Running Shorts

There's an old saying that the marathon consists of two halves: the first 20 miles and the last 6.2. In this edition of LET'S TALK TACTICS, I'm going to argue that that's exactly how you should run your next marathon. Bearing in mind that this is a series dedicated to learning from elite competitors, I want to take a look at two breakthrough races illustrating this tactic: First, Galen Rupp became the first American male to win the Chicago marathon since 2002 (and first American- born  male since 1982), coming through in a time of 2:09:20 -- off of a 1:06:10 first half. That's an incredible negative split, especially when you consider that most of that momentum came during the final 10k -- the second half of the second half. Rupp demolished the field by shifting gears and scorching five straight sub-4:40 miles after mile 21: 4:39, 4:35, 4:30, 4:34, and 4:33. That's a textbook application of this tactic. Just a few weeks later, Shalane Flanagan followed...

With the Olympics starting this week (!), I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. The Marathon Major Model When it comes to road racing, only one event really matters: the marathon. Oh sure, every other distance from one mile on up may be contested and may be competitive, but the only one that people really care about is the marathon. It's the standard by which all other distance races are judged. As it currently exists, the Abbot World Marathon Major series is actually the closest thing athletics has to a fully professional circuit....