Running Shorts

Yes, this is a selfish post. I mostly train alone; as it turns out, so do most of the post-collegiate runners in the Greater Cincinnati area. It's time to change that. Cincinnati is way too small of a town for us all to be doing our own thing, only to meet on race day and maybe the occasional long run. When you consider that many of the best runners train in groups, it makes sense that we ought to start training together. I get that everyone has different schedules; I'm not saying that all us runners need to live and run and hang out together all the time. All I'm proposing is a track workout on Tuesday. a tempo/threshold run on Friday (or Saturday), and a nice hard long run on Sunday. That's it, just three days. Three key workouts on three days, each week, every  week. I get that life gets in the way and you won't be able to make it every time, but you wanna get better? You gotta train consistently. Who better than training partners to keep you consistent? ...

Some days you have it, some days you don't. With training and tapering, of course, you hope to have it on race day. On February 13th 2016 in the heat of Los Angeles, I most definitely didn't have it. On a day that was a battle for everybody, I was one of the many riding the struggle bus. About 60 of the 160-ish men that started the race did not finish, myself included. I made it about 10 miles into the race before calling it a day and stepping off the course. I actually felt pretty good on my short warmup jog. I fell into aerobic threshold effort real easy and was primed to go. The first two miles, even in the mass of humanity, were right about where I wanted to be: 5:25 and then 5:18, right on. I latched onto a group that felt like it was going the right effort, ready to hang on for a ride to a solid time. But by the time we got to 10k, I knew I was in trouble. That's a scary feeling when you're hurting and you realize there are still twenty miles left in the ...

So I've been waiting a few days to post this so I can sort of digest the result and deconstruct the race a bit. I wanted to take a step back and look at it analytically, not emotionally. Anyway, here's the result: 56th place, 1:05:45. No Olympic Trials B Standard. See official results here. The immediate (and lingering) gut emotional response is one of disappointment. That's why I wanted to wait to write up this race recap. In my mind, this whole fall training cycle was geared towards peaking for this specific race. When I surprised myself and ran 1:05:28 in Indy a few months ago, I figured I set myself up perfectly to improve at this race -- 10 more weeks of training and there's no reason my fitness shouldn't improve. I even hit a killer workout just over two weeks before the race: 4 x 2 mile in 10:00, 9:56, 9:52, 9:50; the fastest I'd ever done that workout and 4:57 per mile (sub-1:05 pace) on lockdown. And my race splits started right where I wanted the...

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, ...