Unheralded American Allie Kiefer Gets 5th in NY Marathon After Doing Cross Fit and Running 25 Miles over 6 Months Last Year

Interesting that she's wearing 3 stripe shoes?

This is in our women's race recap. Worth it's own thread.

Congrats to Allie.

QT: WTF? Unheralded American Allie Kiefer Gets 5th After Doing Cross Fit and Running 25 miles last year

Don’t worry if you’d never heard of Allie Kiefer prior to today as hardly anyone had. Yet if it wasn’t for Shalane Flanagan winning the race, the biggest story of the day would have been a complete unknown finishing 5th in the NYC Marathon. Kiefer was a Foot Locker finalist in high school, and a scholarship athlete at Wake Forest, and clearly is a running lifer, as she had tried stings of training under Brad Hudson and Steve Magness.

Last year she only made her marathon debut because she needed the money and switched from the half to the full at the Miami Marathon and ran 2:55. Then she set a then world indoor record of 2:44 at the Armory Indoor NYC Marathon (they were an advertising partner of LetsRun.com). However, in the back half of last year, she didn't ran more than 25 miles (update: we originally said per week, but now think she may not have run 25 miles total over 6 months from this quote, "since I stopped training in June I haven’t run more than 25 miles in the past six months") and started doing cross-fit workouts with her boyfriend according to a nice profile on her by Joe Battaglia of Flosports. She started coaching herself and her results in 2016 have been on a higher level (32:09 10,000m) but none of this predicted a 5th place showing in New York.

Kiefer however was accepted in the Nike Project Moonshot, an offshoot of the Breaking2 Project, where local athletes were given extra resources to help them prepare for New York. “It was like a semi sponsorship. So they helped me a lot in the buildup and really made it possible for me to see a massage therapist, do strength training, and I felt kind of sponsored. So that was really nice. And I think, when I was out there, I was just — I mean, leading up to the race, they allowed me to put in so much more training than I would have been able to on my own because I did a lot more workouts than I — and I recovered a lot better than I could if I don’t see those people,” she said at the post-race press conference.

Kiefer ran a great negative split. While many of the women went out slow just a result of the opening pace being slow, Kiefer was running her own race. She was off the leaders at half way (1:16:36, 18 seconds back) and came back with a 1:13:03 2nd half. Kiefer said she had to run many miles by herself, but she held up over the distance better than anyone in the race except for Shalane Flanagan. Kiefer’s 5:30 26th mile was the fastest in the women’s race with the exception of Shalane Flanagan.

http://www.letsrun.com/news/2017/11/shalane-flanagan-wins-2017-new-york-city-marathon-1st-american-winner-40-years/

Note: Post and title updated after viewer pointed out Allie likely didn't run over 25 miles total over 6 months, not 25 miler per week.