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A record that outlived a generation of milers went down in London this weekend, and Boston just handed thousands of rejected qualifiers a way in. In this issue we’ve got both of those stories, plus three new articles:
What junk miles really are, and how they affect your progress
15 epic point-to-point marathons from around the world
The best time of day to run if you want to lose weight, and whether running fasted does anything at all
Let’s get into it.
Many runners hear the term and immediately start cutting their slow, easy miles. That is the wrong move, and it costs them the fitness those miles were building. Our new piece explains what actually counts as a junk mile, why it holds you back, and how to spot one before you head out the door.
Most marathons run in a loop and drop you right back where you started. A point-to-point race does the opposite. It carries you somewhere completely different, so the finish looks nothing like the start, and that turns 26.2 miles into a real adventure.
Here are 15 of the most iconic in the world, and what makes each one worth the trip.
Early risers swear by morning runs. Everyone else insists their legs do not work until the afternoon. When researchers compared the two groups directly over 12 weeks, they lost about the same amount of weight.
In this article we weigh the real pros and cons of morning and evening running, and cover fasted runs and what happens to your appetite afterward.
He called it Project 222. He needed 222 seconds. He ran 222.66 and got it anyway.
Josh Kerr spent the whole season telling anyone who asked that he was going to break the mile world record. On Saturday in London, in front of 60,000 people, he did it, running 3:42.66 to take 0.47 off the 3:43.13 Hicham El Guerrouj set in Rome in 1999.
Kerr is the first man under 3:43, and the record he broke had stood for 27 years.
Kerr’s personal best going into the race was 3:45.34, which made him only the sixth-fastest miler in history. He improved it by nearly three seconds in one night. His 1500m split of 3:27.62 was faster than his own British record for the distance, and he still had 109 meters to run.
Kerr's reaction was almost a complaint. He had come in thinking he could take a real chunk out of the record and walked away with less than half a second. "Beggars can't be choosers," he said. Stranger still, his hearing cut out over the final 110 meters and he ran them in near silence, to a sold-out stadium.
Beat your age-group standard but fall short of the cutoff, and you now go into a draw for about 1,000 spots.
Almost 9,000 runners who hit their qualifying time were turned away from the 2026 Boston Marathon, where the cutoff came in 4:34 faster than the official standard. For the 2027 race on April 19, everyone who beats their age-group standard but misses that cutoff goes automatically into a random draw for roughly 1,000 extra places. Fast-first ranking still fills most of the field, so a big margin is still the goal.
Registration runs September 14 through 18, 2026, closing at 5:00 p.m. ET. It is not first-come, first-served, so any time in those five days works, and answers come by early October. One thing to check before you submit: this will be the first registration to apply Boston’s downhill penalties, which add five minutes to times from courses dropping 1,500 to 2,999 feet, ten minutes from 3,000 to 5,999 feet, and rule out anything steeper.
Our top picks this week:
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