Running Shorts

Winter is the time most people relax and take stock in their fall racing season. Whether training for a marathon, a cross country season, or even a series of road races, racing often winds down as the temperatures drop and the days get shorter. Thanksgiving often mark a last hurrah, one final chance to see what you've got in your legs, before retreating back into the winter slog of base training for the spring. Not for this guy. I still have one final race on my schedule this training block: the USA Half Marathon Championship hosted by the Houston Marathon on January 18th. As it's name suggests, it's one of the premier half marathons for American athletes. I'll most likely be racing against some runner named Meb and other people like him. I'm going to get my ass kicked, and it's going to be fantastic. Wait...what? This race attracts the best runners in the country, and -- just being realistic -- I know I'm not quite at the level where I can mix it...

So far this has been the fall of progress. Or, maybe, a return to form. Yesterday, as part of small-town Minster, Ohio's annual Oktoberfest, I ran their 10k in a new road PR of 30:12.5. As a testament to how competitive the race was, I only finished 7th (the winner finished in 28:33). Coming off of base training this summer, I've seen: a solid 10k win in 31:10 (faster than my time from last year's Thanksgiving Day Race), a runner-up 30-second PR at Hudy (my old PR was from 2011), and most recently a road PR in the 10k (my previous PR was 30:40 from 2011), which is a full minute faster than a month ago and is near-equivalent to the sub-30 times I was running on the track in college (track times are almost always faster than road race times). It's been a few years, but my training finally seems to be clicking and I'm seeing the results. As for the race yesterday, I had cautiously optimistic hopes going into it. I pushed too hard in training last Friday-Saturd...

Well, it's official: the 2016 Olympic Marathon Trials will be held in Los Angeles . The final decision came down to Houston vs. LA. Houston, the previous host who put on a well-received and successful event in 2012, against LA, one of the major media markets in the country. In terms of exposure for the sport, I think LA is a good venue for the event, especially since the event will most likely be broadcast on nationally on NBC. I also think it is good that the road race will continue touring the country every four years, instead of pigeon-holing itself into one city. There's something to be said for changing locations to engage the community across the country, as opposed to one city. And so, according to Google Maps, Cincinnati is 2,175 miles from Los Angeles. With the race in mid-February 2016, that leaves two years to get there. Welp, time to go run.

Well, we're one step closer to knowing where the Olympic Marathon Trials will be held in 2016: they may be in Houston, they may be in Los Angeles; they definitely won't be in Cincinnati. At a conference in December, USATF went over some really confusing and political procedures for choosing the host city. ( Read the detailed report here ) While there's some debate between hosting in Houston or LA, at this point Cincinnati is out of the running (please excuse the pun). While I would love the trials to be hosted in my hometown (with the potential to race at home!), I think USATF made in the right call in dropping Cincinnati's bid. In defense of their position, USATF cited Cincinnati's lack of experience hosting elite athletes (from p.3 of the Road Race Management report, linked above). And you know what? They're right. Cincinnati's bid was spearheaded by the Flying Pig Marathon , an event that consistently does not offer prize money, comp'd entries, ...