Next Stop, Nanjing? ⏱️

Stability Meets Comfort—ForeverRun NITRO™ 2

Run longer, stronger, and smoother with the PUMA ForeverRun NITRO™ 2—the next evolution in stability. Designed for everyday runners, this cushioned powerhouse features an upgraded dual-density NITROFOAM™ midsole, a wider base for enhanced support, and RUNGUIDE technology to keep every stride aligned. 

A plush 38mm heel stack, reinforced knit upper, and PWRTAPE durability ensure all-day comfort without the bulk. Stability never felt this good. ForeverRun NITRO™ 2—stability in motion. Available now at PUMA.com

Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

At U.S. Indoors, Showing Up Is Half The Battle 🏆

With the first national championships of 2025 taking place around the world this past weekend in preparation for the World Indoor Championships next month in Nanjing, China, it was a big weekend for track and field. 

Or was it? 

Depending on which athletes you choose to follow as a track fan, you may have missed the memo entirely!

Nikki Hiltz stans had plenty to celebrate coming out of Staten Island, as Hiltz won the 3000m and 1500m to pickup their fifth and sixth national titles on the track. (In doing so, they extended their impressive indoor/outdoor U.S. title streak in the 1500m that now goes back to 2023 Indoors.) 

But if you’re more of a Noah Lyles supporter, it may seem to you like the indoor season began and ended on the same weekend earlier this month. Katie Moon heads got to watch their fave soar to her seventh national title with a 4.80m victory in the pole vault, but the Ryantologists (Ryan Crouser fans, of course) have yet to emerge from their deep winter hibernation at all.

The Engaged But Uninformed American Distance Running Fan—a made-up guy who definitely doesn’t actually exist—might be thinking: wasn’t the big 5000m race last weekend when Grant Fisher set that record?... Or was it Friday, when Cole Hocker and Cooper Teare battled to the line at BU?... Or maybe nationals was that big meet at the Armory, given that was the last time any of these guys all raced head-to-head? This imaginary guy’s confusion is understandable.

So to clear things up for him, the 2025 U.S. Indoor Track and Field Championships took place this past weekend. And even though neither Noah nor Sha’Carri nor Sydney nor most of the other NBC poster children were in attendance, it was still a great meet. In a jam-packed window where the Olympics weren’t that long ago, Worlds (outdoors at least) is a long way off, and runners across short, medium, and long distances are trying to figure out how to cram Grand Slam Track and/or The TEN and/or a spring marathon into their schedule, U.S. Indoors clearly wasn’t a must-go. But the athletes who did show up made the most of the opportunity, and we got some interesting outcomes as a result.

When it comes to resume-building, no one made better use of their weekend than Hobbs Kessler. Since winning the inaugural Road Mile World Championships in the fall of 2023, Kessler has only gotten better, making his first U.S. team on the track, winning a bronze medal in the 1500m at last year’s World Indoors, qualifying for his first Olympics in not one, but two, events, and finishing fifth in a heavily-stacked Paris 1500m final in the first sub-3:30 performance of his career. But until Saturday, he had never won a national title over any distance or surface.

Sure, the two Americans who beat him most consistently—Hocker and Yared Nuguse—were not in attendance, but they don’t hand out prizes for hypothetical performances. And despite entering the competition as the heavy favorite in both the 1500m and 3000m, Kessler didn’t look like a guy bogged down by the weight of expectation. He had to work hard to get past Dylan Jacobs en route to his first win in the 3000m, closing in 27.19 to clock a 7:38.00 meet record, but in the 1500m, he both looked and acted like the top dog, leading almost gun-to-tape and making his 26.26 final 200m kick seem like a controlled cruise.

It’s hardly groundbreaking analysis to say that taking the most talented high schooler in the country, giving him four years of pro-level training, and adding tactical sharpening from international racing experience is a winning combination. But it’s clearly working out for the 21-year-old Kessler. And while Hobbs is planning to skip World Indoors, he otherwise got the most bang for his buck out of his decision to contest the double.

The absence of some of the other heavy hitters in the 1500m makes sorting out the two spots on Team USA somewhat complicated. Kessler was the only finisher with the automatic standard, and World Athletics intends to fill the 30 spots using a descending order list of best performances since September 2024. Right now, the first guy in line for the team would be Joe Waskom, who finished… uh… 11th. But should second-placer Sam Prakel, third-placer Luke Houser, or any of the other guys higher up on the list clock a 3:36ish 1500m between now and March 9th, when the window closes, they should fall within the qualifying window. So if anyone has an extra couch or five to crash on in Boston next weekend, there’s surely some high demand. 

Such is the weird nature of a national championship that nominally carries equal weight with outdoors but the tippy-top athletes in particular don’t seem to take very seriously. It opens up the opportunity for many of the sport’s more unsung heroes to earn their Team USA kits, but it dilutes the competition itself. No event better encapsulated the challenge and opportunity represented by U.S. Indoors than the women’s triple jump, where only three entrants competed for two spots on Team USA. Hey, at least USATF saved $2,500 by not having to pay anyone fourth- or fifth-place prize money?

Some are more justified in treating U.S. Indoors as more of a “been there, done that” situation. Last year, Team USA took home six World Indoor titles in Glasgow, and if you’re someone like Bryce Hoppel, who now has two World Indoor medals and four U.S. Indoor titles but finished fourth in Paris last year, it’s understandable that you may want to structure your season to maximize your chances of capturing an outdoor medal. But then again, two of the athletes who have the best arguments to be bored of indoor USAs are Grant Holloway, who has never lost a senior 60m hurdles race and is nevertheless still going to shoot for a threepeat in Nanjing, and Vashti Cunningham, who has an incredible nine-year win streak in the high jump at U.S. Indoors and picked up her fourteenth overall national title this weekend.

For others, a long absence makes the heart grow fonder and the meet more appealing. Shelby Houlihan will be once again representing Team USA after finishing second in the 3000m at her first national championship in five years following her 2021 suspension for testing positive for a banned substance. Regardless of how you feel about that particular situation, it’s understandable that Houlihan had this meet circled on her calendar for a very long time. Her former Bowerman TC teammate Sinclaire Johnson will also be back on a U.S. team for the first time since 2022 after a few up-and-down years of injuries and near misses. Last year, she claimed the unenviable honor of fastest non-qualifier in history in the 1500m at the U.S. Trials, running 3:56.75 to become the sixth-fastest American ever in the event but only the fourth in that race, so it’s nice to see her get back in the red, white, and blue.

One of the unusual features of this World Championship technically being a reschedule of 2020’s is that the automatic byes are not the reigning 2024 champs but the winners of the 2019-2020 World Indoor Tour. Some of those folks are long since retired, but Ronnie Baker has gone the opposite direction, returning to the top of the podium in the 60-meter dash for the first time since 2017. He didn’t need to win in New York to get a spot on Team USA, but the fact that he did suggests that Baker isn’t heading to Nanjing merely to take a glorified victory lap sprint down the runway. 

Similarly, 34-year-old Christina Clemons finished third in the 60m hurdles in a season-best 7.81 and has an auto-spot from 2020, so a podium sweep is not out of the realm of possibility given that she, Grace Stark, and fourth-placer Alia Armstrong are all in the top eight performers in the world this season. (U.S. champ and world leader Masai Russell is shutting down her indoor season to focus on her Grand Slam Track debut in a few weeks).

Ultimately, was the weekend a success or a failure for The Sport? It’s hard to say. The athletes themselves are, generally speaking, rational actors, so a star’s choice to skip one meet for another is almost always the result of that individual making a decision that makes the most sense for them, given the incentives, tradeoffs, and risks. As much as it’s fun to throw around allegations of “dodging” the competition, it’s more accurate to say that the personal and financial incentives simply don’t always add up the same way for different athletes. And races that don’t just feature the usual suspects matching up again and again tend to produce more interesting, unpredictable outcomes. Just ask 800m runner Valery Tobias, who’s not (yet) a household name on par with Athing Mu or Ajee’ Wilson but who managed to full-send her way to 1:59.55 PB and a spot on the World team with a bold early lead that only Nia Akins was able to catch in the end.

At the same time, who bears ultimate responsibility for making USAs a can’t-miss event? A resource-constrained national governing body? An overseas federation trying to get a few hundred different countries to all care about World Indoors? A streamer or media company trying to sell stories and bring eyeballs to races? Yes, yes, and yes—and there’s probably also a little shared responsibility on the athletes themselves to prioritize as many championships as possible. But it takes a village to make a meet compelling, and like so many other elements of track and field, U.S. Indoors is a work in progress. 

Is All Racing “Racing”? 🤔

Hobbs Kessler didn’t just make a statement on the oval this weekend. He also made a statement (or a few statements, really) about his focus this season on head-to-head racing over chasing fast times. 

The most unintentionally inflammatory quip was his assertion that “I think what we should be focused on is titles, big meets, and not running fast at BU” in reaction to the news that he wouldn’t face the likes of Grant Fisher, Cole Hocker, and Cooper Teare after the trio prioritized a pair of weekends at Boston University over showing up at the U.S. championships. Fisher is a slightly different case, as the Olympic medalist over 5000m and 10,000m did shut his season down one weekend before USAs, but the optics of Hocker and Teare choosing to run the 5000m at the “BU DMR Challenge” one day before a national championship is… not great.

Kessler’s comments reignited, for the umpteenth time, a time-old debate over where, when, and how some athletes—mostly distance runners—choose to allocate their hard efforts. Hocker and Teare did race head-to-head, after all, crossing the line 0.15 seconds apart after Hocker edged forward on the final homestretch. But the primary goal of the effort was to secure a 5000m auto-qualifier for the World Championship this fall (mission accomplished). And with Hocker and Teare both securing the standard and the American record out of reach, their order of finish was stakes-free, aside from bragging rights between training partners.

To be fair, there is a certain irony to Kessler becoming the mouthpiece for the “show up and race” crew right before he ends his indoor season early and skips out on World Indoors. Kessler, Hocker, and Teare are all essentially making the same choice: structuring their year’s schedule to optimize their chances of medaling at Worlds in Tokyo in September. But because Kessler has his 1500m standard secured and no apparent desire to move up in distance, he can be less judicious about chasing fast times.

But inherent to that logic is a small fallacy: that pursuing a fast time and competing for national titles are mutually exclusive. Josh Hoey, for one, would probably take issue with that argument, given that he lowered his own American record in the 800m with a wire-to-wire run at USAs. With the aid of a pacer at the Millrose Games, Hoey ran 1:43.90… and then two weeks later, with no pacer to be seen and Brandon Miller breathing down his neck for 700 meters, Hoey ran 1:43.26. The longer the race, the tougher a task this becomes (you don’t see many records being set in the 10,000m by runners leading from the front), but it’s certainly not impossible.

The galaxy-brain solution to this problem is to do away with auto-qualifying entirely and simply select teams based on rankings and championship performances. But that doesn’t feel likely, and it wouldn’t change the reality that some athletes will ride a skinny schedule toward Olympic or World gold while minimizing disruptions to training—in essence, racing as little as possible with as little effort expended as possible to get to the start lines that “really matter.” And if, and when, those athletes come home with the spoils of victory, they (and their rivals) will buy into the feedback loop that the path of least resistance is the most rewarding one. 

Another possible option is blackout periods around championship races, an effort to cudgel athletes into showing up at their national meets by simply not allowing them to hit qualifiers during key weekends. But it’s hard enough to get top athletes to do any indoor racing whatsoever, and a possible side effect of such enforcement would be heavy hitters simply hibernating through February entirely.

For those looking for a carrot over a stick, the obvious solution would be dangling greater appearance fees and prize money over a small number of desired meets. Which we already do… but money doesn’t grow on trees, especially not in the track and field world, and short of a major rebalancing of incentives (rhymes with “Shmand Shlam Shrack”), a few extra dollars here and there won’t be sufficient to get the most well-heeled pros out of BU and into Ocean Breeze.

The real key may be to turn one of the sport’s weaknesses into a strength. Track and field is subject to rampant gatekeeping because, quite simply, there aren’t that many people with a lot of power. If you add up the agents, coaches, brand executives, and governing body higher-ups who collectively work together (or against one another) to shape the cadence and structure of the track and field season, it’s like… maybe 25 people, tops. And those people all have each other’s cell phone numbers! So consider this a plea to the most influential folks in track and field to hop on a Zoom call, set aside the smallest of profit margins or marginal training benefits, and engage in a little old-fashioned collusion to funnel all the top athletes to the same races at the same time.

The broader track and field community may never say thank you (and more likely, will simply find something else to grumble about), but your service will benefit them. We may never get a world without BU time trials, but at least getting everyone to pick the same set of weekends for running fast and for racing for clout would be a major improvement.

When Should Track And Field Utilize The Pay-Per-View Model? 📺

If you tuned into USAs on Saturday, congrats! You were officially a guinea pig for the first pay-per-view stream of a U.S. track championship, and you didn’t even know it. Nor did you have a choice.

Dedicated track fans had to wait until Friday to know for sure what their options for watching Day 1 of U.S. Indoors, as there was very little advance notice or clarity around the non-NBC streaming options for the meet. Per LetsRun, RunnerSpace’s longstanding partnership with USATF.TV ended at the end of 2024, and until last week, it was unclear if the federation had worked out any sort of formal deal with a new streaming partner for the federation. As recently as last Thursday, the USATF.TV website did not list any upcoming broadcasts on its schedule and no information was available about the first two-third of U.S. Indoors (only the track finals on Day 2 were broadcast on NBC and Peacock).

But at the last minute, a new-to-most provider called “Joymo,” a Norwegian video streaming service founded in 2017, swooped in to offer a $9.99 PPV purchase option to those who wanted to watch the Day 1 action, which included—among other attractions—the 3000m finals and both Olympic hurdles champions, live. On the bright side, that’s cheaper than Runnerspace’s $12.99/month subscription, which is essentially a de facto pay-per-view if the only time you sign up for a month is to watch USAs. The downside? You’re also paying two different fees for two different services to watch one meet that, again, wasn’t exactly packed with star power to begin with.

The announcement didn’t receive a universally glowing reception, to say the least. Most notably, Olympic hurdles champ Grant Holloway (also the only reigning World Indoor champ to bother returning to USAs this year) had this to say: “If you plan to watch the USATF Indoor Champs, consider waiting for it to be posted on Twitter or YouTube instead of paying for the PPV. It's surprising that we can't watch our own championships live, which is definitely an area that needs improvement.” It’s not a great look for USATF for arguably the biggest name at their championship to ask people not to pay to watch.

There’s inarguably a time and place for pay-per-view in track and field. Given the number of high-profile but one-off meets dotting the schedule, often with small-scale and/or independent organizers, it makes sense to offer a one-time fee for streams of races that aren’t attached to a major sponsor or a yearlong series to give diehards the chance to watch their faves compete live. And the road race circuit is, for now, scattered and idiosyncratic enough that it’s completely understandable that the best bet for bringing the Falmouth Road Race or Bolder Boulder to the masses is a PPV stream.

But for a USATF meet, especially a national track and field championship, it shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge to get entire meets live-streamed online (or better yet, on television), for free or a low monthly cost. For all the complaints about the streaming status quo, Peacock has been a reliable, relatively high-quality, easily-accessible option for track live streams with the option to slot big meets into the TV schedule when circumstances allow.

NBC has announced its slate of USATF meets in 2025, and its previous eight-year deal (running through the end of 2024) included minimums for how many hours of track were to be broadcast each year. Without knowing the exact details of these agreements, there’s no way of knowing the size or nature of the barriers to simply putting the entirety of any major USATF championship (sorry, road 15km champs, but this isn’t about you) on streaming, which would seem to the outside observer the best path forward for the goals of consistency and access.

Another area where there’s clear room for improvement is in transparency and communication. Last week, LetsRun.com reported on recent layoffs in USATF staff that included the organization’s chief content officer and chief communications officer. So it’s understandable, albeit not acceptable, that anyone trying to plan their weekend track and field viewing was completely in the dark about the joys of Joymo until mere hours before the event. The past is past, but currently the “live and upcoming” page on USATF.TV is still completely empty, so moving forward that’s probably a good place to start.

Pay-per-view is likely here to stay, but the viewership bump it does (or doesn’t) create will ultimately depend on how it’s applied. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, so perhaps the changing of the streaming guard and the shifting landscape for consuming live track and field will engender innovation or, at least, more responsiveness to what viewers, old and new, actually want.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– Despite what you may think from reading this newsletter, the United States wasn’t the only nation in the world to host a national championship last weekend. International highlights include shot putter Jessica Schilder popping off with two 20+ meter throws at the Dutch champs, an upset victory for Hannah Nuttall over Laura Muir in the 3000m at the British champs, and a big 60m hurdles PB of 7.76 for Frenchwoman Laëticia Bapté to land at No. 4 on the 2025 list.

– It's a long-established Lap Count policy to not get too excited over high schoolers breaking four-minutes in the mile… HOWEVER: Owen Powell’s record-setting 3:56.65 run at BU, taking 1.01 seconds off Hobbs Kessler’s HS indoor record, sure turned a few heads. And through the power of friendship, Crater HS (OR) and self-described BFFs Josiah Tostenson and Tayvon Kitchen became the first high school teammates to go sub-four in the same race at BU. (BU results)

– The NCAA DMR machine continues to spit out otherworldly times, and technically, two new collegiate records were set this past weekend. The Oregon women went 10:42.05 at BU (other teams have run faster, but on the oversized Dempsey track in Seattle) while the UVA men went 9:14.19 in Arkansas (same story here, oversized-track-wise). (Arkansas results)

– At the Sirikwa Classic cross country meet in Eldoret, Kenya, fans got to witness two great 10km wins (Alice Ngetich in 32:42 and Daniel Ebenyo in 29:57) and a third, rarer phenomenon: a Faith Kipyegon DNF—the three-time Olympic 1500m champion dropped out midrace after being dropped by Ngetich.

– Inside the Games reported that Marcell Jacobs has been the subject of a cyberattack. That alone makes for a bizarre headline. But it gets weirder: one of his 2020 Olympic gold medalist 4 x 100m teammates’ brothers is under investigation for the attack, and he was allegedly looking for evidence that Jacobs had been doping.

– In “water is wet” news, Nike-sponsored sprint star Sha’Carri Richardson has been announced as a headliner for the 50th edition of Nike’s premier U.S. track meet, the Prefontaine Classic.

– Bop to the top? After appearing in a music video with DJ Kygo in January, Mondo Duplantis appears to have caught the music bug. Duplantis teased on TikTok that he’s planning to release a song entitled “Bop” on Friday.

– Brimin Kipkorir—a 2:04:53 man and winner of the 2024 Sydney Marathon as well as the 2022 and 2023 Frankfurt Marathon—has been provisionally suspended by the AIU after testing positive for EPO. EPO? What is this, the 1990s?

– And to close things out, a global road running results grab-bag: Yihunilign Adane (2:05:37) and Waganesh Mekasha (2:26:33) prevailed at the Osaka Marathon. At the Seville MarathonSelemon Barega took home an easy “W” in his debut (2:05:15) and Anchinalu Dessie’s 2:22:17 provided her a similarly beefy margin of victory. The winners of the Daegu Marathon’s $160k first-prize purses were Gabriel Gerald Geay (2:05:20) and Meseret Belete (2:24:08). And Alex Nzioka Matata (59:28) and Fikrte Wereta (1:06:28) were victorious at the Meishan Half Marathon.

Interested in reaching 20,000+ dedicated runners and track and field fans? Advertise with us here.