destroy the world in a similar fashion come Doha.”

• Texas high school junior Brynn Brown ran a 16:12 5K to win the Texas MileSplit Invitational. Her time is the second-fastest cross country 5K ever run by a U.S. high school girl, behind only Katelyn Tuohy’s 16:06.87 last year. It’s a bit ridiculous to keep such lists at all, because cross country courses vary so much and aren’t certified, but either way, it was an impressive performance.

• Japan’s Olympic marathon trials, known as the Marathon Grand Championship, were held over the weekend. Unlike the U.S. trials, which will include hundreds of women, only 10 women competed for spots on the 2020 Olympic team because the qualifying criteria were so tough. The race went out hard, and the runners suffered in the hot conditions because of it. Honami Maeda won with room to spare in 2:25:15 before receiving emergency medical treatment. Ayuko Suzuki (2:29:02) secured a spot on the Japanese team, and Rei Ohara (2:29:06) may have secured her place on the team, but if any of the other women can run 2:22:22 or faster this winter, they can knock her out of that spot. (Can you imagine the drama if that was how it worked in the U.S.?) Brett Larner, who does a lot of great work to keep English-speaking fans informed about what’s going on in Japanese running, has a good recap of the races on his website. (Results)

• At the Copenhagen Half Marathon, Ethiopia’s Birhane Dibaba won in an impressive 1:05:57, with Kenya’s Evaline Chirchir second (1:06:22). If you scroll down through the results, Jessica Watychowicz of the U.S. finished 20th in 1:12:35, which qualifies her for the Olympic Marathon Trials. Right behind her, Kaitlyn Peale, also of the U.S., just missed the Trials cutoff of 1:13:00, but ran a solid 1:13:09. (Results)

• Kenya’s Stellah Barsosio won the Sydney Marathon in an event record of 2:24:33.

• At New York Road Runners’ 18-mile race on Sunday, Marie-Ange Brumelot won outright in 1:48:43 (6:03 pace) and her husband, Luciano Medina, finished second, 93 seconds back.

Other news

• I enjoyed this 30-minute video featuring Lauren Fleshman in which she coached her host through a mile and talked about her career, entrepreneurship, how she has chosen to tell her story and why, and some of her goals going forward. Fleshman and her husband, Jesse Thomas, also did a joint podcast with Sarah Bowen Shea of Another Mother Runner last week, and it’s a good introduction to their podcast, Work, Play, Love, if you’re not already a listener.

• This article from Amby Burfoot looks at two recent studies of how top runners train. And when I say runners, I mean 68 male runners. (The day before, the New York Times published an article only focusing on the Ingebrigtsen study.) But I share this article not to point out the sexism in scientific research, but because you might find something useful in the two studies’ conclusions. Or maybe not, because having success with a particular training method doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best training method. And what worked, on average, for a bunch of men who probably have very different lives than you do might not work for you. This stuff is tough to study, but that’s also kind of what coaches do, deduce how to train people based on past data and current observations. They tend not to publish papers with their results, but at least they include women.

• Laura Thweatt, who finished sixth at the 2017 London Marathon in 2:25:38 but has struggled with injuries since, announced that she’s running the Chicago Marathon.

• Just when I was starting to think not that many female distance runners had signed with Nike this summer, 2019 NCAA 1500m champion Sinclaire Johnson and Jessica Harris, the third-place finisher in that race, announced that they have signed with Nike.

• Marathoner Tristin Van Ord has joined On ZAP Endurance, which will help beef up their women’s team, as they currently have only two other women listed on their roster.

• I didn’t see this Bowerman Track Club video from earlier this summer until last week, but I thought it was an interesting insider’s view of the USATF Championships. Colleen Quigley narrates as Shelby Houlihan and Kate Grace run the 1500m final, and Houlihan doubles back in the 5,000m. I was also happy to catch glimpses of two-time Olympian Amy Rudolph-Carroll doing on-field interviews, which makes sense because she’s a local, her husband coaches at Drake (where the meet was held), and she did as well before moving on to Iowa State.

• If you’re curious what a 2:29 marathoner’s training looks like, Lindsay Flanagan shared a week of her training five weeks out from her goal race, the Chicago Marathon. Don’t try this at home. Or if you do, adjust the paces and volume accordingly. HOKA NAZ Elite shared one of 2:24 marathoner Kellyn Taylor’s marathon workouts in this Twitter thread. And Gwen Jorgensen shared her five essential core exercises via her YouTube channel.

• As I mentioned last week, the Fifth Avenue Mile was a fantastic race. If you missed it, or if you just want to watch it again, a video of the full race is available here.

• Amanda Nurse, a 2:40 marathoner, was this week’s guest on the Ali On the Run Show. She talked about Joan Benoit Samuelson’s role in kickstarting her competitive running career, going from 3:26 to 2:40 in the marathon, pausing her running career to have a baby and some of the challenges that came with that, and the challenges of parenting, period.

• Taylor Dutch profiled another 2:40 marathoner, Kristina Aubert, for Runner’s World. I thought it was interesting that she called having success as a young runner “the biggest curse that could ever happen to you.” Aubert qualified for the 2016 Olympic Marathon Trials but was unable to run due to injury, so she’s looking forward to the 2020 race. Aubert is getting married in Greece next July and she and her fiancé plan to run the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens with friends and family two days before the ceremony.

• Suzy Favor Hamilton went on the Sports Like a Boss podcast and discussed her mental health struggles. I thought it was an interesting listen and it pairs well with Amelia Boone and Brad Stulberg discussing their mental health challenges on this episode of the Morning Shakeout.

• Danae Rivers was honored for her NCAA indoor 800m title at a Penn State football game, and Dani Jones was honored for her 2018 Honda Sports Award for cross country during a CU football game. Maybe if either football team has a good season, they’ll get lucky and be honored at halftime of a track meet.

• Fast Women editor Sarah Lorge Butler was among the group of reporters who got an inside look at the renovations to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field last week and she wrote about it for Runner’s World. The stadium will include a theater, athlete lounge, hydrotherapy pools, and a barber shop, but not locker rooms for visiting teams.

• MileSplit did a day-in-the-life video with Sydney Masciarelli, who is one of the top returning high school runners in the country after winning the 2018 Foot Locker Cross Country title. I have very mixed feelings about how much attention high school runners really need to get, but I include it because I know I would have enjoyed this video when I was in high school.

• Mary Albl wrote a good article about June Eastwood, the first transgender runner to run NCAA Division I cross country, for DyeStat.

• UC Davis hosted the inaugural Stump Invitational last Friday in honor of Sarah Sumpter, an All-American distance runner for the school who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 25.

• Ultrarunner Clare Gallagher helped HR 1146, “the Arctic Bill,” pass in the House of Representatives last week.

• Registration for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials has opened for women who have run 2:45:00 or faster during the qualifying period. The $30 entry fee (plus the cost of the USATF membership) gets you free travel and a hotel room. It’s one of the best deals out there, as long as you don’t count all of the money and hours of work that go into running under the 2:45:00 qualifying standard.

• Caster Semenya will retroactively have her silver medal from the 800m at the 2011 World Championships upgraded to gold after the original winner, Maria Savinova, was banned for doping. The medal reallocation ceremony will be held at this fall’s world championships, where Semenya isn’t allowed to compete, so understandably, she will not attend.

• Brenda Martinez will also receive a medal upgrade at worlds this fall; her bronze medal from 2013 will become a silver. She noted in her post that her sponsor, New Balance, has already given her a medal upgrade bonus. Holding these ceremonies at the world championships is nice, but it also makes you wonder how many of the 2019 medals will need to be reallocated in the future.

• Erin Finn, a 10-time Big Ten champion for Michigan, wrote a blog post about how she’s balancing medical school and running thus far.

• Salomon put together a 10-minute video of Courtney Dauwalter’s experience running 205 miles on the Tahoe Rim Trail in 2018, and I’m impressed that it has nearly 150K views in its first five days.

• John Mulkeen pointed out on Twitter just how otherworldly Sifan Hassan’s closing splits were when she ran 14:26.26 to win the Diamond League final in Brussels, and why it’s so hard to beat her. She ran her last 3,000m in 8:30.46, her last 1500m in 4:02.40, her last 1,000m in 2:33.48, her last 800m in 2:02.56. Many of her competitors can’t hit those times, period, let alone at the end of a 5,000m race.

• In somewhat bizarre news, Tigist Girma, a 2:26:34 marathoner from Ethiopia, withdrew from the Toronto Waterfront Marathon because her husband didn’t think the course was fast enough to match her fitness.

• Molly Bookmyer was the latest guest on Ali Feller’s You Can Run a Marathon series. She told the dramatic story of her brain tumor and brain surgery, as well as her husband’s cancer. Bookmyer said that she’s currently recovering from a sacral stress fracture. This was just a small part of the discussion but I was interested to hear that she made a wrong turn at the 2017 Glass City Marathon in Toledo, because I once wrote an article for Runner’s World about Samantha Bluske (now Palmer) making a wrong turn at the same race. I hope it’s now harder to make a wrong turn there.

• Lori Riley wrote about Lindsay Crevoiserat’s first month of coaching at UConn, and the article illustrates how much who you know (and what they think of you!) can matter in coaching hires, at least at the Division I level.

• In this episode of the Clean Sport Collective podcast, Kara Goucher and her agent, Shanna Burnette, discuss some recent news stories in doping, both in and out of track and field. They take a hard line in discussing these cases, whereas I am more inclined to fear for any legitimate false positives that could potentially come from eating meat or similar (assuming this has legitimately happened to people in the past). But I really appreciate influential women in the sport speaking out and sharing their thoughts.

• A week later, Goucher and company released another episode of the podcast, featuring Allyson Felix. Felix talked about missing one drug test while taking a final at USC, because her schedule had changed, and how that terrified her into making sure she never missed another one. “It’s really hard to understand having multiple missed tests,” Felix said.

• Alysia Montaño is on the cover of the latest issue of California magazine, and here’s the story. (It’s an in-depth piece with some good information, but the author lost me a bit when she called Montaño a 400m runner.)

• It may be (fake) snowing at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Organizers tested out spraying snow on spectators at a canoe event last week.

• A post from a professional runner last week, about cutting weight before a big race, inspired me to include this blog post, sent by reader Nic Errol. I don’t say this to call anyone out, people can make informed decisions about their own bodies, but I also want to warn of the dangers of buying into the idea that hitting a magical number on the scale will lead to good performance. In the post, Canadian ultrarunner Mallory Richard writes about DNFing at the Superior 100 specifically because she went to unhealthy measures to hit her goal weight after a friend made an offhand remark about her size.
   

Something that made me laugh, smile, or cry

• I loved this video that came out last week of James Corden talking about fat shaming. This may not seem particularly running-related, but if you read Mallory Richard’s blog post that’s linked above, it’s very much related. 

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Thanks for reading. I always appreciate your feedback and thoughts, which you can send by responding to this message. Huge thanks to our Patreon supporters. If you’ve made it this far, I have a question for you: I’ve enjoyed being able to connect with quite a few of you, thanks to this newsletter, and sometimes I wonder if you would like to have the ability to connect with one another. I am not sure what form this would take—message board, Facebook group, or something better that I’m not aware of. But if you have an opinion on this, I’d be curious to hear it.

I hope you have a great week.

Alison