Quick Splits
— CIM, aka the Cal International Marathon, was once again the deepest marathon in the U.S., despite the fact that it wasn’t the U.S. championship this year. If you want to qualify for the Olympic Trials, earn your BQ, or set your own personal best, this is the place to do it. In all, 72 women and 37 men ran under the Olympic Trials standards of 2:45 and 2:19, respectively, although some of those runners already had the mark they needed to compete in Atlanta a little less than 12 weeks from now. A couple performances at the front that stood out to me by a couple folks I’m going to try and learn more about on my podcast:
+ C.J. Albertson, second in a tight men’s race in a personal best 2:13:40, just four seconds off the winner, Elisha Barno. Albertson charged out hard early and was in it all the way to the very end. It was an impressive showing by any account. I’ve been following Alberston’s training on Strava recently and had a feeling he was ready to pop off something special. Of note: this 30-mile training run on November 17 where he averaged 5:15 per mile, this track 50K where he averaged 5:14s, and, oh, might as well add in this 9-mile training run yesterday—the day after CIM—where he averaged 6:06 a mile around the California State Capitol, the last two miles pretty damn close to the pace he averaged for the marathon on Sunday. (He did comment that his quads were sore, FWIW.) It’s an interesting approach, but it seems to be working for him, and I think he’ll be a disruptive presence at the Trials in late February.
+ Meriah Earle, 41, third-place finisher in the women’s race in 2:34:35, is someone I was aware of because she races against some of the women I coach in San Diego but I wouldn’t have predicted she’d finish on the podium at CIM. Earle’s been solid at shorter distances but the marathon had always eluded her—until yesterday. Earlier this year, Earle set a marathon personal best of 2:46:14 at Boston and that mark is, well, history. As I understand it, Earle was a pretty quick middle-distance runner in the late 1990s and early 2000s before stepping away from the sport for a while and coming back to it in her mid-30s. I’ve seen many a Masters runner who either got a late start in the sport or took a bunch of time off training after high school or college make big gains well into their 40s because their legs aren’t super trashed from 20-30 years of hard running.
— Alberto Salazar gets suspended from coaching for breaking anti-doping rules. Several of his former athletes accuse him of emotional and physical abuse and body-shaming. Nike renovates and rededicates the building named in his honor rather than renaming it as they’ve done for other structures on campus named after disgraced athletes and coaches. Four hundred or so employees marched in protest on Monday. Why is that such a big deal? As New York Times reporter Kevin Draper Tweeted yesterday, “While the protest was tame compared to, say, 20K Google employees walking out worldwide, it’s hard to overstate how insular Nike is and how many of its employees are true believers.” This last bit is hard to truly comprehend until you understand the culture that exists within Nike’s walls—most of their employees are fanatical about the brand and for even a few hundred people to organize a public protest on campus says a lot about the kind of change that is long overdue in that environment.
— Scott Fauble is this week’s guest on the Rich Roll Podcast and I really enjoyed the long conversation between these two guys. I’ve had Scott on my own show twice—Episode 1 and then again on Episode 62—and while some of the subject matter was consistent with what we’d already talked about, I found Scott’s discussion of the coach-athlete relationship he has with Ben Rosario particularly interesting and insightful. Even if you’ve listen to Scott on my podcast and many others, this one is still worth a listen.
— The Court of Arbitration for Sport reinstated Vin Lananna as president of USA Track & Field last week after the board removed him in 2018 due to purported conflicts of interest. Bottom line: There were/are folks within USATF who didn’t/don’t want Lananna to be in a position of authority because he’s someone who isn’t afraid to rock the establishment. Now, we wait for the arbitration report to be released so we can understand how we got here in the first place.
— Mariko Yugeta, 61, who I first wrote about last week, ran 2:56:54 at a marathon in Saitama over the weekend to take another three minutes off her personal best and lower the world record for her age-group, according to Brett Larner of Japan Running News. As the old saying goes, it’s never too late to be what you might have been.
— I’ve shared Mike Posner’s music in this newsletter before—some of his more recent lyrics were the bottom line two issues ago—and I followed his walk across America pretty closely on Instagram earlier this year because it was fascinating to see how he changed throughout it: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. This article sums up the whole thing, the motivations behind it, and what he learned about himself after several months on the road. “When people die, it’s just a reminder that you’re gonna die too, dude—you’re next,” he says about what pushed him to take the walk. “In the meantime, you should start doing the things that are important to you now. This is it. This is your life. Look around, here it is.”
— If you read one thing I like to this week, set aside 15 to 20 minutes and check out “Running Dysmorphic” by Devin Kelly. It’s a long read about competitive running, identity, and giving yourself permission to be exactly who you are. Really can’t recommend it enough. “If you run long and far enough, you’ll find something good in yourself and see something good in someone else,” Kelly writes. “The thing is, this isn’t even that strange of a concept, because life is like that, too. All these people. All different. All on the start line of today’s morning wearing different things and being different heights and sizes. It’s not really a cliché so much as a fact. It’s difficult enough, life is. Who cares what you look like doing it?”
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