Madness In March ⏱️

PUMA x SAYSKY

Every runner is a star – whether you’re lacing up for the first time or running your 100th race. That ethos guides SAYSKY, a Copenhagen based running brand powered by the joy of running itself. Inspired by the woodblock print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, the collection was designed to tell the story of the highs and lows of running, and the importance of pushing boundaries.

The PUMA x SAYSKY collection has something for every runner. PUMA x SAYSKY: Forever. Stars. Check it out here and catch the PUMA Elite team members modeling.

Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

March Madness Comes To Virginia Beach ☘️

Good morning, trackheads! How did you do in your NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championship bracket? Did you win your office pool? Did you name your team something so clever it's borderline inscrutable, like the Johnny Brackets or the Riley CHAMPberlains?

In a perfect world, basketball wouldn’t be the only sport to take the country by storm each March. But we’re a ways off from indoor track catching up in the public consciousness, which is a shame—because once again, NCAA weekend delivered one of the most exciting meets of the year.

This meet had all the same hallmarks of March Madness (the basketball version), with all the drama centered around a 200-meter oval in Virginia Beach over the course of a single long weekend.

Surprising eliminations: The first day of competition didn’t feature many unexpected outcomes on the men’s side, but the women’s prelims were topsy-turvy from the start. NCAA 60m leader Tima Godbless of LSU didn’t get a chance to finish out her season on a high note, as a fairly blatant false start knocked her out of the running before she could get all the way down the straightaway. In the 400m, Olympic relay champion Kaylyn Brown of Arkansas, who entered as the #3 seed, finished runner-up in her heat but missed the final by two-tenths of a second. But perhaps the craziest event was the 800m, where Olympian and reigning NCAA champ Juliette Whittaker, and Arkansas’s Sanu Jallow, the fourth fastest collegian in history, both ended up on the wrong side of the Q.

All in all, it was a pretty rough Day 1 for the Razorback women in their attempt to defend their team title. They would ultimately finish in a three-way tie for fourth, 25 points behind the eventual champions from Oregon.

Rivalry narratives: Perhaps the most thrilling events of the weekend were the duels between the UNC’s Ethan Strand and UVA’s Gary Martin. The two fastest milers in NCAA history both opted out of the open mile to match up twice in other events: on the anchor of the distance medley relay and in Saturday’s 3000m final. At ACCs, Strand got the better of Martin in a quick 5000m final, but Martin came back two days later to pick up his own title in a Strandless 3000m. Despite their strong resumes, neither runner had won a NCAA title heading into the weekend, and Strand, with a lethal finishing kick and two collegiate records, was probably the slight favorite.

In the DMR, Strand made the first move, hitting the front of a six-man pack with 400 meters remaining. When the final lap came, however, Martin found a gear that we haven’t really seen before from the 20-year-old. With 100 meters to go, it was Gary the Great powering away from Strand to his first title. But there was plenty to celebrate for the Tar Heels the next day, when the script flipped and Strand decisively outkicked Martin over the final lap of the 3000m, winning a NCAA title of his own. The back-and-forth between the two rising stars has been one of the more fun recent rivalries to follow on the collegiate level, but it’s all in good fun, as this sweet moment between Strand, Martin, and 5000m winner Brian Musau shows.

New superstars: Before this weekend, Femke Bol probably didn’t know the name Isabella Whittaker. But after Whittaker gave her indoor world record a real scare in the 400m final, we reckon Bol might have spent a few minutes this weekend familiarizing herself with Whittaker’s game. It’s not that Juliette’s older sister was a total unknown before last weekend: the University of Pennsylvania graduate finished sixth in last year’s Olympic Trials and represented Team USA in the relay pool. But the 23-year-old grad transfer to Arkansas had never broken 50 seconds before this month, when she ran 49.90 to finish runner-up behind fellow Olympian Aaliyah Butler at SECs.

In a weird quirk of the two-section final system of indoor NCAAs, Whittaker and Butler got their rematch—in the first round of racing, where they both advanced to the final with identical marks of 51.61. Then they got split up for the final, where Whittaker threw down a gotta-see-it-to-believe-it run for the record books in the first heat, breaking the collegiate and American indoor records with an incredible 49.24 performance, just 0.07 seconds off Bol’s indoor best. In less than a minute of racing, Whittaker immediately ascended from someone to watch to the one to watch in one of the most stacked events in American sprints.

Favorites get upset: In last week’s preview, two of the heavy favorites we highlighted were JaMeesia Ford in the 200m and Johnny Brackins in the 60m hurdles… and we may have to apologize for creating a Lap Count Jinx after the dust settled on the sprints last weekend. Ford fell to TCU freshman Indya Mayberry, the Big 12 champ who’s now also an NCAA champ and the fourth fastest woman all-time indoors in the event, thanks to her 22.30 run in the final. Brackins may have been worn out by the double-duty he pulled on Day 1, competing in both the long jump and the 60H prelims, and he took his first collegiate loss of the season at an inopportune time, finishing fourth in the final in 7.54.

Brackins deserves great credit for being a team player, however, scoring in both events and contributing to USC’s 39-point team title. Which brings us to the weekend’s controversial conclusion…

Team drama: Whereas the theatrics in the women’s team title race were mostly contained to Day 1, the men’s competition, as it so often does, was not sorted out until the final event. The Trojans entered the 4x400m with a two-point lead over Auburn, who didn’t field a team, and four points up on defending team champs Arkansas. To come out victorious, Arkansas needed to perform extraordinarily well and USC needed to falter, and almost the exact opposite happened.

Disaster struck in the first lap, when an early cut-in from Auhmad Robinson of Texas A&M bumped Arkansas onto the infield and out of contention. Despite a bit more confusion during the handoffs (including a strange incident where the officials erroneously held up the anchor legs from getting on the track for the final exchange), USC safely picked up a heat win and fourth place overall finish, but Arkansas was relegated to jogging in a last-place finish.

Herein lies the problem: Arkansas rightfully could—and did—petition to get A&M disqualified from the results, but doing so only moved the Razorbacks up to 11th place and didn’t change their team score at all. The Arkansas coaches then tried, unsuccessfully, to either re-run the race solo or get the entire race re-run to give the team a shot at the points they missed. In the end, their efforts fell on deaf officiating ears, and USC got to hoist the team trophy—their first in 53 years.

Did Arkansas get screwed over? Undoubtedly. Would re-running the race be the best possible outcome for the integrity of the sport? Hard to say. Ultimately, part of the unique nature of indoor track compared with its outdoor cousin is the bumping and jostling that the tight turns engender. For better or worse, it’s part of the sport.

It was a frustrating conclusion for the Razorbacks and a small rain cloud over an otherwise extremely well-run meet. But hey, the randomness and unpredictability of championship season is what March Madness is all about. 

Five Storylines To Watch At World Indoors 🏅

After months of travel, we’re approaching the golden end of the Road to Nanjing.

The World Indoor Championships kick off tomorrow—at least if you’re on this side of the International Date Line. Figuring out the meet schedule may require a bit of time-zone jump rope, as the “morning” sessions in Nanjing, China, kick off around 10pm the night prior on the East Coast. A full timetable with local time conversions can be found on the meet website if you don’t want to be constantly doing math. You can also read our preview written by Preet Majithia here.

The dominant narrative leading up to the championships has, unfortunately, been focused on who isn’t competing. We already knew that Noah Lyles, Julien Alfred, Femke Bol, and more were skipping out on a full indoor season, but the past few weeks also brought a few major late scratches, including Olympic silver medalist Kishane Thompson, U.S. 60m champion Jacious Sears, and Jamaican upstart Tia Clayton. But the past is the past, and with world medals up for grabs and plenty of talent crisscrossing the globe to compete, Nanjing ‘25 still raises some fascinating questions about the state of the sport.

Will big-name absences allow new stars to shine? Of all the Olympic medalists from the men’s and women’s 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, and 1500m, only two are headed to China to compete: Tsige Duguma, who will look to defend her 800m title, and Georgia Hunter Bell, who’s surely out for redemption after barely missing the indoor podium at the European championships. But that opens the door for a whole bunch of athletes who’ve had strong 2025 seasons to really introduce themselves to the world stage—folks like Josh Hoey, the U.S. champ and world leader in the 800m, or Italian Zaynab Dosso, last year’s bronze medalist in the 60m. What could feel like a normal day at the office for one of the sport’s more decorated figures could be a life-changing moment for a blue(r) collar athlete on the come-up.

What does someone like Mondo or Jakob stand to gain? The flip side of the superstars opting out coin is that, when megastars do show up to an event like World Indoors, it leaves us asking “thanks for coming, but why are you here?” Sure, there’s an easy medal and a moderate payday to be had, but do guys like Mondo Duplantis or Jakob Ingebrigtsen really need the hardware? In the end, they’re really doing us a favor: no one would bat an eye if they decided to skip the meet, and they even risk the possibility of embarrassment should they lose, but they’re showing up and lending their credibility to the meet nevertheless. And it’s not a meaningless accomplishment: Duplantis will go for a three-peat in the pole vault, and a World Indoor title is actually one of the few medals missing from Ingebrigtsen’s shelf. He skipped 2024 and only finished second in the 1500m in 2022. Somewhere in the middle, high jump world record holder Yaroslava Mahuchikh will look to get back on top after winning in 2022 but getting beat by rival Nicola Olyslagers last year.

What will it take to win the women’s shot put? If there’s one event where the best athletes in the world are all showing up, it’s the women’s shot put. Three of this year’s four 20-meter throwers are all competing: reigning champ Sarah Mitton of Canada, four-time global medalist Chase Jackson of U.S.A., and European champ Jessica Schilder of the Netherlands. One of those three will almost certainly come out with the win, but 36-year-old Tokyo Olympic champ Lijiao Gong would surely love to win one last gold on her home soil. The bigger question will be how far the winning throw will sail. Mitton and Schilder’s season’s bests are separated by only a centimeter, at 20.68m and 20.69m.

Can Team USA replicate its middle-distance medal haul from 2024? One of the biggest storylines coming out of last year’s championship in Glasgow was the overperformance of Team USA across the distance events. Americans brought home seven medals across the 800m, 1500m, and 3000m, including titles for Elle St. Pierre and Bryce Hoppel. Neither champ is back to defend, but there are still a good number of medal contenders making the trip. Last year, the U.S. women brought home two medals in the women’s 1500m, and with Heather MacLean and Sinclaire Johnson on the line, a repeat performance is not out of the realm of possibility. In the 3000m, Shelby Houlihan and Whittni Morgan face long odds for gold with a talented Ethiopian team and Australian Jessica Hull in the mix, but then again… so did St. Pierre in 2024. And one area where the U.S. could actually pick up a new medal is the women’s 800m, where Nia Akins is fifth on the entry list by SB but only 0.34 seconds off the world lead.

Where should we be on world record watch? Championship racing is all about picking up hardware, but a stacked field and a hard early pace can also yield historically fast times as a side effect. Ethiopian Gudaf Tsegay already holds the world indoor record in the 1500m and loves to take races out hard. Particularly if she gets some help or pressure from countrywomen Diribe Welteji and Worknesh Mesele (one of whom may be an alternate), the 3:53.09 mark could be in trouble. In the field events, the presence of reigning WR holders Duplantis and Mahichikh in their primes creates a perpetual record watch. And both hurdles events feature the current world’s best, where American Grant Holloway could always reset his own mark and Bahamian Devynne Charlton could lose hers if Ditaji Kambundji can back up her breakout performance from the European Championship.

The sun is setting on the indoor season, but as a fan there’s no reason to go to bed early. With so many closely contested events and so much uncertainty, this year’s World Indoors could send us out with a bang—and a lot to think about as the outdoor season gets underway.

World, Meet Matt Richtman 👋

This past weekend, a Montana State grad named Matthew Richtman ran 2:07:56 to win the Los Angeles Marathon, which ties him for sixth all-time on the U.S. men’s list.

What???

Let’s break every element of that absurd sentence down. First off, the Los Angeles Marathon usually posts results that rarely turn heads, with the winning time since the course was changed in 2020 being somewhere in the 2:09-2:13 range. And the last American winner crossed the finish line 31 years ago. Despite being point-to-point and net downhill, it’s not a particularly fast course, with over 900 feet of elevation gain—similar to the profile of Boston but with more climbing loaded into the first half. And the elite field tends to be pretty shallow: fewer than five men break 2:20 on average over the last five years, and no more than seven have in a single year.

The next fastest winning time in the last five years was John Korir’s 2:09:08 victory in March 2022. Six months later, Korir finished third in Chicago in 2:05:01.

The newly-crowned champion isn’t from a highly-touted training group or distance-running mecca; he lives and trains in Bozeman, Montana, and hails from Kaneland, Illinois. As an MSU Bobcat, he clocked (comparatively) modest PBs of 13:47.04 for 5000m and 28:21.79 for 10,000m, earning two All-American honors in cross country but never qualifying for NCAAs on the track or winning a conference title. His marathon debut was impressive; a 2:10:47 fourth-place finish at the Twin Cities Marathon last fall, and he clocked two 61-minute half marathon performance in the leadup to LA, but candidly, no one outside the most diehard of track fans in the upper Midwest had ever heard of this guy before last weekend.

His Strava account is entertaining, but shares little insight that would suggest a sub-2:08 run was right around the corner. He’s either leaving some critical data off his log (which, as written, suggests he rarely works out hard and only topped 100 miles twice in the leadup to LA), or he’s an all-time sandbagger in training in addition to being supremely talented.

Then there’s the way he ran the race (which you can watch for yourself in full on YouTube). He took the lead around halfway, dropped the entire field by mile 15 (which, although downhill, still involved splitting a 4:28) and ran something like 4:45 pace all the way home completely solo. That’s the kind of performance, on that kind of course, that suggests that his 2:07:56 could be worth something south of 2:06 in a race like Chicago.

How the heck did this happen?

The simplest, and possibly truest, explanation is that everyone is getting faster. 93 men have run sub-2:08 on record-eligible courses already this year, and Richtman’s time would’ve missed the top 150 in 2024. The number of sub-2:09 Americans has grown from 10 to 17 since 2020. It’s not crazy that someone new would join the top-ten list in 2025, but it’s safe to say no one expected it to be Richtman.

Still, someone like Matt Richtman finding marathon success that far exceeds his prior resume is far from unprecedented. Sure, Ryan Hall and Galen Rupp have NCAA titles, but riding the crest of the talent wave from Foot Locker to the Olympics isn’t the only path to the top of the American ranks. CJ Albertson, as he so often is, is the biggest outlier on the U.S. all-time list: he made exactly one NCAA championship, in the steeplechase in 2016 where he finished 22nd.

Richtman’s college career doesn’t look entirely dissimilar to others who’ve made their way up to the front of World Marathon Majors and Olympic Trials over the past few years. With repeated cross  country success that exceeded his track achievements, Richtman is cut from the same mold that produced guys like Martin Hehir, Scott Fauble, and Colin Bennie. And like those guys, Richtman didn’t hang around the 10,000m circuit for a decade after college—he made his marathon debut the same calendar year he finished out his career at Montana State.

It’s also worth noting that the transition of talent upwards in distance isn’t quite as linear as we’d like to pretend. Joe Klecker’s experimentation with the half marathon hasn’t (yet) produced the fireworks some expected, and fellow Olympian Woody Kincaid’s half marathon debut in New York ended in a 63:00 effort after a 14:01 opening 5km. That’s not to say that these guys won’t one day be great marathoners, but their success over longer distances is far from guaranteed.

Only time will tell if Richtman’s incredible run in Los Angeles is a flash in a pan or the arrival of a generation-defining athlete. But in a world where we spend years anticipating the marathon debuts of guys like Grant Fisher, it’s always a pleasant surprise when the Next Great American Marathoner arrives suddenly out of nowhere.

What’s The Point Of The Half Marathon? 🙃

If you were in Manhattan this past Sunday for the New York City Half, unless you groggily happened across the course itself while walking to grab a coffee, got caught in the ensuing road closure traffic, or were a participant, you could be excused for not knowing there was a race featuring nearly 30,000 people taking place in America’s largest city.

Not to nitpick the NYC Half, which is always a great production that lures plenty of big names—like this year’s winners, Sharon Lokedi and Abel Kipchumba—but when a race is placed in direct comparison with one of the world’s most iconic (ahem, the New York City Full Marathon), we have to grade on a steep curve.

The great road races of the world come with inherent stakes. There’s history. Or they’re a spectacle that captivates people outside of our dorky running bubble. Or they attract enough talent that they settle a score—namely, answering the question “who’s the best at this?”

This isn’t to say that no half marathon has ever involved stakes, or had a rich history, or provided a spectacle to the masses, or included fields so terrific they cannot be ignored. But sometimes, the “half”-ness of it all overshadows all the good things. For athletes, for fans, for the sport’s powerbrokers, the half marathon always feels like a bit of an afterthought.

So what’s its deal? We’re not trying out standup or offering rhetorical questions. Seriously. What’s the point of the half marathon? We’re sincerely asking!

Is it a stepping stone distance designed to lure tracksters sensing the sting dissipating from their once-lethal finishing kicks?

Is it a default race-as-a-workout, the ideal final hard effort before a big target marathon?

Is it a tweener distance with its own specialists, who are doomed to distance running obscurity while most of the prize money and a little bit of glory goes to the marathoners and 10,000m stars, respectively?

Or is it a play by Big Road Race to lure more mass participation-types out to the tarmac, all so they can shell out a few more race entries and slap a “13.1” bumper sticker on their car?

Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes (the first half marathon wasn’t contested until the 1950s). 

Each of these justifications for the half marathon’s existence is totally fine. But together, they can make for a muddled event—at least from a storytelling standpoint—that populates the global racing calendar but rarely receives the spotlight. Short of a multi-time Olympic medalist on the track making their half debut, it’s rare for the distance to generate any sort of buzz ahead of time. And unless somebody breaks a national or world record, stretching out headlines past a few days can be a challenge.

So what do we do about it? We like the half marathon and don’t want it to disappear. But we do wish it carried a bit more weight when contested.

The half’s inclusion in the World Road Running Championships is a great start. The championship event as a whole has demonstrated its ability to attract top talent. But a global championship is not a guarantee of clout— without checking, do you remember the winners in the half in Riga?

(Apologies to any Sabastian Sawe or Peres Jepchirchir superfans…)

We’re all about solutions here at The Lap Count. (And we love proposals that tinker with circuits.) So let’s conclude with something that we think would work to make the half marathon count for something: the World Half Marathon Tour.

World Athletics loves a circuit— albeit with mixed results (the Diamond League still carries far more clout than the World Indoor Tour, let’s be honest). But in addition to NYC, there are plenty of popular and worthy 13.1-mile races around the world who would benefit from some loose organization. The Great North Run in the UK is the largest half in the world by number of participants. The Delhi Half boasts a fast course and is located in a part of the world not currently featured in the WMM circuit. And given that Spain has quickly become a road-running mecca in recent years, Valencia deserves its moment in the sun.

Schedule-wise, a half marathon or three is easy to slot into a marathon buildup or wrap around a track and field schedule. And a shorter recovery time than the marathon means that dedicated road warriors could, if they wanted, contest far more than the traditional spring/fall double.

A race like the NYC Half taking on global implications wouldn’t immediately level it up to World Marathon Major status or impact, but it’s a step worth exploring. And the next time someone asks “what’s the point?” the answer gets a little more interesting.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– Grand Slam Track has unveiled the full fields for its inaugural slam, taking place in Kingston, Jamaica, from April 4th through 6th. Dalilah Muhammad is listed as a Challenger in the long hurdles category—a fun next step for the 35-year-old given that she announced the 2024 Olympic Trials would be her last.

– ATHLOS, the women’s-only meet launched last year by Serena Williams’s husband Alexis Ohanian and Olympic champ Gabby Thomas will return to New York City’s Icahn Stadium on October 10th.

– France’s Jimmy Gressier and Uruguay’s Santiago Catrofe went 1-2 in the 5K at the Semi-Marathon International de Lille. They both clocked in at 12:57, which established new area records for Europe and South America.

– Gerald Phiri, an Olympian in 2012 and 2016 for Zambia and now the director of track and field at the Montverde Academy in Florida has been provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit. Phiri was placed under joint-investigation by WADA and USADA after three of his high school athletes—most notably Issam Asinga, the U20 world record holder over 100m—tested positive for metabolites of the same banned substance.

– Kibiwott Kandie, former world record holder in the half marathon, has also been provisionally banned by the AIU, in this case for evading drug tests.

– Letsrun’s Jonathan Gault reports that a second athlete, TCU’s Tabitha Ngao, had been competing in the NCAA this season despite serving a provisional suspension for whereabouts failures from the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya. Ngao—who is appealing her suspension—was slated to compete in the 800m at NCAA Indoors, but scratched when the news broke. 

– Don’t cancel that Peacock subscription just yet. NBC and USATF have announced a reup of their broadcasting partnership through 2028. If there’s not a track meet on at a given moment, you can gobble down every episode of King of Queens until there is.

– It’s been a while since we dedicated a bullet point to him, so let’s check in on Australian teen phenom Gout Gout… oh, it seems he went 19.96 with a nice tailwind. That’s still absolutely blazing for a 17-year-old. 

– As part of his forthcoming Comeback/Farewell Tour, Eliud Kipchoge will be racing this year’s Sydney Marathon—the event’s first installment as a World Marathon Major.

– And if any of our readers are early- to mid-career brand marketing-types looking for an excuse to uproot their lives and move to Monaco, good news: World Athletics is hiring a brand manager.

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