June 02, 2020 Homepage Archive

Track is Back, Baby

17,000 Athletes including Barbora Spotakova competed in track meets in the Czech Repulbic on Monday as the ‘Back on the Track’ series began 17,000 athletes competed across 173 locations, with televised events in Pilsen and Kolin as well as Kladno.
*Spotakova won javeline at 63.69 *Video

A throws meet took place in Estonia on Monday Adam Kelly of USA topped the field with 69.12 in the hammer.
Colleen Quigley DESTROYED 7 other professional women in ESPN’s Peloton All-Star Ride, She also easily beat all the men if you are looking at w/kg. Of course, wouldn’t you expect her to destroy the likes of Rory McIlroy and Allyson Felix in an endurance challenge?

Sprint / Field News

Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce Says She Isn’t Ready To Retire Yet She said that she isn’t ruling out going through 2022. She shares some other interesting thoughts like her favorite Kenyan athlete is Ezekiel Kemboi because of his dancing.
World LJ Champ Malaika Mihambo To Be Coached By Carl Lewis And Leroy Burrell If travel restrictions allow it, she plans to move from Germany to Houston in August.
Karsten Warholm Eyeing 300m Hurdles WR At The Impossible Games Next Week The 18-year-old record is 34.48 and Warholm has run 34.26 indoors.
Olympic Shot Put Champ Michelle Carter To Join Dad In Texas Sports HOF Her father Michael Carter won shot put Olympic silver in 1984.

GB News

Mo Farah Remembers How He Took The Subway With His Two Olympic Gold Medals In His Pocket The Day After “Super Saturday” At London 2012 Farah said he wanted to see his family the next day so left the Olympic Village and hoped on a normal train with a hoodie. He said one guy kept looking at him and gave him a thumbs up.
GB’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson Says Euro Champs Cancellation Was Harder To Deal With Than Olympic Postponement “With the Olympics … had weeks to expect that. But the thing I struggled with the most was the Europeans getting cancelled in Paris. Not even postponed, but outright cancelled. That was tough for me because then I didn’t have any sort of focus to train for.”

The Latest Distance News

Andy Young Thinks Olympic Delay Will Help His Two Stars In Laura Muir And Jemma Reekie Muir didn’t have much of a base as she had an Achilles issue at the end of last year and Reekie is so young an extra year can only help.
HSer EJ Holland Writes About Helping To Create The Quarantine Clasico Where Leo Daschbach Broke 4 Holland ended up getting hurt but he and Matt Stangio deserve major props for worrying about the sport, not just themselves like so many pros.
Penn Relays Mile Record Holder Tori Starcher Of West Virginia Is Ready To Start Her College Career At Stanford After Initially Comitting To Notre Dame She ran 4:38 at Penn last year but missed XC with a stress fracture.
Kipchoge, Bekele, Cheptegei, Kamworor Are Going To Team Up To Run A Virtual Marathon Together On June 6th Each will run a 10.5 km leg and the public can form their own 4-person teams.
8:42 Steepler Stephen Jones To Finish Eligibility At Colorado As Grad Transfer
Timothy Cheruiyot Talks About His Friendship/Rivalry With Training Partner Elijah Manangoi
A Look At The Super-Successful Kibet Sisters All five were pretty good at running, led by Sylvia, who won 2 WC silvers and an Olympic bronze.

For The First Time Ever

LRC 2020 Boston Marathon Canceled; Will Be Staged Instead As Virtual Race Through 123 years and two world wars, the Boston Marathon had always been staged as an in-person event. That streak ends in 2020, another victim of the coronavirus pandemic. *MB: BOSTON MARATHON CANCELED

The Stawell Gift, Australia’s Oldest And Richest Handicap Footrace, Has Been Canceled For The First Time Since 1945 Because Of The COVID-19 Pandemic
Toni Reavis: Many Races And Running Organizations, Including Ironman And Running USA, Have Banded Together To Beg The Govt. For A Bailout “Without specifically targeted help from the federal government,” said the Endurance Sports Coalition, “the endurance sports may not survive the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Kenyan News

MB:Breaking: David Rudisha has surgery after breaking ankle in Kenya. Expected to be out 3 months.

Kip Keino Is Thrilled The World Athletics Continental Tour Meet I Nairobi Will Be Named After Him – “It’s a great feeling to be honoured when someone is still alive.”
Kip Keino Classic Likely To Be Held At Nyayo National Stadium Assuming It Gets A New Mondo Track If not, it will be held at the Moi Stadium in Kisumu.
Hellen Obiri Thinks When She Ran 14:18 That She Might Have Been Able To Run 14:12 Why stop there? The WR is 14:11.15.

These Reads From The US Are Definitely Interesting

“The Fastest Nice Christian Boy in the World”: Nearly 7,000 Words on 1956 Triple Olympic Champion Bobby Morrow Who Claimed He Wished He’d Never Been A Track Star This 1984 feature on Morrow, who died on Saturday, from Texas Monthly is very interesting.
*A look back at nearly every single race in Bobby Morrow’s career
Leo Daschbach reveals what a typical week of training looks like and what his final workouts were before breaking 4:00
*MB: Secrets of Leo Daschbah’s sub-4 training revealed. How would you rate these workouts?
2016 World junior 1500 bronze medallist Christina Aragon reflects on her career during Covid-19: ‘I feel like I am where I should be at this point’ The former Montana legend, who ran 2:04 and 4:08 and was valedictorian as a prep, is hoping to help the Stanford women to an NCAA xc title this fall.
Toni Reavis writes about race relations in the US
Michael Wardian runs to the 4 boundary stones of Washington, DC (59.9 miles) in 8 hrs, 35 minutes
Stephen Pifer looks back on his career that saw him win the triple crown (xc, 1600, 3200) in Illinois in HS before starring at Colorado “(My HS coach) said ‘the harder you work, the luckier you get’ and that’s something I’ve always used as a mantra in life,” said Pifer who now works for Mizuno.

Will NCAA XC Change Its Qualifying System?

LRC What We Know About The Potential Changes To The NCAA Cross-Country Regional System Change may be coming to the NCAA XC qualification system, but the crazy thing is, NCAA coaches have no idea who is driving this change, beyond a faceless NCAA working group. The NCAA committee charged with developing the new regional concept contains representatives from 11 schools. Only two of those schools, Kansas and Ohio State, have ever sent a team to the NCAA Cross-Country Championships.
*MB: NCAA Cross Qualifying Changes?

US Mid-D

Mary Cain Says She Was Treated “Like A Product, Not A Person” At NOP She also says she didn’t want to be seen as the “weak athlete” at NOP as she was worried Nike wouldn’t want to invest in her.
MB: JOHNNY GREGOREK runs 4:06.25 blue jeans mile WR to raise money for mental illness in honor of his later brother Patrick

Sprint Stuff

Usain Bolt Says He Will Never Become One Who Complains About Everything When Asked About A Carl Lewis Tweet Bolt was asked about Lewis’ tweet which was questioning the sustainability of the sport.
RIP:USA’s 1956 Triple Olympic Champion Bobby Morrow Passes Away At Age 84 Morrow won gold in the 100, 200 and 4 x 100m and set 11 world records during his career.
South African Sprinter Akani Simbine “Hungry” For A 100m Medal After Just Missing Out (5th, 5th And 4th) At The Last Three Global Championships

Non-Distance News

Seb Coe Does Video Conference To Say He’s Pumped About Monday’s Back On Track Event In The Czech Republic The event will “bring together professional athletes, including two-time Olympic javelin champion and world record holder Barbora Spotakova, alongside kids at 173 venues across the Czech Republic.”
Now That She’s Been Training In A Park With Deer, Sprint Star Dina Asher-Smith Finally Understands How Distance Runners Can Run Many Miles Every Day “The sprinters always joke that we don’t understand how the longer‑distance people go on those long runs. When the scenery is so pretty I was starting to understand it. Running in a park among deer is definitely not what I would normally be doing.”
Katarina Johnson-Thompson Has Been Training At Home In Liverpool, Not At Her Normal Place In France During Covid-19 Quarantine
22 Questions Q&A With US 200 Champ Dezerea Bryant

US News Of Note

US Education Department Rules That Connecticut’s Policy Allowing Transgender Girls To Compete In Girls Sports Without Treatment Violates The Civil Rights Of Girls Who Have Always Identified As Female The CT authorities, however, aren’t backing down citing state law. Will they lose federal funding as a result?
*MB:Women’s sports may be saved!! Connecticut’s policy of allowing transgender women to compete w/o treatment found to violate Title IX

Cool Story:The Day After NCAA Indoors Was Canceled, Many Of The Top DIII Athletes Went To A Local Track And Ran A 5,000 The NCAA DIII XC champs Patrick Watson of Stevenson University and Parley Hannan of Ithaca won the races in 14:20 and 16:49. *Race Video

Throwback Thursday #8

LRC I Was Bored, So I Watched Alan Webb Run 3:53 As A High Schooler At The 2001 Prefontaine Classic In honor of the race’s 19-year anniversary, Jonathan Gault revisits the day when Webb broke Jim Ryun‘s 36-year-old US high school mile record and took a Hayward Field victory lap with Hicham El Guerrouj.

Get Healthy

Are you struggling with Plantar Fasciitis? Read this. 5,600 words on how to treat it

Administrative News

USATF Releases Return to Training and Event Hosting Guidance *Return to training guidance *Event hosting
Scottish Athletics head is confident he and UK Athletics can finally work together and build up the sport “Scottish Athletics chair Ian Beattie believes the recently-published blueprint to reform UK Athletics (UKA) can lift it out of the doldrums and put the whole sport back on track.”

NCAA Coronavirus News

AP:Number Of Eliminated College Sports Programs Nearing 100 97 programs have been cut in at least part due to the economic impact of the coronavirus. Only 19 of the teams were DI.
NCAA Releases Plans Allowing Football And Basketball Players To Return To Campuses Next Week

145 Years Of History, Gone In An Instant – Brown Has Cut Its Men’s XC/Track Program

Brown XC And Track Athletes Sound Off On The Decision To Ax Their 145-Year-Old Program A good read. They have plenty of reason to be upset as the transfer window has closed and incoming freshmen have already been locked down.
Athletics Illustrated: Brown University President Christina Hull Paxon Spews Boilerplate Rhetoric At The Expense Of Athletics “The benefits of running the low-cost, high-return sport of athletics far outweigh the meager savings supposedly brought by adjusting numbers on a spreadsheet to satisfy the bean counters.”
MB: Rojo: The more I think about the way the Brown sports decision went down, the more OUTRAGED I become
MB:Brown University, Despite Its $4.2 Billion Endowment, Cuts Men’s XC, Indoor and Outdoor Track Effectively Immediately
Sign The Save Brown T&F Petition

Listen To Our Podcast While You Work Out This Weekend

MoreLRC Content: Podcast: Leo Daschbach Sub-4 In A Real Race, Pro Runner Wedding Bells, London Marathon In Doubt, LRC’s Poker Win Wejo reveals how his six-figure online poker win helped fund LRC in the early days.

An Event Worth Looking Forward To

LRC Sara Hall Among Pros Who Will Take Shot At Treadmill World Records On June 6 In Chaski Challenge Inspired by the success of last month’s Quarantine Backyard Ultra, a handful of elite runners will attempt to break treadmill world records across five distances next week. “We are 100% sure that we are going to break these records in this race,” says meet director Tyler Andrews, who will be aiming for the marathon/50k records. “We want to have actual, really good athletes just totally destroy them and set them way out of reach.”