What are the odds?⏱

Lap 110: Sponsored by Brooks Running

The Brooks Hyperion House is coming back to Boston! Join us mere steps from the marathon finish line at 137 Newbury St from April 14th to 18th for a five-day pop-up experience featuring group runs, free swag, and a chance to shop the all-new Brooks x Des Run Boston Collection!

If you are not in town on race day then put on your best pair of Brooks and join our watch party from home for an alternative live stream on the CITIUS MAG YouTube Channel.

No dice at the Boston Marathon 🎲

I had forty-five minutes to kill ahead of a family dinner this past weekend. The restaurant was next to the casino and the forty dollars cash I had was burning a hole in my wallet. So I left a sleeping baby in the car (with my wife), wandered in, and promptly lost four straight hands of blackjack. When I walked back to the car six minutes later we had a good laugh about it. It had been over a year since I was last summoned by the flickering fluorescent lights and smell of chain smoking slots players, and any itch to return again soon was scratched.

I don’t consider myself a gambling man. Though admittedly, I did also place some bets last month.

There is an old hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Westchester that I had been meaning to try. Due to my lack of friends, I decided to venture there solo and sit at the bar for a burger and beer. There was a television directly in front of me showing an early-round game from the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. I had no prior investment in either team but decided to throw a ten-dollar wager on Miami because I like their uniforms. Suddenly this game mattered to me.

(Remember a few weeks ago when I shared that the NCAA Indoor Track meet was lumped in with 28 other college championships in a package worth $34M/year to ESPN? Well, that was before 9.9M people tuned in to watch the women’s basketball finals…)

When the news leaked last week that DraftKings had requested permission from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission to open up its books for the Boston Marathon, fans were excited. Would it be worth the $100 risk on Eliud Kipchoge to cover the costs of a single cup of coffee?

Unfortunately, one day later this pipe dream was denied by the MGC as the B.A.A. expressed concern given the tight turnaround. We can cross our fingers and hope that other World Marathon Majors have taken note of the potential interest and start getting the wheels in motion for approval. But already on the approved list are the Olympics, Olympic Trials, World Championships, World Indoor Tour, and the World Athletics Continental Tour (the Diamond League isn’t listed).

That means that meets like the Trials of Miles Track Night NYC meet or the On Track Festival would theoretically be eligible – if there was enough interest. That could be a pretty great opportunity for the pro-gambling media conglomerate known as CITIUS MAG to help make that happen (is this a subtle enough plea to readers to help us get in touch with the right people?).

While I don’t think adding betting to the sport is the panacea to all of our problems, it would undoubtedly capture more consistent attention from an already partially engaged audience. While excitement will be amplified over the course of a two-hour race, it’s the built-in hype of the ever-changing odds during the lead-up that would be the real kicker. There would be ripple effects across the industry as every article, interview, and race video now has a potential financial impact on fans.

Are you familiar with how intently old men smoking cigars watch horses as they trot out of their stables? Now imagine how many views a press conference of those same horses talking about how their training went would receive. Suddenly the logo on that horse’s shirt is worth a bit more, and the bank logo behind his horse head is even more. Impressions equal dollars, baby.

And I don’t understand the concern with athletes throwing races. First off, Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame – he only bet on himself to win! Something every runner already does. I mean, 4,256 hits is unbelievable. One solution is to limit the maximum payout. Boom, already done by every sportsbook.

This is an issue in every other sport, especially in college sports where the athletes don’t have prize money or bonuses. But the easiest solution is to pay the athletes more. Oh, you can’t afford it right now? I have an idea…

Welcome back Sha’Carri!🌪

Hurricane Sha’Carri hit the Miramar Invitational this weekend, reaching top speeds of 10.57 with gusts as strong as +4.1 m/s! Richardson is back and without surprise, there’s already a lot of debate around her return to top form. Why this time, you ask?

Because it’s too early.

Run too slow and they’ll chirp. Run too fast and they’ll chirp. Unfortunately, Sha’Carri couldn’t find that Goldilocks zone to quiet the doubters. But as a Sha’Carri-stan I am thrilled to see her back running fast and in the headlines. She puts asses in seats and generates interest – that’s the team I will always be on!

But is it too early? The wind was twice the legal limit and a conversion in still conditions puts it at 10.77. Would that be an acceptable time for critics?

I hear the argument that even with the wind, her legs went 10.57. That means she is fit and in shape.

But let’s not forget that Sha’Carri’s personal best is from April 2021 when she ran 10.72 (+1.6 m/s) to win this same meet. This is only a marginal improvement from that performance, except the difference is she is two years older, two years stronger, and is now no longer in uncharted territory. And a few months later Richardson looked fresh as a daisy dominating the Olympic Trials, so no I am not worried about her burning out or peaking too soon.

This performance is worth celebrating because it’s her best race in two years. It is not a suggestion that she is now better than the Jamaicans, which seems to be the interpretation. The most head-scratching narrative that has infiltrated athletics culture is that we should refuse to care for any result until the very end. Should fans lean into this nihilism and remain silent observers for the next four months because nothing matters? (And we wonder why track is dead!) The build-up, the developing narratives, the debate, and the analysis is all part of the experience.

Who knows if Sha’Carri holds on to finish out the season with a medal. Only she and coach Dennis Mitchell know what it took to arrive at this point today. But if I was a betting man (and if you just read the preceding section then you know I infrequently am), then I like the odds a whole lot more when Sha’Carri is having fun, loving the sport, and bringing that signature swagger back into the blocks. That’s the biggest win.

And let’s not forget that the official world leader, Aleia Hobbs, ran 10.87 (+2.0) at LSU this weekend. Not bad considering she broke her hand and couldn’t do weights or block starts for over a month. Is that too fast, or just right?

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This is a new Olympic event? 🚶‍♂️🚶‍♀️

If you’re concerned that me dissing (and make no mistake, that’s what this section is about, baby!) the new Olympic race walk event will lead to my inbox filling up with hate mail — don’t worry about it. Everyone feels the exact same way. 

So without further ado, allow me to introduce the Marathon Race Walk Mixed Relay!

The 50K distance has been a staple of Olympic programming since 1932. It wasn’t the first race walk event ever contested – that was the 3500m and 10-mile races in 1908 – but the 50K has been the consistent staple and premier event of the discipline since its inception. That is until it was eliminated ahead of Paris.

The main reason cited was to create greater gender equality in Athletics. And if this sounds familiar, stop me, but rather than adding a woman’s 50K, they eliminated the men’s race entirely. Nothing is more equal than two zeroes!

The 2022 World Championships shortened the 50K to the 35K, but that’s now gone after this year. Now Paris will feature just the 20km on both the men’s and women’s sides. And also a full marathon distance mixed relay featuring two athletes who each walk twice. What do you possibly do with 45 minutes to recover between two six-mile legs?

As a distance runner, I should not be the voice for the race walk community. Although this is sort of like if they removed the 1500m entirely and added a 1000m in its place. On the surface as an outsider, I like the idea of a marathon distance (not as a relay) because it is more relatable to the general public. The World Record in the 50K is 3:32:33, which for most readers means nothing. But what if I told you Yohann Diniz walked 31 miles at 6:50 per mile? That’s a sub-three-hour marathon plus another five miles. You will likely have a greater appreciation for the accomplishment.

But here is the thing: most fans still won’t watch it.

If the entire race walk community is upset with the elimination of the 50K and the subsequent addition of a historically vacant new event, then it would seem that the target audience has been lost. In general, there are too many events in the sport as a whole. Replacing the ones that some athletes love with new Frankenstein events that no one asked for isn’t a solution to that problem.

Uniforms are out and kits are in 👔

Look, I get that they’re called uniforms, but do they have to be SO uniform? This week on the Ali on the Run Show, we debated the proper name for your racing attire, and after reading this New York Times article about the evolution of women’s race day fits, I am fully on #TeamKit.

The article notes that the original intent of a tight and revealing uniform may have been to make female athletes “look more feminine and sexy,” and so an unfortunate yet predictable consequence is that it leads to unwanted conversations about women's bodies. Case in point, this week, America’s best heptathlete, Anna Hall, posted a video asking all the dipshits of the world to stop making hurtful comments about her and other athletes’ bodies. Unfortunately, people can be real assholes and that’s exacerbated by the anonymity afforded by a keyboard.

Allowing athletes to compete in an outfit that they are comfortable wearing makes sense on a more cynical, marketing level as well. On Noah Lyle’s YouTube channel, there was universal agreement in his “Sprint Talk” with other stars that a focus on athletes’ walk-in outfits, as well as the ability to express individuality on the track, gives the fans something to connect with.

Like a walk-up song in the MLB, high socks or eye black, how an athlete expresses themselves on the field of play is one more opportunity to show a side of themselves that gives fans a reason to care beyond the result. This is not a debate between half-tights or split-shorts, but a call to open up all aspects of what athletes choose to wear.

If an athlete is on a team, then it is understandable why the Brooks Beasts would all be wearing the same signature highlighter yellow uniform. But how often do we see an entire Diamond League field – comprised of runners from dozens of training groups – donning the same exact clothes? If I showed up to a party and one other dude was wearing the same shirt as me, then I’d either leave immediately, or spend all night obsessing over my lack of originality and spiraling over the idea that we are all slaves to the capitalist cycle of fast fashion. (That is unless everyone agreed to dress up as Guy Fieri for a bachelor party.)

It has been 35 years since Florence Griffith-Joyner was wearing hoods, or a single long pant leg, and yet here we are still talking about it. Isn’t promoting the individuality of an athlete better for the brand? The alternative is to be another cog in the machine whose dress is indistinguishable from the lane over.

Unless the people in charge of these sorts of things like it when the athletes are indistinguishable and replaceable…

Catching up with Jessie Cardin

The Hansons-Brooks Distance Project has been a driving force in American marathoning for the past 20 years. At the team’s core is a belief in the value of providing athletes with a structured training group and the support to continue building their aerobic strength. That ideology is what attracted Jessie Cardin, then working as a teacher, to make the move from her native Massachusetts to Michigan, where she is now all-in on a career as a professional runner.

Cardin graduated from Westfield in 2018 with personal bests of 10:33 in the steeplechase at 17:14 for 5000m. But her breakout performance came in 2022, when she finished 10th at the USATF Half Marathon Championships and ran 1:12:08. Jessie ran 2:33:34 in her debut in last year’s Chicago Marathon, but following the momentum of a 1:10:52 at the Houston Half Marathon, there are big goals on Marathon Monday.

With a week to go until Boston, how's everything going?

I'm so excited. This buildup has been really hard. So I'm just trying to divert my energy into other things. It's going to be so awesome.

What’s so significant about this taper? 

I was telling someone about this a few days ago, but for Chicago, my mileage was high. But for Boston, my coach, Kevin [Hanson], was like  “we’re going to make your mileage higher… like, we're going to try to challenge you.”

Well, give me a number. How high are we going?

Like 120. So, a good amount! I got to the point where on quote unquote “recovery days,” I was doing like 16, 17 miles. 

Near the end of the biggest part of the build I felt like I was setting daily goals and fighting to hit them. But then you go down to running like six and four doubles and you're like, “Oh, gosh, I feel like I barely ran today.”

I like that part about marathon training. For Chicago, the mileage was really tough. And then this time around I just knew it was all part of the process and all this mileage was going to help me. 

When I was talking with your coach, I told him I would love to speak with one of his athletes, and I asked who is going to have the big breakout performance. Why did he suggest you? Do you feel like a big breakthrough is about to happen?

This race is my whole life. I think he knows how important Boston is for me just because I'm from there. So he realizes this is more than just a big marathon to me because it’s a Major, it’s my home.

But I feel like I’m also learning so much really quickly. I'm not saying that all of a sudden I know everything because I ran one marathon. But I’ve learned a lot from my time around the professional life. I’m more marathon mature, if that makes sense. 

And Coach told me right when I joined the team that the marathon is my event. He knows how to train for it. And I’ve adjusted to the training well so he knows I can handle the event. The marathon feels like you’re breaking barriers for 26 miles, and I really like to break barriers.

It also seems like you have a really cool journey from graduating until now. So you graduate in 2018, from Westfield State – a DIII program. What did you do immediately after?

I got my degree in elementary education – so I got a job right out of college teaching at an inner-city school in Massachusetts. I worked there for a year. It was really hard. 

I didn’t want it to make me hate running or teaching. You know, it's 6:00 am in the winter time, it's dark. But it was also the only time I could really get a run in. That, or after working all day, or sometimes at 4:30 in the morning when I can't sleep because my job was so stressful. There wasn't a ton of consistency with my running schedule when I was there. 

Then I moved on to a different school for the next two years where I was teaching fourth grade. It was right around when the pandemic started, so we lost our social lives too. And that's really where I found more of a consistent schedule and also set more rigid goals for myself. 

I didn't know what was going to happen. But once I got used to it, I was like, “at least I know I'm going to run.” I suddenly had all this time, now that I didn’t have to be in school all day. And so that's when I started increasing my mileage, up to, I don't know, probably like 90 miles. 

And I was like, “oh, I'm loving this.” I loved not having to get up at the crack of dawn to go for a run, too. That's when my competitive side started to come back and that's when I started jumping into half marathons. 

I would just like, jump on a plane and come back for the week like it never happened and then get back into teaching. I was really trying to balance the double life of wanting to be this fast runner and then also teaching elementary school kids. Then I moved on to teaching at the high school for a year, and that was even more demanding because it was a private school. So I had to be there like seven days a week. 

So finally in January of 2022, after the US Championships, I talked to Kevin, and he was like, “you’d like to do this full time?” I was like, “I would love to.” And so we obviously talked about the contracts and all that stuff. And then I joined the team and was really bored with all the spare time I had. So I started tutoring because I was teaching before, and I've been doing that for the last ten months.

Was there something beyond doing it full-time that attracted you to the group specifically?

I had a couple of teams reach out, and the option to run professionally was not really something I had expected. I was like, yeah, you know, I can intensify my running. But I didn’t think about it in terms of a team.

But when Kevin reached out, I remember he was just so easy to talk to. He basically told me all about their approach and didn't make me feel pressured at all because I was like, “I can't just decide to leave tomorrow and move out to Michigan.” 

At that point, I'd made a promise to my students in my school, and I love what I do. So we worked it out for me to come out at the end of the school year – he was just super understanding and I've experienced that sort of understanding since I joined. The team does feel like a family.

I have never had a team like this before – not in high school, definitely not in college. Mostly, people didn't really take it very seriously and I took it very seriously. So I've never had a team where there's such good camaraderie and communication and again between the coaches and athletes, as well as communication within the group.

I had a tweet that I sent out a couple of weeks ago, the premise being that like a DIII alumni team ten years after graduation would kick a DI alumni team’s ass.

Ha! That’s funny – I cannot confirm nor deny that…

So in your case, you graduated five years ago and you had a good college career, but it was nothing that said “hey, in five years you should still be doing this professionally.” But you stuck with it and now it’s your career. Why do you think the experience of a DIII athlete leads to this idea of being a lifelong runner?

I know I felt like I always ran with such… like, it sounds so simple… – but  I always loved running and I never felt like it was a source of pressure in high school. 

And then before college came around, I remember looking around at schools. Some programs had people running races when they had stress fractures, or you might hear about eating disorders being super common at their school. 

And again, I'm not saying that would be every person's experience at a DI program. But I just remember almost making a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go somewhere with a pressure cooker environment. 

Even then I knew I wanted to do this the rest of my life. I don't care if I'm racing, I don't care if I decide to do trail running. I want to just enjoy it. Like, that's the most important thing for me with this. 

So when I went to Westfield, like… we don't even have a sponsor. We pay for our uniforms – that’s what it's like. People do it because they want it. I mean, why else would they be doing it? 

I know a lot of people that went to Division I or Division II schools who you could tell were trying to ride out the wave and be done. They didn’t even like it anymore, but I have always loved it.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

• The Arcadia Invitational always delivers, but if you took a college recruiting coordinator from 2009 and slipped them this year’s results, they’d probably lose their minds. The biggest highlight was that three high school boys – led by Simeon Birnbaum – ran 8:34 for 3200m in the same race! And 44 total ran under 9:00! That used to be worth a big scholarship back in my day!

• The 2022 World Champion in the steeplechase, Norah Jeruto of Kazakhstan and formerly of Kenya, has been suspended by the AIU for use of a prohibited substance. Hindsight’s 20/20, but the biggest red flag for me was that she unnecessarily ran 9:01 in the prelims to dominate the field…

• The young 110H star Trey Cunningham gave a great interview with Jonathan Gault. I was surprised to hear he only goes over hurdles once every ten days – that’s shockingly close to my own routine of zero times every ten days.

• Vincent Kipkemoi (28:11) won the Port-Gentil 10K. A ways back, but still notable, was Mo Farah finishing 7th in 30:11. Here’s hoping this was just a tempo for an appearance fee ahead of London!

• The CARIFTA Games in the Bahamas always makes for some exciting performances, but this triple jump from Arkansas freshman (and NCAA Indoor Champ) Jaydon Hibbert has my jaw on the ground. I have NEVER seen such a short approach launch well over 50 feet.

• Rai Benjamin set a new personal best in the 400m, running 44.21. He was already the fastest flat runner of the world’s top-10 400m hurdlers, but now he’s the even faster fastest. If you’re curious, you’d have to go back to Angelo Taylor (#13 all-time) to find a better flat PB (44.05).

• Two athletes have been banned for six months after a bib swap that resulted in the Honduran national record in the marathon falling. These sorts of things happen at a more amateur level where it’s understandable to not know the protocols, but a 2:09 guy should know better…

• There were two OTQs at the Carmel Marathon as Parley Hanna (2:33:43) and Peighton Meske (2:36:34) knocked out their times. Unfortunately, local man Jack Beakas (2:18:18) just missed the mark. I’m a fan of people taking a shot at qualifying outside of the usual circuit: Houston, Grandma’s, Chicago, CIM, etc.

• The New Yorker wrote an emotional piece that gives an in-depth look at the life and death of Agnes Tirop and the greater social issues facing women in Iten.

• Catch up with Brooks athlete Erika Kemp ahead of her marathon debut at Boston in this new CITIUS MAG video.

• Michael Johnson (do I need to introduce him? anyway he’s my favorite Twitter follow) somehow posted well over 140 characters of how he would improve track and field. I agree with 99% of what he says, the only difference being what events I’d choose to include. You might disagree with some of the things he says, but I think the dialogue and creative thinking on the subject are super important. I’d encourage everyone to read some of the replies and engage in the conversation. It’s not a simple problem, and who knows if we’ll ever solve it, but philosophizing about it is fun!

Are you wondering where the Boston Marathon preview is? Subscribe to the CITIUS MAG newsletter on Thursday to receive it in your inbox.

Thanks so much to Brooks Running for supporting this week’s newsletter! Make sure to tune in to the CITIUS YouTube channel on Marathon Monday to watch the race with us live from the Hyperion House.