Wrapping Up The Season ⏱️
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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, Paul Hof-Mahoney & Jasmine Fehr
Giving Out The REAL Awards 🏆
The long-awaited(?) World Athletics Awards came and went last weekend, with the who’s-who of European track and field descending on Monaco while us Americans were still polishing off leftover turkey and nodding off while “watching” our football teams’ rivalry games.
The winners were… largely predictable, with Mondo Duplantis and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone picking up the overall Athlete of the Year awards. The two biggest surprises came in the men’s track events, where Emmanuel Wanyonyi beat out Noah Lyles, and in the women’s field, where Nicola Olyslagers triumphed over Tara Davis-Woodhall. Once again, it seems that World Athletics has prioritized the “World” part of its name, selecting winners from five different continents and only one country—Kenya, which produced Wanyonyi, consensus top marathoner Sabastian Sawe, and Rising Star Edmund Serem—getting multiple nods.
Lyles and Davis-Woodhall getting shut out, combined with the Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Valarie Allman snubs in the nomination phase, feels like a bit of a pointed nose-thumbing at Team USA. (For what it’s worth, Sydney returned the favor to WA, skipping out on the ceremony entirely.) Not to mention the very nature of the awards itself—buried at the end of an American holiday weekend, with no way to watch the ceremony internationally. Ultimately, the whole shebang landed with a bit of a she-fizzle, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
But just because we don’t have the means to invite all our readers to a swanky Monte Carlo gala doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate as well! So here are a few Lap Count Athlete of the Year Award categories our European overlords were too cowardly to hand out.
Podcaster of the Year: Geordie Beamish
With all due respect to runner-up, Chris Chavez, the Kickin’ Kiwi put out regular episodes of the Coffee Club podcast and won the World title in the steeplechase, dethroning two-time defending champ Soufiane El Bakkali in the process. The “Textbook George” kick became world famous not once, but twice over the course of Tokyo, as first Beamish had to bounce back from a final-lap fall just to book a spot in the final and then went from 11th to first over the last 400m of the final to shock the world. He headed home to Colorado with plenty to talk about on mic!
Social Media Star of the Year: Gabby Thomas
The 2024 Olympic 200m champ may not have had an ideal end to her season, with an Achilles injury hampering the latter part of her summer and keeping her off Team USA, but Thomas still made quite the impact on the sport in 2025. Whether it was sleuthing out the true identity of “Track Spice” on Twitter or sharing her candid thoughts on the anti-doping system, Thomas was a must-follow on every social media platform she graced.
Late-Season Surge of the Year: Brittany Brown
Brown had a slow start to the season after undergoing a medical procedure during the winter for complications related to endometriosis, but once she was back in action she got better every outing. She gritted out a fourth-place finish at USAs on limited training, then defended her title in the Diamond League final to book a wild-card spot on Team USA. At Worlds, she made the 200m final, finishing sixth, and then capped off the season with a nice little payday in New York, winning both the 100m and 200m at ATHLOS. Talk about ending on a high note!
Championship Peak of the Year: Cian McPhillips
Many of our readers may be surprised to see a Cole Hocker snub in this category—for the second year in a row the American won a gold medal in his best race of the season when it really mattered. But perhaps the wildest championship jump of all in Tokyo came from an athlete who didn’t even medal: 23-year-old Irishman Cian McPhillips, who finished fourth in the 800m. His best heading into the season was 1:45.92, which he improved to 1:44.19 in July to earn his first-ever spot on the World starting line. That’d be an impressive accomplishment in and of itself, but once he got to Worlds he knocked two full seconds off his PB over the course of three rounds, breaking the Irish national record in both the semi and the final to end the year with a 1:42.15 to his name.
Busiest Baddie of the Year: Melissa Jefferson-Wooden
She should’ve been Track Athlete of the Year, but in addition to the high highs of MJW’s breakout season, the American sprint sensation raced early and often, across multiple continents and formats. Jefferson-Wooden began with three Grand Slam victories, continued with two titles at USAs, found time for three Diamond League appearances, and still wasn’t too tired to bring home triple gold in Tokyo. What more can we ask of our biggest stars than a packed year of entertaining performances?
Disrespected King of the Year: Ethan Katzberg
Much like Jefferson-Wooden, Canadian hammer thrower Ethan Katzberg was snubbed from finalist consideration despite a stellar season. Unlike Jefferson-Wooden, however, he couldn’t even drown his sorrows with a big paycheck or two, because neither GST or the DL offer hammer throw as a discipline. And yet, Katzberg still won eight of his 10 competitions and put up the farthest throw in the world in 20 years in Tokyo, an 84.70m mark that’s fifth on an admittedly-sketchy all-time list.
Swan Song of the Year: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce
The last thing the Pocket Rocket needs is more awards, but we’re going to toss one more onto the enormous mountain of accolades upon which Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce perches. The 38-year-old Jamaican legend finally hung up her spikes, but not before giving us one last great year with a 10.91 100m season’s best, a sixth-place finish in the final, and a silver medal in the 4x100m—the 25th global medal of her career. One more round of applause for the GOAT.
Well, that would’ve been a more fun and interesting ceremony! There’s more to track and field than just the ability to impress a few dozen members of a World Athletics selection committee, and just because these athletes (and more) were overlooked doesn’t mean they haven’t earned our recognition—and yours. So as 2025 draws to a close, let’s take one last moment to cheer on the athletes that made it so special. Huzzah!
The “Cross”-Over Event We Didn’t Know We Needed 🏃🌲
For at least this weekend, Portland, Oregon, will be doing its best Eugene, Oregon, impersonation—only instead of dubbing itself Track Town, USA, Portland will likely lean into an equally alliterative Cross Country City, USA, moniker.
In addition to its annual NXN-hosting duties (more on that in a moment), Portland will also welcome the top senior harriers from across the land—with some prominent exceptions, sadly—for the USATF Cross Country Championships, which will serve as the selection event for January’s World Cross Country Championships, held in Tallahassee, Florida. The top six finishers in the men’s and women’s 10k races will be offered spots on the World team. There will be separate 2k races, with the top two men and top two women being given the chance to contest the 4 x 2k mixed relay in Florida as well. Fans can anticipate an exciting and likely muddy affair given the next few days’ drizzly forecast. The already mushy muck and mire is liable to get downright sloppy, given that the pro men and women will race after the NXN kiddos have already decimated the course.
On the men’s 10k race side of things, Graham Blanks, Wesley Kiptoo, Cooper Teare, Parker Wolfe, and Nico Young should probably be considered your headliners, but the beauty of cross country is that none of them are a lock to make the six-man squad for Tallahassee. A scan of the entries reveals plenty of other notable fellas—Drew Bosley, Paul Chelimo, Olin Hacker, Drew Hunter, Woody Kincaid, Bob Liking, Alex Maier, Dan Michalski, Ahmed Muhumed, Abdi Nur, Ethan Strand—who run the gamut from elite marathoner stepping down in distance, to elite miler stepping up, to wily veteran track aces, to pure grass specialists. This list is hardly exhaustive, and any of these dudes could wind up on the team, either via a top-six showing or a top-six finisher turning down their spot.
On the women’s side, we’ve got just as much up-top star power in Shelby Houlihan, Weini Kelati, Karissa Schweizer, and Parker Valby. Of these four, Valby’s got the most recent relevant cross country experience—on considerably firmer ground at the NCAA level—but has also raced just once since her return from a long injury lay-off, a solid but not spectacular showing at the Dash to the Finish Line 5k ahead of the NYC Marathon. We’re not inclined to count out Houlihan or Kelati, who have both been consistently performing well over the past calendar year. But again, nobody is a sure thing when the footing is this suspect, finishing kicks lack their sharp edges, and the tactics are so unpredictable. Keep an eye out for usual U.S. champ mainstays like Allie Buchalski, Van Constien, Grace Hartman, Emma Grace Hurley, Ednah Kurgat, Olivia Markezich, Allie Ostrander, and Katelyn Tuohy, as well.
Unlike the NCAA ranks, both men and women race 10 kilometers, rather than the much shorter 6km for the collegiate ladies. That’s great news for strength-based runners with road-racing creds like Kelati, Hurley, or Kurgat, but those last 4km creates a big unknown for the track specialists, particularly those with more of a middle-distance pedigree like Tuohy and Markezich. And at the other end of the spectrum, there’s even a 2km selection event for the relay at World XC—probably the first time in a while runners like Vince Ciattei, Craig Engels, Sage Hurta-Klecker, and Emily MacKay have even entertained the notion of setting spike to grass.
USATF is presumably combining its senior cross country championship with NXN in hopes of drumming up interest for the former via high school runners and their friends and family. It’s hard to imagine too many of the actual competitors will be lining the course, but NXN is a much physically bigger to-do than U.S. XC so ironically the more amateur event will likely increase views of the pro showcase.
CITIUS MAG’s Paul Hof-Mahoney and Jasmine Fehr have been chatting with many NXN favorites over the past few weeks, and they’ve got a wide range of backgrounds, interests, and things to say about their own personal hopes and the sport writ large (You can read the full interviews at the links below).
University of Colorado-bound Emma Hoffman, the Michigan state champion, has surprised herself with her increasingly bright performances during the postseason. She heads to Portland after a second-place showing at the NXR Midwest meet, where she expected a fifth-place finish at best. Hoffman offers this bit of advice to other athletes, which runners at every level can take to heart: “...have no regrets and give everything you have on the day. You’ll be happy if you can walk away and say you gave everything. No regrets like ‘I should have done this or that.’ Just push as hard as you can during the race and don’t focus on anything else.”
We got an interesting window into the sport via new eyes in Yohanes Van Meerten, the Arizona state champion and third-place finisher from NXR Southwest. Van Meerten has only been running seriously for about 18 months, and accordingly, has a very unique Mount Rushmore of elite runners he looks up to: “who got me into running was Quincy Wilson. I loved Usain Bolt, but Quincy Wilson was a big inspiration for me to go do all this running. With other pros, Jakob Ingebrigtsen is probably one of my favorite long guys and Edward Cheserek. I just found out about him and he’s becoming more of an inspiration…”
Coloradan NAU-commit Addy Ritzenhein already has one NXN individual title to her name… a name that’s likely very familiar to our readership as belonging to her father, Dathan, as well. Being a defending champ and the daughter of one of America’s most celebrated distance runners ever would make for a whole lot of pressure for most athletes, but Ritzenhein possesses a poise beyond her years, and seems to get great advice from her team and family, both big picture and tactical: “From my coach, it’s always to have fun on the line. That keeps running lighthearted. From my dad, a big piece of advice that helped me at NXN my sophomore year was: don’t fight the mud!”
These unique perspectives add to the fascinating juxtaposition of races. (For more, check out interviews with Maddie Gullickson, Jackson Spencer, and Caden Leonard.) Compared to the pro ranks, where there’s a certain uniformity to approach and mentality, high school stars present a more idiosyncratic range of outlooks. And no matter whether they’ve been logging steady 80-mile weeks for years or they just started running every day this summer, when the gun goes off, the rain-soaked playing field is at least metaphorically level.
An Ode To The Offseason 😴
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. No, not Christmas—it’s fall offseason, that delightfully indulgent week or two when the marathon build is over and the cross spikes are cleaned of mud for the final time. Unless you’re one of the lucky few trying to stretch XC fitness into a fast 5000m at BU or tapering down for CIM/Valencia/Marathon Project, odds are you crossed the finish line at your turkey trot with no other race on the horizon.
And that’s great! As fun and exciting as it can be to rip a hard long run or smash a PB, you can’t have the highs without the lows. In this case, the “low” isn’t even an emotional one; it’s the 7-14 days of coach-mandated lethargy that every training cycle needs. Now is the time to eat the second slice of pie and drink that second beer. Hit snooze on that 5am alarm—or better yet, turn it off entirely. Send your Garmin into a panic by cratering your daily step count and projected race times.
As every good coach and long-tenured athlete will tell you, time off is just as important as time on. Odds are, the greatest runners you can think of take their postseasons even more seriously than you do. Sifan Hassan didn’t train for three months following her triple at the Paris Olympics. Nick Willis believes that a key to his two decades of success was prolonged periods of rest. Maximizing outcomes in the long term means that, sometimes, those zero mile weeks are actually rolling the boulder up the hill.
Often, that’s easier said than done. We runners are creatures of compulsion habit, and while a day off, or two, or three, can feel like a welcome reprieve, stretching the down time over a week starts that little voice in your head chattering, your trainers whispering to you like the Green Goblin mask. A couple weeks away coming out of a long—maybe too long—season can feel amazing, but the tougher sell is when you’re riding the high of a great last race and are dying to dive back in. Don’t!
Some runners truly live to train. Sure, the race medals and Instagram-bio PRs are fun trinkets of social status, but nothing quite hits like racking up kudos day in and day out. A 100-mile week is just a stepping stone to 110. Running a double threshold just means twice the intervals. Stocking up on gels the night before a long run is better than digging into a bag full of Halloween candy.
If that sounds like you, you need this message more than anyone else. Just because not running doesn’t provide the same grinding satisfaction doesn’t mean it’s just as important an element of training to conquer. If it helps, write yourself a weekly plan: your goal is three days minimum of afternoon naps; 2x drinks with coworkers, and at least 17 episodes of your favorite TV series. Can you achieve it?
It may sound silly, but embracing the offseason is one of the most underappreciated and critical elements of building a healthy long-term relationship with the sport. The old adage that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is true, but so is the converse: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Or a burnt-out boy. Or a boy who loves running now, but for whom the ceaseless weeks, months, and years will one day take a physical and mental toll that sours that passion.
And if you’re reading this weekly newsletter, the odds are good that you’re someone who maybe needs to be reminded every once in a while that there are other sources of joy in life. All those hobbies you never have time for because you’ve got to get your afternoon double in. All those non-running friends whose social plans stretch past your bedtime. Now is the time to pick up something else, anything, that brings excitement and happiness into your life. If you’re lucky, you’ll come back with a new routine that incorporates new, fun, non-running things while still delivering that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine that only miles can provide. A true win-win!
So consider this your permission slip or doctor’s note to live a little. The air is cold and the days are short, so who wants to be outside anyway? Depending on your age, there’s probably a work holiday party waiting to be livened up or a post-finals rager to attend. Heck, maybe there’s just a friend you haven’t met up with for coffee in a while or a book you’ve been meaning to read. ‘Tis the season of not running, and it’s time to celebrate.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Conquering the world, one continent at a time: Brigid Kosgei ran the fastest ever marathon on Chinese soil in Shanghai, going 2:16:36 to win by over two minutes. Milkesa Mengesha was the top male finisher in 2:06:25—not a Chinese all-comers record by any means, but not too shabby!
– At the Manchester Road Race, Edwin Kurgat set a new course record (20:54) in what was almost assuredly a new 4.737-mile PB, too. Weini Kelati won the race (23:18) for the fifth straight time.
– Is it too early for Millrose Mania? The Wanamaker Mile organizers don’t seem to think so, as they dropped a few big names entered in the 2026 edition – including U.S. champ Nikki Hiltz, mile American record holder Sinclaire Johnson, and the return of three-time champ Elle St. Pierre – on Tuesday.
– At the 8.1k—it’s that extra 100m that’ll get you—Cross Internacional de la Constitucion Yenenesh Shimket (25:32) and Rodrigue Kwizera (22:55) prevailed, claiming World Athletics Cross Country Tour wins and perhaps points, but we’ll leave that to the mathematicians.
– “Down under,” speedy teen Cam Myers won the Australian men’s selection event for World Cross Country, going 29:43 for 10k to take down the likes of Seth O’Donnell and Morgan McDonald;in the women’s race, Leanne Pompeani (33:36) put about 45 seconds on the field to claim victory.
– And “up over” in Canada, Mo Ahmed (29:31) and Ceili McCabe (32:58) secured national cross country titles of their own.
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