Tales From The WIN-dy City ⏱️

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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, and Jasmine Fehr.

Putting Ruth Chepngetich’s 2:09:56 World Record In Context 📊

Welcome to a brave new world.

Thanks to a combination of generational talent, rapidly advancing shoe technology, a fast course, favorable racing conditions, and… well, who really knows what else… we now live in a world where the fastest female marathoners run sub-2:10. 30-year-old Kenyan Ruth Chepngetich picked up her third Chicago Marathon title in eye-popping, history-making, mind-exploding fashion, hitting 5km in 15:00, halfway in 64:16, and hanging on to cross the finish line in 2:09:56, knocking 1:57 off a world record that was shocking as well when it was set, barely a year old. 

Somewhere around mile 20, it became clear that, even as Chepngetich slowed and the insane early pace began to take its toll, she was going to break the record. But even with a few miles to go, we were all assuming the finish time would be something like 2:11. And maybe if she’d run four seconds slower, we might not all feel quite so insane, but there’s something about that big zero in the middle of the finish time that makes this particular performance feel even more brain-melting than other major recent jumps forward in the sport.

With a few days’ hindsight and enough time for our heart rates to drop back down to normal, it’s worth taking a step back to ask: what does 2:09:56 really mean? When you drill down on the details, is this a logical next step in the broader trends of elite women’s running, or have we entered a new normal heretofore unknown to the sport?

How crazy is knocking two minutes off the world record, really? Ruth Chepgnetich actually broke Tigist Assefa’s world record by a smaller margin (1:57) than Assefa broke Brigid Kosgei’s former record (2:10). And although it took her two swings, Paula Radcliffe ultimately lowered the world record by 3:23 in the space of about six months. Percentage wise, Chepngetich took 1.5% off the record, smaller than Usain Bolt’s 1.6% improvement on the 100m WR (over three runs) or, more recently, Beatrice Chepkoech’s one-run 1.6% reduction in the steeplechase.

What makes it feel wild this time is that it’s the third big chunk taken off this particular world record in five years, after Radcliffe’s 2:15:25 stood strong for 16 years. But perhaps we’re also seeing a slight evening out effect as the popularity and depth of women’s elite running starts to grow. Since 2003, the men’s world record has been broken nine times by seven different athletes, taking 5:03 in total off the time, so with a wide-angle lens, three runners taking 5:28 off doesn’t seem that ridiculous.

The craziest stat may be her place, not her time. For those in the “times don’t matter” camp, there was one particular metric coming out of Chicago that stood out. Ruth Chepngetich finished 11th overall in a World. Marathon. Major. Records have been set before, but that level of performance relative to the whole field is pretty unprecedented. Assefa finished 29th in Berlin last year when she set the world record; Radcliffe was 16th in London in 2003. The last five Chicago Marathons have produced the #1, #3, #4, and #5 fastest female performances ever; the next highest female winners finished 21st (Chepngetich in 2021 and Sifan Hassan in 2023). You can’t always make an apples-to-apples comparison of elite field quality across races, but it’s safe to say that, in a race as competitive as Chicago, Chepngetich beating all but a handful of men was as historic as her time itself.

Chepngetich is the world’s best positive-splitter. Prevailing wisdom is that the best way to run a strong marathon is to even- or negative-split. But apparently no one told Chepngetich, who is self-coached, about the whole “go out conservatively” thing. And this isn’t the first time, either: in her four appearances at the Chicago Marathon, Chepngetich has clocked an average positive split of 4:12. Her most brutal was in the humid 2021 edition, where she went out in 67:34 and came home in 75:57 but still held on to the win. She went out the fastest she’s ever gone out this year, but she also died the least, clocking a 65:40 second half – only 1:24 slower than her opener. Frustrated coaches everywhere will inevitably have to explain to their athletes before the next big race that no, banking time still does not work: Ruth Chepngetich is simply built different.

Chepngetich is clearly a fantastic athlete at the top of her game; it’s easy to forget given her career over the last five years that she’s only 30 years old. Unlike Assefa, who seemed to truly come out of nowhere with her 2:15:37 win in Berlin in 2022, Chepgnetich has been running sub-2:20s since 2018 and is the only woman with three performances in the all-time top-10. But just as importantly, Chepngetich is not unbeatable: she only finished ninth in the super-stacked London field this year, and with runners like Assefa, Hassan, Hellen Obiri, and Amane Beriso showing no signs of slowing down, it doesn’t even feel like Chepngetich is necessarily a favorite to win any head-to-head matchup. The women’s marathon is undoubtedly in a new era, but that was true before Sunday and it isn’t one person carrying the event. So while 2:09 seems crazy for now, it might end up feeling a lot more normal very soon.

A Non-Chepngetich Chicago Rundown 💨

52,149 people not named Ruth Chepngetich also finished Sunday’s Chicago Marathon. And while it’s hard to imagine any of them having a better outing than she did, what kind of weekly athletics newsletter would we be if we didn’t at least breeze through some of those performances from the Windy City? 

There was a fine men’s race, but pretty much everybody has already forgotten about it. Eventual champion John Korir was part of a pack of 10+ dudes at the halfway point, hitting 13.1 miles in a brisk 1:02:19. The reason we use a phrase like “brisk” here and not something a bit more scintillating like “blazing” or “hot, hot, hot!” is because when the late Kelvin Kiptum set his world record in Chicago last year, he clocked a 1:00:48 split. And therein lies part of the problem – the marathon is such a time-based race that unless an athlete is registering the sort of splits required to give the WR a scare, we invariably lose a bit of interest.

Although a 2:00:XX performance went out the window almost as soon as the gun went off, we still got to watch a masterclass performance. After that 1:02:19 half we mentioned earlier, he pressed his foot to the gas and dispatched the entire field with a couple sub-4:30 mile splits. Korir ultimately won by over two minutes, in a time – 2:02:44 – that makes him the sixth fastest marathoner in history.

That’s one hell of a performance! But it wasn’t a world record. It wasn’t the result of a 26.2-mile duel that culminated in a sprint finish. And it wasn’t billed as a grudge match between Korir and a loathed rival (that’s a rarity in the marathon – you just don’t race the same people enough to get an Ingebrigtsen-Kerr thing going). So what we’re left with is a marathon that is empirically one of the best ever run, but that barely triggers so much as a drip of dopamine for fans at this point. 

Susanna Sullivan steals the show.

Any time an athlete of Keira D’Amato’s, Sara Hall’s, Emma Bates’s, or Betsy Saina’s caliber lines up for a marathon, there’s at least the possibility that the American record is going to go down. The fact that we had four such athletes in this field sent American distance running fans into something of a tizzy. Rumors of never-before-reached fitness circulated about at least a couple of these athletes, so no matter how much they downplayed their intention to take a stab at sub-2:18:29 in the days leading up to the race, the buzz was there.

But D’Amato ended up dropping out with plantar pain a little before halfway, Hall and Saina had a rough second half, and Bates – one of the most consistent runners in the game – had an “only okay” kinda day, finishing 11th in 2:24:00. Instead, this was a statement race for Susana Sullivan, who missed out on the Olympic Trials Marathon due to injury, but has since been “super patient.” During her leadup to Chicago, she ran fewer miles than she had for previous marathon builds, and the result was a healthy stretch of training she called “a dream couple of months.”

This isn’t an anti-mileage section, nor is it an anti-mileage newsletter! We don’t mean to diminish the importance of going out there and pounding the pavement in preparation for a race as demanding as the marathon. But even in the long-distance world, sometimes less is more. Sullivan’s success in Chicago is a nice reminder that stacking months of what others might consider B+ training often yields better results than the home run swing approach, where eight consecutive A+ weeks are rendered moot if you’re too banged up or fatigued to tap into the earned fitness.

So kudos to Sullivan on a methodical training cycle that allowed her to take a risk on Sunday – she went out at damn near her half marathon PB – and hold on for a race that catapults her closer to the upper crust of American marathoning.

CJ Albertson is the most exciting – and at times frustrating – American marathoner.

On Sunday, CJ Albertson earned himself a nice PB, finishing in 2:08:17 as the top American man. If you read only those five numbers, that run should be cause for celebration. But digging in deeper, both during and before the race, tells a more complicated story. Some context: Albertson went hog-wild two weeks out from Chicago in a small park in Fresno, California, and on November 3rd, he’s going to race the New York City Marathon. He also went out in 63:20 in a valiant attempt to hit the 2025 World Championship standard of 2:06:30, but that hot early pace took its toll, with Albertson clocking a 15:48 split from 35-40K (2:13 pace, slower than any of Chepngetich’s splits). 

Upon reflection, do you… seethe with rage? “One of the most talented male marathoners keeps leaving his best performances in training! And then goes out stupid hard! What could he accomplish if he worked with a coach like Ed Eyestone or raced like Scott Fauble?”

…or do you chuckle knowingly and say: “That CJ. They broke the mold when they made that guy. It’s amazing he can run that fast with beach balls in his shorts. And his crazy workouts are all on Strava for the fans to see! A true people’s champion. I’m gonna go hammer 20 miles in his honor.”

There’s no right answer – although if you asked CJ, I think we know where his vote would be. From the fan perspective, he’s one of the more compelling athletes to follow both during a marathon and its buildup. And while science tells us he could optimize his training and run faster, he’s nevertheless steadily improved over the last few years and is now the ninth-fastest American of all time. It’s hard to imagine New York City going well, but when it comes to CJ Albertson, we’ve all been wrong before.

Sponsored by Canadian Running Series

It’s finally here!

The Toronto Waterfront Marathon is the grand finale of the Canadian Running Series and doubles as the Canadian Marathon Championship.

CITIUS MAG will be streaming the marathon FREE on Sunday, October 20th live from Toronto. You’ll be able to watch our alternate broadcast on race day via the CITIUS MAG YouTube channel, hosted by Chris Chavez, Eric Jenkins, and Karen Lesiewicz. 

You can also tune into the CITIUS MAG broadcast via the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon app.

We’re In A Zone. A Zone Of Danger. 🚨

To paraphrase Kenny Loggins and/or Sterling Archer:

Conference on the ‘rizon

Mileage at 104

Tendons under tension

Femur’s feelin’ touch and go

Highway to the danger zone

Run into the danger zone

That’s right, folks. We’re two weeks out from the vast majority of collegiate conference cross country championships, which means one thing: the best harriers in the country are riding the razor’s edge in training. You can’t win NCAAs in October, but you sure can lose it. If you’re going to go nuts and inadvertently ruin your season, now’s when it’ll happen.

With the big invitationals now largely behind us, teams and individual harriers have a pretty clear sense of where they stack up in the NCAA pecking order. In terms of training – with a few notable exceptions for athletes who got a late start thanks to a spring injury or wildly successful track campaign (we’re looking at you, Graham Blanks) – the hay is in the barn. There may be one or two more big sessions on the docket, but realistically, most gains made from those will be more psychological than physiological.

One bit of cross-country coaching wisdom that resurfaces every few years is that you really only get five good races max in any given season. For the biggest studs on the national scene, ideally those five races will be 1. your home-course rust-buster, 2. a big invitational, 3. conference champs, 4. regionals, and 5. nationals. But even getting five good races in a season is contingent on timing your training to peak in mid-November and not burn out or get injured in any of the five months between track season and the Big Dance.

This is the time of the year to feel good. The dead legs and constant brain-fog of peak load training should be transitioning into a sort of autumn-induced invincibility as the temperatures drop with the mileage. And yet, countless young adults around the country will spend the next two weeks staring into the abyss, only to find it staring right back at them. They’ll ignore a dull throb developing in their metatarsal to hit an arbitrary mileage goal. They’ll blast the last rep of a threshold workout while the eventual top dog on the team finishes mid-pack. They’ll lose precious hours of sleep cramming for a midterm – or worse, scrolling through message boards. 

The dirty little secret of NCAA XC championships is that most of the top 10 finishers are going to be there regardless of how boneheaded they and/or their coaches are. These are the Foot Locker champions, the international junior stars, the future Olympians. But the heroes of NCAAs aren’t the low sticks – they can only pretty much meet expectations or underperform. Team titles are won by the runner who came in expected to get top 100 and finishes 40th. The fifth-year senior who finally broke through after years of grinding. The top-7 scorer who spent the first half of the season toiling away in the pool.

The bulk of All-American finishers are gonna be the ones who are talented and put in the work, yes, but who also spent the season trusting the process and playing their cards right. So if you want to come out of the danger zone into a postseason celebration as joy-filled as a homoerotic beach volleyball scene, don’t do anything stupid in the next two weeks.

How Coach Nick Polk Is Helping Make History For Lipscomb’s Cross Country Team 🤘

Nick Polk, Lipscomb’s director of cross country and track, joined Jasmine Fehr for this week’s NCAA coach spotlight. Polk has been at the helm of Lipscomb’s program since 2019 and has steadily transformed the women’s team into one of the best in the NCAA. Last fall, the women qualified for nationals for the first time in program history and placed 11th. This season, Lipscomb, located in Nashville, Tennessee, returns almost all of the women from last year's standout squad.

The following interview excerpt with Nick Polk has been edited lightly for length and clarity. You can read the full interview here.

Jasmine Fehr: What set the team apart last year that led to the women placing 11th at NCAAs? Moving into this year, are you seeing some of those same pieces?

Nick Polk: At one point, our goal was: ‘Hey, let's get there and let's get last. Doesn't matter what place it is, but let's just get there.’ Then it started to slowly evolve into something more. 

It was at Nuttycombe last year where we ended up 10th and were like, ‘Okay, we actually are pretty good. We can do this and we have the depth to get it done.’ It was an exciting year to get to NCAAs. At the meet, we were 28th through the first kilometer, then it was 22nd at the next kilometer, then 18th, then 16th… They never failed and just kept getting better. 

I think they're way better now than they were last year, so it will be fun to see what that end result is. 

In building team culture and cohesion, what factors do you prioritize most?

Depth is really important to us. If you look back at last year, there were five schools with a better number five and four schools with a better number six at NCAAs. 

Realistically, how many people are we going to have fighting for an individual national title? Probably not many — but we can out-culture and out-depth a lot of people by having such a good one-to-five or one-to-seven. 

That’s something we're excited to see: what do five, six, and seven look like and can we truly have one of the best five, six, and seven in the country? 

That’s where our team is. Our ladies are super close: they train together, live together, and eat together. They understand the culture and pack running. That's been our superpower over the last few years.

So when you're recruiting, do you focus more on creating team depth rather than finding low sticks? 

A little bit of both. As we've gotten better, we've had to discover and try to find low sticks… But we've done a really good job of developing people over time. One of the other cool statistics about us last year – and not that we're against this, because we have both of these things now – but we had no international students or transfers on the team. It was all undergraduate students who came to us as seniors out of high school. 

There could not have been a very big group of people like that. We were able to develop them over time. I think only two of them broke five in high school. No one was a state champ, no one was winning everything, but they developed over time. I always want to make sure we keep that as the main thing. 

Then we've been able to add strategic transfers. I think it’s about having your team be really good culture fits that you develop and then sprinkling in really good people. 

Speaking of adding in transfers and international athletes, how have you navigated the changing landscape of the NCAA? Has your coaching or recruiting style changed?

Thankfully, we've never had anyone that outgrew us since we've done a good job of cultivating them and giving them opportunities. We’ve been the beneficiary of getting a few good transfers. Sometimes they helped create a spark – and even if they didn't run in our top seven,  they were just really good fits. Now we've gotten some transfers that I think will be in our top five or top seven. It's a tricky balance… We don't want to be only transfers or only international students. Our primary source of success still has to come from really good fits for the university – Lipscomb is a Christian school. 

Finding kids that fit the culture super well is always going to be where we start and build from. We navigate it pretty well by just adding on pieces. As long as they fit and it works well, that's awesome. The changes have been good for us in that way. 

Looking back on the past few years, can you share about a memorable meet, workout, or moment that you've had with the team? 

One that comes to mind is when we could feel the momentum building on the women’s side. It was one of those times when you could feel that something special was coming. 

At the Bryan Clay Invite two track seasons ago, we had four or five ladies in the 5000m and all of them were in different heats. Each one was warming up and then the next one was racing. I remember being out there and one would come back and be like, ‘How did she do?’ And I would tell her, ‘She broke 16:00 for the first time.’ And they would be like, ‘What?’ – I'm just blowing their minds. And then another would come back. I think we had five ladies run a huge PR that night and quite a few under 16:00. I remember that day being the precursor for what was going to happen to us at NCAAs for cross country the next year.

People were doing things they never thought they would be able to do: achieving lifetime ambitions and goals with two years left of running still. We've had a lot of moments of being on the rise, a lot of moments that were building this positive momentum.

Read the full interview here!

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

– Spare a thought for the poor AIU investigators who continue to have a busy year, even during the sport’s offseason. Last week it announced a two-year ban for sub-27 10K and sub-59 half marathon man Charles Kipkkurui Langat. 

– World Marathon Major completionists: start banking those credit card points, because the impending addition of a seventh race to the series will require a lengthy flight for American runners: Sydney and Cape Town were already known finalists, but now Shanghai has officially entered the discussion. 

– Noted boxer shorts advocate (and Olympic gold medalist) Quincy Hall and two-time Olympic medalist Matthew Hudson-Smith have both signed on with Grand Slam Track, joining Muzala Samukonga to round out the men’s 400m podium from Paris. 

– The first two GST Racers have signed on to the long distance category, as well: Olympic medalists Grant Fisher and Ronald Kwemoi. They’ll duke it out over the 3000m and 5000m four times in 2025.

– And in a third GST bullet point this week, Nikki Hiltz has also signed with Grand Slam Track as a Racer. The American mile record holder will line up in the 800m and 1500m as a “short distance” specialist.

– Gabby Thomas marathon debut when?? 👀👀👀 Thomas, the reigning 200m Olympic champion, will serve as the “Grand Marshal” for next month’s New York City Marathon. 

– At the Boston 10K for Women,Erika Kemp broke the tape in 31:48, followed by Annie Rodenfels six seconds back. Emily Venters rounded out the podium, placing third.

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