For more than a week they felt pretty miserable, as though they might never be able to run like they once did.
For some, it lasted longer than three weeks. That made for one of the stranger buildups to this weekend’s New York City Marathon, a wicked balancing act between recovery and training, between rest and preparation, between the singular focus that one of the hardest tests in athletics requires and the mental downtime that has to follow it or else it will drive even the best runners in the world completely mad.
That’s what the last 10 or 12 weeks have been like for the handful of runners trying the quadrennial feat of competing in the Olympic marathon in August and then racing in the New York version on the first Sunday in November. It’s the sort of task that can test the confidence of even the best of the best.
“I’m so excited and sometimes I’m worried to see the outcome,” said Hellen Obiri, the defending champion in New York and the bronze medalist in Paris.
Obiri, a Kenyan whose nickname is “Queen Hellen,” should see some familiar faces in the starting area on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on Sunday morning. American Dakotah Lindwurm, who finished 12th in the Olympic women’s race, will be on the starting line, even though she got married on Sunday and is test-driving her new last name — Popehn.
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So will Popehn’s teammates, Conner Mantz and Clayton Young, who finished eighth and ninth, respectively, in Paris. They will race against the gold and silver medalists from Paris, Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia and Belgium’s Bashir Abdi.
The five and six-figure appearance fees the Olympians can fetch is a big enticement.
“I just want to go celebrate this fitness,” Young said late last month.
Popehn and Mantz actually led their races in the middle sections before the lead pack surged to a pace that was too rich for their budgets. Now they’ve come to the world’s biggest marathon with high hopes and a heavy dose of curiosity, because they’ve never done something like this before, at least not on a stage this big.
They might get to Manhattan at the 16-mile mark, hear the roars of the hometown crowd and surge with belief since they so recently tackled a tough Olympic course with a rough series of hills in the middle miles outside Paris.
Or they might get there and realize they just don’t have anything left in their legs. Only one runner has won the Olympic marathon in the summer and New York in the fall — Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir in 2021. Tola would figure to have decent shot to become the second. He won in New York last year, and he said Thursday he rested for a month after his Olympic win. Before he arrived in New York, he had one extremely hard-core training day: a 24-mile run in the morning and an 8-mile run in the evening.
In general, marathon runners are a fastidious lot. They stick to their tried-and-true training routines. A buildup to a marathon usually involves 12-16 weeks of hard-core training that includes a mix of harder, shorter runs and long, slower distance runs.
Sometimes those harder, shorter runs happen in the middle or at the end of the longer-distance ones. The mileage peaks somewhere between 130-160 miles in the longest training weeks. If everything goes according to plan, they have a few of those high-mileage weeks before they back off and taper as the race approaches.
In most cases though, runners are starting those cycles with their base level of fitness and health, not immediately following the most intense race of their careers. The Olympic marathons took place the weekend of Aug. 10. By the time the Olympians were ready to really get back to work, their next marathon was just nine weeks away — though really eight, since little in the way of preparation happens during the final week.
That made for some complicated math, improvisation and a good bit of psychology for some top coaches the past few months.
“Physically, she recovered better than she ever has,” said Dathan Ritzenhein, Obiri’s coach with the On Athletics Club in Boulder, Col., a haven for world-class distance runners. “Mentally it has been more of a challenge, wrapping her head around doing a hard race again in such a short time.”
Obiri loves New York. It’s her favorite race — the noise, the crowds, the beauty of Central Park. She wasn’t going to miss this.
This is where being part of a team came in handy for Obiri, both she and Ritzenhein said, especially one that operates as cohesively as the On team. Some athletes on running teams share little beyond a shoe logo. OAC’s dozen or so runners behave as though they are part of a basketball or football team.
Practices and other training sessions happen at a set time. Team members are accountable to themselves and to one another. In Obiri’s case, that meant teammates and coaches were as committed to getting her to the starting line in New York as she was, or maybe more so.
She was physically ready to start training again in early September, but even when perfectly healthy, marathon training can be a long and lonely process. Obiri found the mental boost she needed from teammate Joe Klecker, a finalist in the 10,000 meters at the Tokyo Olympics who is working his way back from a torn adductor muscle. Klecker was there doing plenty of Obiri’s training runs with her.
“They’re like my family,” Obiri said of her team. “They were always there right by my side.”
Young never has to look far for running company. His best friend and training partner is Mantz, who was his teammate at Brigham Young. That doesn’t mean the two of them experienced post-Paris the same way.
Mantz said he felt ready to get back to work after about a week. Young knew getting ready for New York was something he needed to pay attention to, but half his brain was thinking that he had just run what he considered the best race of his life, just 44 seconds off his personal record on a far more difficult course.
That race had required every ounce of mental energy he had, especially after the pressure cooker of the Olympic trials marathon in February, which had been a similar experience. If he was going to make it to New York, he had to figure out how to give himself a bit of a break.
“I had to change my mindset and let go of all the meticulous things,” he said. “I just focused on the main parts of training — mileage, sleeping and eating.”
He didn’t worry if sometimes it felt like he was just going through the motions. If he felt like skipping sauna sessions, which can help with endurance and recovery, or running hills, or doing the visualization and meditation work that have become a part of his training, he did.
Obsessing over his diet, race plan, mobility drills and every session of physical therapy didn’t happen. If he wanted dessert, he ate dessert, though he tried to eat homemade desserts rather than processed ones.
“There’s a mental decompression you can experience while eating a cookie or ice cream,” he said.
Amen to that!
Popehn said she found herself replaying the Paris race in her head once she got back home. Was there something she could have done to finish in the top 10 instead of 12th? She had taken the lead near Versailles, but then didn’t go with the leaders when they surged because her internal governor told her it was too fast.
What would have happened if she had gone with them?
“No matter what the result was, I probably would have wanted more,” she said.
Good thing she had another race coming up to turn her attention to. To her, coming off the Olympics and running New York was the sort of iconic thing that American Olympians did.
Her beat-up quadriceps muscles thought otherwise. She took off a full week and traveled to the south of France for some “vitamin sea” in the Mediterranean. But she was still sore during her first runs after that. Even in early September, she was cutting miles from workouts.
Then she started adding 15 miles a week to her mileage total. She got to 130 in mid-October. She did a workout that shifted from eight minutes at her race pace to two minutes at 30 seconds slower and repeated that for 90 minutes. She went 28 miles at a 6:05 pace recently.
She’s done quick turnarounds before, running the Boston Marathon in mid-April and Grandma’s Marathon in her home state of Minnesota in June, though she thinks those are easier courses than Paris and New York, which are both hilly and undulating.
“The work I did to get to Paris will pay off,” Popehn said.
Mantz thinks the work he did in Paris can pay off, too, even though he had some foot pain after the Olympics. Too many miles in racing shoes caused it, he thinks. He took three days off and was basically fine.
Unlike some of his competitors, he has raced so recently that he feels he may have a mental edge. Sometimes, if he hasn’t raced in four or six months during the usual cycle of two marathons in a year, he can feel flat. Not now.
“I have practiced a marathon already,” he said. “It’s on my mind.”
(Top photo of runners, including American Clayton Young, during the Olympic men’s marathon in Paris on Aug. 10: Ulrik Pedersen / DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
