the morning shakeout | issue 558

Good morning! The worst part about taking a vacation is coming back from vacation and staring down the to-do list that didn’t take a single day off while you were gone. In fact, it apparently decided to work overtime! Needless to say, I had a lot of catching up to do yesterday and felt a bit rushed when it came time to sit down and write. Let’s get right to it.

I delayed the start of my run on Saturday morning to watch the men’s mile at the Diamond League meet in London. For months, Scotland’s Josh Kerr had been hyping it up as a world-record attempt, even dubbing it “Project 222,” and, to his and his team’s credit, they did a masterful job spinning a compelling story around the event. It’s not often these days that I’m willing to rearrange my schedule to watch a race of any distance or significance live, but I’ll bend myself over backward for a good mile. This event captured my imagination as a high schooler in the late 90s and has held it ever since. Back then you couldn’t watch races in real time quite like you can now, but I remember when Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco ran 3:43.13 in 1999 to break the world record that Kerr lowered this past weekend. I was going into my senior year of high school and had gone all-in on running, committed to training through the summer months for the first time, and read and watched whatever I could get my eyes on. I learned about El G’s record in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, my local newspaper, which ran an AP wire story about the feat. That was a BIG fucking deal, especially back then, when, more often than not, results from European track meets were buried in the agate page (if you were lucky!). For the mile world record to get a photo, headline, and a couple columns of copy meant something, and impacted me enough that I cut the article out of the newspaper and tacked it to my bedroom wall as motivation to dream big. (FWIW, I’ve held on to that clipping—pictured above—which I think says something about the significance of that performance to me.)

Anyway, back to this past Saturday. As most of you probably know by now, Kerr took down El Guerrouj’s record, running away from American Yared Nuguse over the final lap to stop the clock at 3:42.66. The race itself wasn’t quite as exciting as El Guerrouj and Noah Ngeny’s battle down the finishing stretch in Rome, but it was a special moment just the same to watch someone break 3:43 for the first time. It gave me goosebumps to see it go down. On one hand, it was crazy to think that El G’s record had held for as long as I’ve been running seriously, on the other it was exciting to know that in that very moment countless numbers of wide-eyed kids were inspired to do something great. (Adults, too—speaking for myself, anyway!)

That’s the magic of a performance like this. It’s not just about the record, or the splits, or how high Kerr’s heart rate got, or the specialized spikes he wore, or the aerodynamics of his speedsuit, or when he took bicarb before the race, or any of the stuff people often like to nerd out over. It’s about the feeling it instills in you. It’s about what happens when someone aims high, works their ass off, and takes a big swing at an impossible goal. Not everyone’s going to break a world record, of course, but seeing someone do something that’s never been done before plants a seed that might grow into something pretty great if you water it well enough.

*100 miles can be similarly magical for the more ultra-inclined folks out there.

P.S. I texted the above photo to a couple of my best friends, one of whom’s response was too funny not to share here. “This is awesome,” Mark wrote. “One day 27 years from now, some guy is going to pull out a grainy TikTok clip of Josh Kerr’s final 100m to show to his friends.”

— Two more observations on Kerr’s world-record run over the weekend: 1. Watch the replay of the race and check out Kerr’s smile and swagger when they announce his name on the start line. You can’t exactly call it quiet confidence, but you just knew he felt ready to do something special. 2. This post-race interview with Kerr’s coach, Danny Mackey, especially the last 90 seconds, is pure gold and a must-watch for any coach. “This is true of a lot of things in life, but you need to have a really smart and talented group of people around you that care about you,” he says. “I would have left the sport twice if it wasn’t for people that really love me. And without them, Josh wouldn’t have done this today. They’re part of it because…this will almost be 15 years with the Beasts, and Josh and I have been working together almost nine years. It takes a long time, and there’s a lot of lows. It’s such a hard job and hard sport that you need people around you to help you with your flaws and pick you up when you’re down.”

+ Here’s an interview I did with Mackey in 2017 in which we traveled down the path his coaching career has followed, talked about which mentors have influenced him the most, discussed what the sport of track and field is struggling with most, and much more. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done and I think we probably need to sit down for a Round 2 soon. Stay tuned. “The one thing that was the key thing—that I like about coaching—is that it’s so hard and there’s so much on the line,” he told me. “It kind of scratches an itch that keeps me a little bit settled. Coaching helps me because there’s so much going on all the time. It’s intense, and humans are really unpredictable.”

— Alex Ostberg, who works alongside Jerry Schumacher to coach the Nike Swoosh Track Club out of Eugene, is on the money with his latest post making the case for losing fitness on purpose after a big race or training block. The longest ongoing battle I’ve fought with athletes over the years is exactly this: getting them to take a break from training and assuring them it’s OK (even preferred!) that they’re a little out of shape when it’s time to get rolling again. As I’ll often remind someone: If you tell me that you’ll do whatever I tell you to do, that applies to rest days and taking time off as much as it does increasing your mileage, doing bigger workouts, running intervals faster, etc. “Getting fit is like inflating a balloon,” Ostberg writes. “It’s a lot harder to inflate the first time. Even after it deflates, it’s easier to blow back up the second time; you’re met with far less resistance. In other words, once you’ve reached a certain level of fitness, it’s always easier to get back there again.”

— As I wrote a few weeks ago in my Western States recap, coming out of Foresthill at Mile 62, Ryan Montgomery was a man on a mission. I don’t know how to describe what he was doing other than that. He was charging hard down the trail, intent on going as hard as he could for as long as his body and mind would allow him to. I didn’t know much about Ryan other than that he’d finished in the top ten there twice before and he was clearly looking for more this time around. I got a much better sense of him in this short film that La Sportiva, one of his sponsors, put out a few days ago. It’s really well done and chronicles Ryan’s evolution as an ultrarunner, as well as his 13:53:55, third-place effort at Western States. “What feels different this year is I really want to extract everything out of me,” he admits before the race. (And from what I observed that day, I’d say: mission accomplished. Ryan’s performance was incredibly impressive to watch. I’ll end with what his coach, Jason Koop, told me after the race: “He just ran way above his pay grade!”)

— The YouTube algorithm gifted me with this gem of an uncut Tupac rehearsal from who knows how long ago and the least I can do is pay it forward here. Holy talent, Batman.

— From the archives (Issue 454, 2 years ago this week): This is a great BBC profile of reigning 1,500m world champion Josh Kerr, who, at the Paris Olympics, will be looking to improve upon his bronze medal from the 2021 Games in Tokyo. He’s a hard guy not to like: focused, hard-working, selfless by nature but selfish when he needs to be, and someone, who, when he crosses the finish line, regardless of the result, knows there’s nothing else he could have done to be as prepared as he was when he stepped on the start line. “He brought a scented diffuser, his own mattress topper, a waffle maker so he could make the breakfast he normally would have,” said Jake Wightman, the 2022 world champion who shared a room with Kerr in Tokyo. “I thought at the time: ‘Oh, a bit extra’. But I look at it now—he did everything possible to get the most out of himself and he got rewarded with a medal.”

I’ve been putting some miles on the new Eliot Ryder from Tracksmith, which is officially out in the wild. You can learn everything you’d ever want to know about this sleekly designed, maximally cushioned shoe here, but let me share my experience with it so far: I was pleasantly surprised, even impressed, by how much I liked it. It rides (rydes?) incredibly smoothly for packing 25mm of supercritical foam directly underfoot with its innovative drop-in midsole. It’s super stable yet forgiving on impact, and more responsive than I assumed it would be (it even felt good during fast strides at the end of a run). Also, it’s light (under 10 oz. in my size, men’s 9.5) for a chonky boi! If you want to try out the new Eliot Ryder (which comes with a 100-mile/30-day guarantee!), or pick up anything else on Tracksmith.com for that matter, use the code “MARIOJULY15” for $15 off an order of $75 or more.

The following workout comes from Jon Green, head coach of the Verde Track Club who guided Molly Seidel to a bronze medal in the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. It’s essentially an enhanced version of the broken-up tempo run, alternating 90 seconds at around threshold pace with 30 seconds at the faster end of your easy running pace for 4-6 miles, and one of Green’s go-to sessions for all the athletes he works with. It was originally inspired by a workout Green did regularly when he was a collegiate athlete at Georgetown under coaches Pat Henner and Brandon Bonsey. “This is a sneaky hard workout,” Green told me. “The lore is that everybody hates it.” Here are the details.

“I don’t do crazy workouts or crazy mileage. I just don’t miss days.”

— Josh Kerr, as quoted in Issue 486 of the newsletter from this Athletics Weekly article

That’s it for Issue 558. Please forward this email to a like-minded friend or two, share the web link among your social circles, and/or reply to me directly at your own risk.

Thanks for reading,

Mario