Gary Cantrell clanged a bell at 6:40 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, signaling 70 runners to jog off into the woods on his farm in Tennessee. They had an hour to complete a 4.1667-mile loop trail. Easy. Most of the group finished with 15 minutes to spare. The bell clanged again at 7:40 a.m., and they ran it again. And at…
As soon as they’d had a chance to mop the sweat or rinse the vomit out of their mouth, the top finishers of the Chicago Marathon stiffly climbed to the stage in the media center to answer reporters’ questions that generally elicited thanks to the Chicago Marathon for putting on such a great race and magnanimous credit…
There’s a new marathon world record—and it’s quite a bit faster than the old one.
The 25th running of the Hardrock 100 ultramarathon took place this weekend, with 114 of the 146 runners who started the race making it the full 100.5 miles. Of the 32 who didn’t finish, 30 fell short of completing the arduous race, while two were controversially disqualified.
Endurance athletes, triathletes and distance runners, are a humble lot—hardworking, long suffering, and taught to endure not only punishing workouts, but years of incremental improvements with little, if any, monetary reward or recognition. Humility, patience, and persistence are the hallmarks of the endurance…
Cedella Roman, a 19-year-old French woman who was visiting her mother in British Columbia last month, was arrested by US Border Patrol and detained for two weeks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after she accidentally crossed the U.S.-Canada border while jogging.
Coming into the 4x400 meter relay at tonight’s NCAA track and field championships, the USC women had to win to clinch a national title; otherwise, Georgia would win and pull off a rare sweep of the men’s and women’s titles. When USC mangled the handoff on the final exchange (about 2:48 into the video below), it looked…
Probably the easiest sports story to write is one about a meteoric improvement. The Wow This Person Got A Lot Better At Sports story is one that works in every sport, honestly, but it tends to be most common in ones like running or swimming. (Stories about rapid improvements in those sports generally tend to elide the…
Blake Leeper is a double amputee, self-described alcoholic, and coming off a two-year suspension for testing positive for cocaine that ended last year. He also may be one of the best 400-meter runners in the United States—and by extension, the world—after dominating the field with a PR of 44.42 seconds in Prague…
Gabe Grunewald is one of the most inspiring and upsetting stories in sports right now—at just 31 years old, her running career has been interrupted by cancer three times, in 2009, 2011, and 2016. In 2017 she somehow raced a partial schedule through the U.S. championships while undergoing chemotherapy. It was…
The 2018 Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon was held Saturday in Champaign, and featured a virtually unheard of finish: runners Tesfaalem Mehari and Wilson Chenwono crossed the finish line at the same instant, and the result was ruled a tie. The runners will reportedly split the combined purse for first and second…
Track and field’s international governing body announced this morning that women who compete internationally in events from 400 meters to the mile will have to maintain natural testosterone levels below a certain limit in order to be eligible to compete. (Those with more testosterone will be required to take hormonal…
Despite miserable weather, 95 percent of of the 27,042 common folk who started Monday’s Boston Marathon eventually crossed the finish line. The whippets up front proved less stalwart: two-thirds of the elite men’s field dropped out. One who didn’t was 41-year-old Tucson resident, Abdi Abdirahman. He finished 15th,…
On Monday, Des Linden became the first American woman to win the Boston Marathon in 33 years. For the 34-year-old Linden, her Boston title represents a long-awaited prize after coming up agonizingly short may times over—placing second at Boston in 2011 by two seconds, numerous top-10 finishes, and no wins in the World…
The men’s and women’s races at Monday’s Boston Marathon were won by two of the unlikeliest people. Desi Linden was the first American woman to win Boston since the race became fully professional in 1986; the men’s race was won by Yuki Kawauchi, who isn’t really a professional. (He has a full-time government job in…
You will read, and in fact are reading right now, that Desi Linden and Yuki Kawauchi’s times (2:39:54 and 2:15:58) were the slowest winning times in the Boston Marathon in 40 and 42 years, respectively. You should pay this no mind—given the brutal rain and headwinds in which the race was run, and given the shocking…
Here’s Shalane Flanagan, defending New York City Marathon champion and one of the best American runners of all time, sprinting to a porta-potty just before the halfway mark of this morning’s Boston Marathon:
The first three quarters or so of this weekend’s IAAF World Half Marathon Championships in Valencia, Spain, were cagey and uneventful, as the runners hung out and watched each other while being buffeted by powerful gusts of wind. Then, with about six kilometers left to go, two-time defending world champ Geoffrey…
World-beating British runner Mo Farah has spent the gold-medal winning portion of his career denying that he took performance-enhancing drugs in more than the allowed amounts or in unallowed ways. He’s had to issue those denials in part because of his association with the legendarily shady coach Alberto Salazar, but…
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