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Going The (Off) Distance ⏱️
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Lap 205: Sponsored by Olipop
Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder
Big Questions For Track And Field’s Opening Weekend 🗣️

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
As we run out the clock on January, it feels like we’re coming out of a long period of darkness—both literally and figuratively, as the days get longer and the track and field calendar starts filling up.
While this weekend doesn’t feature the first track meets of the year, it does feature many of the first big professional meets in close proximity. And with apologies to our friends in New York last weekend, it really does feel like this weekend is the unofficial-official kickoff to the indoor track season. The stars are emerging from their winter-training hibernation and lining up against serious competition, and all of a sudden, World Indoors in seven weeks doesn’t feel quite so far away.
So as we head into a jam-packed weekend of indoor track racing around the country (and the world), here are a few key questions on our minds:
Is this track and field’s opening weekend?
One of the weird things about track and field is that, unlike most other major sports, we don’t operate by a set season calendar. Sure, almost everyone circles the global championship on the calendar, but plenty of pros continue their seasons following Worlds or the Olympics, and nobody starts at the same time.
Instead, we roughly follow an annual cycle beginning in January—except the NCAA indoor season kicked off in December, and the Worlds qualifying window opened last August (for most events). Some pros have been racing on the roads or grass for weeks; others will seemingly disappear until May.
According to the calendar World Athletics wants us to pay the most attention to, the first “gold” meet on the WA Indoor Tour kicked off last weekend in Astana, Kazakhstan, but frankly, the results were nothing to write home about. The second gold-label meet is happening today in Belgrade, Serbia, where two-time Olympic long jump champ Miltiadis Tentoglou headlines. And of course, there’s the background trickle of huge stars opening up their season’s with low-key rust-busters at small local-to-them meets.
But with the confluence of Friday/Saturday’s BU Terrier Classic and Sunday’s New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, it sure feels like the fireworks signifying the real start to the indoor season will be set off this weekend in Boston. Maybe one day, stronger incentives and guardrails will be erected to ensure that fans and athletes all operate around the same calendar, but until WA chooses to truly rock that particular boat, this is the best we’ve got.
Will Olympic champs pick up where they left off in Boston?
The Grand Prix features the starriest lineup of any of the action on tap, with 100m champions Julien Alfred and Noah Lyles receiving top billing. Olympic hurdles champions Masai Russell, Grant Holloway, and Rai Benjamin are all slated to compete, along with 2020 Olympic 100m champ Marcell Jacobs and World Indoor 60mH champ Devynne Charlton. Notably, none of those entrants are New Balance athletes, which means that meet organizers were able to entice them to show up without being contractually obligated to—nicely done!

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
Lyles and Jacobs are squaring off in the 60m, which should be an interesting matchup given Lyles’s greater strength over longer short sprints and Jacobs’s 2022 World Indoor title. Alfred and training partner Dina Asher-Smith are opting instead for the 300m, which is a bit of a shame as Alfred is arguably even better at 60m than 100m, but it’ll still be a fun exhibition for the fans, and a great chance to check in on how Alfred’s post-Olympic work has impacted her strength.
There’s not a ton at stake reputationally for any of these highly-decorated names. You can write off a bad day at the office as “too early in the season” or point to a race not being your specialty distance, but a safe win or stronger-than-expected showing would send a clear message that you haven’t gotten too comfortable atop your throne. Certainly, someone like Gabby Thomas or Shericka Jackson will be closely studying Alfred’s performance for signs that the Paris silver medalist at 200m is stepping up her game in the longer sprints. And for Russell, the chance to improve on her fourth place showing here last year could be an early sign that she’s gunning for a World Indoor title to match her outdoor gold.
How will Graham Blanks and Parker Valby fare in their debuts?
Over in the distance events, sports-marketing eyeballs will be glued to the shiny new New Balance logos on the shoulders of two of the brand’s biggest 2024 pickups, NCAA champions Graham Blanks and Parker Valby, as they make their professional debut.

Photo by Justin Britton / @justinbritton
Blanks finished off the 2024 season in high style, defending his national cross country title then clocking the first sub-13 of his career in December in his final race in a Harvard uniform. He and fellow Team USA distance runner Grant Fisher are dropping down in distance to the 1500m, and they’ll have their work cut out for them in a field that includes Commonwealth Games champion Olli Hoare, sub-3:30 runner Stewy McSweyn, and 2022 World champ Jake Wightman (more on that below). But again, here, the name of the game is expectations management, and Blanks will get to check off the “job well done” box by simply finishing mid-pack and knocking a few ticks off a very dusty 3:44.08 1500m PB from 2021.
Valby, on the other hand, will likely have to clear a higher bar as she’s entered in the 3000m, a distance where she was the NCAA champ and fifth-fastest American indoors last year. That being said, with Olympic medalists Georgia Bell and Jessica Hull toeing the line alongside Elise Cranny and her 8:25.10, Valby doesn’t have to win the race to notch a successful start to her pro career.
Given that Valby hasn’t raced since Paris and has since moved from Florida to Massachusetts and switched over to a totally new training system under coach Mark Coogan, it’s perfectly understandable if the 22-year-old—who raced 14 times last season—needs a little more time to adjust. But hey, if she jumps in the deep end and it turns out she can swim (or maybe aqua-jog), that’s a great sign that one of the greatest collegiate athletes to ever circle the oval is just getting started.
Where does Jake Wightman shake out among the 2025 contenders?
Another closely-scrutinized NB runner in the mix on Sunday will be Jake Wightman, the 30-year-old Scot who took gold in Eugene in the 1500m two years ago but missed the latter half of 2024 (and his shot at a second Olympic appearance) with an injury. Wightman returned to racing right after the new year with a 7:44.94 victory at the national indoor 3000m championships in Glasgow, so it’s clear he’s at least able to hit the starting line in decent fighting shape against a much stronger field.
Wightman is clearly one of the most talented milers in the game, with world-beating finishing speed and tactical savvy to match, but he’s also one of the more injury-prone. And given that his specialty event keeps getting more top-heavy with highly-credentialed runners at the apex of their careers, his margin for error has never been slimmer if he wants to return to the podium. It’s tricky to put too much weight on a January showcase as a harbinger of global medal potential in September, but it’ll certainly be on the minds of Team Wightman, his fans, and his rivals.
Will we see even more collegiate records fall at BU?
This year’s John Thomas Terrier Classic may not feature a highly-touted American record or World standard attempt (as far as we are aware) at print time, but pretty much any time a bunch of middle-distance runners hit up BU’s 200-meter trampoline you can’t count out the possibility of history being made. Providence’s Shannon Flockhart and BYU’s Riley Chamberlain are, on paper, quite a bit far off Katelyn Tuohy’s 4:24.26 NCAA mile record (they both have 4:30 PBs), but Flockhart ran 4:05.99 in the 1500m outdoors and Chamberlain anchored the Cougars’ NCAA-winning DMR team in stupendous fashion. Flockhart’s teammate Kimberley May will be similarly hard-pressed to nap Tuohy’s 8:35.20 record in the 3000m, but she’s likely to knock a big chunk off her own PB of 8:54.16.

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
Newly-minted NCAA 3000m record holder Ethan Strand may still be feeding off the good vibes from his big day at BU in December, and Cooper Teare’s 3:50.39 mile record from 2021 does increasingly seem to be living on borrowed time given the caliber of runners who’ve followed him through the collegiate ranks in the years since. It feels less likely than Tuohy’s mile record going down, but then again: who had “Ethan Strand 7:30.15” on their 2024 bingo card? In the 5000m, New Mexico’s Habtom Samuel will try to do what Blanks failed to do in December and knock Nico Young’s 12:57.14 down a slot on the NCAA all-time list. He’ll likely need some ambitious pacing help to get there. But Adriaan Wildschutt, who helped push Young to that record en route to his 12:56.76 victory at this race last year, is back to defend his title and should keep things honest up front.
What do the steeplechasers have in store for the 5000m?
Two notable names that also pop out on the entry list in the 5000m are BYU alumni-turned-Paris Olympians Courtney Wayment and Kenneth Rooks, both former NCAA champions in the steeplechase who parlayed their collegiate success into spots on Team USA. Now, they likely don’t need a qualifier in this particular event for Worlds, but a strong flat-track performance can be a good indicator of fitness later in the spring. Wayment herself is proof positive of that hypothesis: she ran 14:49.78 at this meet last year, and then came back and clocked her 9:06.50 steeplechase PB at Olympic Trials exactly five months later.
It’s also notable that (at least as far as World Athletics’s tracking is concerned), this will be Rooks’s 5000m debut on the track. So he’s a bit of an unknown when it comes to longer distances—at least as much of an unknown as an Olympic silver medalist can be.
How will Shelby Houlihan’s return to the track be received?
Lastly, but impossible to ignore, is the announcement that Shelby Houlihan will be making her return to racing on Saturday at the Razorback Invitational in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Houlihan, whose four-year ban for testing positive for a prohibited substance ended on January 13th, is slated to race the 3000m and has expressed her intent to compete at the U.S. Indoor Championships, should she qualify… which she almost certainly will.
The return of one of the sport’s more controversial figures raises questions of both fitness— where will she stack up in the new world order of 2025 middle-distance running?—and perception—will she be cheered, booed, or both, by the fans the moment she steps on the track? There will almost certainly be a mixed reaction to her reemergence on the circuit.
It’s unlikely that every question hanging over our heads in 2025 will be answered definitively by the time our calendars flip to February, but we’ll have a lot more information once the unofficial ribbon is cut and the floodgates are open this weekend. And along the way, there will be a heckuva lot of good racing to watch.
Why More Athletes Should Run The 1000m 👇

Josh Hoey after setting the new American 1000m record in 2:14.48 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Quaker Invite.
It’s been a big couple weeks for the 1000m.
As the 2025 season continues to unfurl across the U.S., the ol’ five-lapper got some serious shine as a wide range of athletes took their crack at one of the signature off-distances of the indoor circuit. First, Sinclaire Johnson returned to action in her first track race since the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials with a 2:35.11 win at the oversized Dempsey track in Seattle, good for an asterisked U.S. #6 all-time. The next day, former high school standout Josh Hoey, now 25 and in the midst of a mid-career (late-career?) resurgence, helped christen the University of Pennsylvania’s shiny new indoor facility with an American record 2:14.48 run. Also that Saturday, Georgetown sophomore Tinoda Matsatsa improved his own NCAA record by over a second in the event with a 2:16.48.
And then last weekend, Olympic 1500m champ Cole Hocker opened up his season (officially, not counting a rabbit job the week prior) with a 2:18.22 victory in his home-base track at Virginia Tech. Hocker’s time was the least impressive of this roundup, but it’s a clear statement that he and training partner Cooper Teare are ready to take on the indoor season with a healthy dose of their usual shake-and-bake action.
That’s a whole bunch of medium-to-big middle-distance names from a range of backgrounds who had a nice time taking the 800’s quiet, awkward cousin out for a date. And unlike the 1500m, which is rarely contested indoors this side of the Atlantic, most of those meets (and plenty others) offered the 800m as an option for entry. For the collegians in the mix, the shorter event is your only ticket to NCAAs, and for the pros, you can’t lock in an early World qualifier. So why does everybody seem to love racing the 1K?
Part of it has to be the time of year and placement in the season. For most folks, January is a time for busting the rust, not sharpening the razor’s edge. So for the sake of confidence building (and not wanting to compare times with your August 2024 self), you may want to take on an off-distance just to start getting your sea legs back. And if you are pretty fit and planning on targeting USAs or World Indoors, you may not want to show all your cards to the competition just yet.
Another factor has to be embracing some old-fashioned indoor track culture. Depending on your home state, you may have grown up racing exclusively the 55m, 300m, 600m, 1000m, mile, ad 2 mile distances indoors, and there’s a certain hard-nosed nostalgia for the idea that indoor is its own unique sport, with events and dynamics distinct from its occasionally humid, often windswept counterpart. 800s are for June, baby! Leave that January-800m-nonsense down in Australia where it belongs—for the time being.
But the final, and perhaps most serious, reason why the 1000m is a pet favorite of many middle-distance specialists is that it’s a really, really good event for working on your weaknesses. A speed-based 800m specialist has to figure out how to hold on for another 30 seconds or so of racing. An aerobic-focused miler has to get their sprint on just to stay in contention before the final lap. And when normal expectations of pace and effort measuring are thrown even a little bit askew, it can create interesting tactical setups perfect for working out every possible championship scenario.
For a runner like Hocker, it also helps load up your arsenal to prepare for what your rivals might throw at you. 2:18 for 1000 meters also happens to be 3:27 1500m pace, and getting through five (indoor) laps of hard effort as controlled and relaxed as possible translates well to hanging in a classic Jakob Ingebrigtsen squeeze-from-the-front race. You could perhaps even argue that a hard final 1000m is also often the key to surviving a championship 5000m and that longer-distance athletes could stand to drop down once in a while.
Regardless of your own personal reason for toeing the line, contesting a hard 1000m in January is as much a training tool as it is a race unto itself, and there’s little downside to giving it a shot. So whether you’re gunning for gold in Tokyo or just trying to find the extra one percent for a mile PB, don’t overlook the 1K as you plan out your racing schedule.
Why More Athletes Should Run The 60m – Outdoors 🌤️

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
We’ve gone over this countless times: there’s too much track; there are too many meets; and there are often too many events at those meets. And yet, here we are, standing out in the metaphorical pouring rain holding a bouquet of roses, asking more international athletes to race the 60 meter dash.
That’s because holding the occasional early-season, outdoor 60m as an exhibition-style race may actually be good for the sport. From an athlete’s perspective, it’s good for speed development and working on response time out of the blocks. From the fan perspective, it creates a somewhat-legit frame of comparison for top athletes on different continents who may not face off head-to-head for months. But the reason this shorter event benefits the sport on a larger scale is its narrative-building benefits.
During the offseason, track fans can—rightfully—assume that their favorite athletes are putting in the work. The most transparent of distance runners will share their Strava workouts (like this particularly insane Clayton Young effort), and we all love an update on Ryan Crouser’s latest feat of Herculean strength, but for many sprinters, the work goes unseen. This is an issue that historically also plagued sports with larger television audiences: it’s tough to give fans something to clamor over when there is no real product on display in the offseason or during bye weeks. The stuff happening behind closed doors isn’t always terribly interesting, and athletes prefer to keep their preparation and recovery protocols somewhat private anyway.
Enter a phenomenon borne of social media: a virtual peek “in the lab.” You’ve undoubtedly seen them. A crisply-edited video depicting an athlete having vastly improved an existing skill or developed a new one entirely. The existence of an “in the lab” post hardly means the posting athlete has actually leveled up, but it gets the conversation going. And there’s nothing sports fans love more than making a SportsCenter-split-screen, screaming-argument-at-the-bar mountain of a debate out of a molehill during the quiet parts of the sports season.
Track and field does not always lend itself to easily digestible “in the lab” moments. For the real technicians, watching Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone working through some lead leg challenges or Yulimar Rojas drilling through the second phase of her triple jumps can be very enlightening. But racing “off” or “weird” distances brings a slightly more casual viewer in on that phenomenon—the shortness of the 60m essentially means it is a pure display of an athlete’s start, drive phase, and acceleration.
Let’s not forget what last year’s World Indoor 60m finals told us about the future of the season. Noah Lyles taking world indoor record holder Christian Coleman to the line (for the second time that winter) was a definitive sign he’d shed his “terrible starter, only good at the 200m” narrative, and Julien Alfred picked up her first global medal (a gold one). Later that summer, they became your Olympic champions.
Now, participation in the indoor 60m on the pro circuit is just part of the job. That’s no longer a development play, but an actual competitive pursuit. But when it takes place outdoors? Ooh buddy. That’s an athlete “in the lab,” refining a few things in public but in a silly, low-stakes way.
Down in Jamaica, where even in the winter the days remain—relatively—long, so too does the track. Meaning they aren’t fussing with short indoor track. Hell, there isn’t even an indoor track anywhere in the country! But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for Jamaica’s star sprinters to remain in-country while dropping down further in distance from 100m dash. Kishane Thompson opened up his 2025 racing schedule a couple of weeks back with a 6.48 outdoor 60m showing. He’s since run the distance indoors, using our “in the lab” theory, one can surmise that Thompson is doubling down on his strengths as a 100m man.

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
Here’s what the talking heads should be chirping: He’s a solid starter, with as good a drive phase as anyone in the business. His early season foray into the 60m means he’s looking to shore up his first 20m, to ensure he hits the final 20m with enough of a lead on the field to avoid a rehash of the 2024 Paris Olympic 100m final. Thompson’s been reliving that fraction of a second every day since then, and is doing everything in his power to ensure that he doesn’t glimpse a hard-closing Lyles out of his periphery in Tokyo.
There are plenty of other sprinters in plenty of other sprint-averse countries where a similar performance could get lips a-flapping. Let’s get Ferdinand Omanyala ripping something crazy with a +1.9 m/s wind at 5800 feet in Nairobi, just to keep things interesting. Teenage Australian sprint phenom Gout Gout may be in the middle of his summer season, but that shouldn’t stop him from dropping down and testing out his short-short speed. The present reality of indoor track, despite the best efforts of World Athletics to build up its tour circuit, is that it’s not nearly as internationally popular as its outdoor cousin, so why not create some “in the lab” moments as a stopgap measure to keep things interesting?
More News From The Track And Field World 📰

Photo by Johnny Zhang / @jzsnapz
– And on the topic of the 60m—albeit indoors—the men’s field at Millrose features hotshots like Marcell Jacobs, Zharnel Hughes, and Trayvon Bromell.
– Marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich has offered an explanation for her fourth-place showing at the Athletics Kenya Prisons Cross Country meet: she had malaria. Your “I haven’t started speedwork yet” post-race lament is going to read a bit more hollow after that justification has been trotted out.
– At the Dr. Sander Scorcher: Nia Akins set a new 800m meet record, 2:01.03; Katelyn Tuohy held off Oregon’s Wilma Nielsen 4:25.54 to 4:25.89 (new NCAA indoor #3 all-time); Cameron Myers established a new U20 indoor mile WR, 3:53.12.
– If track and field were big on LinkedIn, you’d be smashing like on a “Drew Hunter is happy to share that [he’s] starting a new position as professional runner at ASICS!” post right now.
– Josh Kerr has re-upped with the Beasts, inking a 10-year extension with Brooks, and Aliphine Tuliamuk and Emily Infeld have signed on with the brand, too. Infeld joined the CITIUS MAG Podcast to talk about the transition after 12 years as a Nike athlete.
– Ethiopian Workenesh Edesa defended her Osaka Women’s Marathon title, breaking the tape in 2:21:00.
– Even with over a month remaining to post qualifying marks, it’s notable but bewildering that if the NCAA D1 Indoor Track & Field Championships were held today, you could run a 5000m in 13:30 as a guy, or 15:37 as a gal, and not be guaranteed a spot at the meet.
– 📺 Catch the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix this Sunday on Peacock from 4pm – 6pm E.T. (subscription required).
– 📺 And kick back pretty much any other time this weekend to watch the John Thomas Terrier Classic on Flotrack (subscription required). It’s a long two-day meet, with the women’s events taking place Friday and the men’s on Saturday, and you can find a meet schedule here to just tune in for your favorites.
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