Running Shorts

So it's been about four years in the making, but I'm now going to the Olympic Marathon Trials. I ran the B-Standard qualifying time, I've registered for the Trials race (most reasonably priced marathon ever, by the way), and I've bough the plane tickets to LA. I'm all in. Well now what? What do you do after you finally run that cathartic qualifying time? You recover, race a 10k on Thanksgiving, and then hop into marathon training. I've spent the past two weeks taking training pretty light. The first week was very unstructured, just lots of easy mileage to get my legs back to feeling good. This past week was a little bit of a step up, with more mileage and some more tune-up workouts. This coming week I'm racing Cincinnati's classic Thanksgiving Day Race (if you'll be there come say hi!), looking to get after it  a few weeks removed from Indy Monumental. I don't want to go into the race with too many expectations, but suffice it to say I'...

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, ...