Running Up The Tally ⏱️
Lap 255: Sponsored by The Doha Marathon by Ooredoo Village
Sponsored by The Doha Marathon by Ooredoo Village
The Doha Marathon by Ooredoo (this Friday, January 16th) has leveled up its elite men’s and women’s marathon races in 2026 and will feature fields headlined by Olympic and World medalists. The World Athletics-certified gold label race has also expanded to 20,000 participants.
The men’s race managed to bring in 2024 Olympic champion Tamirat Tola, who is also the fastest man in the field with his 2:03:39 personal best. The field now features five total men who have run under 2:06 for the marathon, including Sammy Kitwara, who was the 2010 World Championship bronze medalist in the half marathon, and has a personal best of 2:04:28 from 2014. Ethiopia’s Balew Yihunle is the top returner after a runner-up finish last year by just eight seconds.
The biggest stars on the women’s side share a first name—Tigist Girma and Tigist Gezahagn. Girma was the 2022 Sydney Marathon champion and then went on to run 2:18:52 at the Valencia Marathon that year. Gezahagn is a Paralympic gold medalist at 1500m but has shown great promise in the marathon with a 2:22:47 PB last year to win the Ljubljana Marathon.
Learn more about the Doha Marathon here. You’ll be able to tune in to watch the races LIVE and for FREE here.
Compiled by David Melly & Paul Snyder
The Greats Conquer Gator Alley 🐊
As far as we know, no one got eaten.
The best cross country runners in the world survived Florida humidity, poisonous snakes, and whatever forever chemicals were in those neon-blue water pits to deliver an entertaining World Cross Country Championships to the U.S. audience for the first time in three decades. Apalachee Regional Park in Tallahassee provided a welcoming backdrop for thrills, spills, and the first global medals of 2026 as Ethiopia swept both senior team titles, holding off the defending champs from Kenya without winning either individual race.
It’s understandable to think that Jacob Kiplimo’s transition to the marathon would leave him a little vulnerable over 10km, particularly given that he won Chicago just three months ago. But if he was feeling rusty, it certainly didn’t show. The 25-year-old Ugandan won his third straight title in dominant fashion, absolutely tearing apart the final lap to leave three-time runner-up Berihu Aregawi in his dust. Kiplimo’s final 2km split through the mud, artificial hills, and turns was a ridiculous 5:22—that’s 4:19 mile pace. He put 18 seconds on Aregawi, a 12:40 5000m runner, and third-placer Daniel Ebenyo. There was only one apex predator on the course on Saturday, and it was Kiplimo.
On the women’s side, Agnes Ngetich was just as lethal but with a totally different kill strategy. It was a familiar sight to anyone who followed Ngetich, the world record holder on the roads over 10km, throughout her track season last year: she hit the front and pushed the pace, daring anyone else to try and follow. No one made it even a third of the way, as second, third, and fourth placers Joy Cheptoyek, Senayet Getachew, and Asayech Ayichew were all dropped by 3km. Ngetich went on to win in 31:28, a ridiculous 42 seconds up on Cheptoyek, the Ugandan record holder over 5km and 10km. Ngetich’s hot early pace strung out the whole field, which made for a brutal final lap for many of the racers in the heat and humidity. It’s inordinately hard to compare times over different courses, but only six women broke 33 minutes in Tally, compared with 16 two years ago in Belgrade.
Speaking of struggles, it was a fairly tough day at the office for a good chunk of Team USA. In all fairness, the Americans had their work cut out for them: for both the senior men and women, a team medal was really only possible if the top four scorers had awesome days and one or more of the East African superteams faltered. Uganda has historically brought less depth than Kenya or Ethiopia, but they still managed to put five women in front of Team USA’s third. Uganda’s fourth man, Emmanuel Kibet, beat Nico Young by 15 places, a pretty brutal gap given Kiplimo’s low stick.
If Young or Rocky Hansen, who had to pull out of the race the day prior with an injury, had finished alongside U.S. XC champ Parker Wolfe, again the top American in 12th, Team USA would’ve still been 18 points off the podium. On the women’s side, U.S. champ Weini Kelati took a risk early, running near the top 10 for most of the race, but she had a pretty brutal final lap and ended up 40th, Team USA’s last finisher. Had she finished up with Ednah Kurgat, who had a great performance with a 10th-place run to lead the team, they still would’ve missed the podium by 24 places. Heck, both teams could’ve scored three runners against Kenya/Ethiopia/Uganda’s four and still missed the medals.
This isn’t to say the Americans didn’t put in a very respectable effort; it’s simply to demonstrate that there is no margin for error when the favorites bring the heavy artillery. Team USA fielded strong teams and its entrants performed mostly up to par, but even with the home field advantage, World XC is no cupcake race. It’s a brutal, punishing affair, and if there’s any takeaway home from Tallahassee, it’s that winning is really, really impressive. The general sentiment that there’s any sort of hierarchy of global medal legitimacy that places the Olympic gold at the top and everything else laddering down doesn’t hold up when you look at just how hard World XC medals are to come by, and how few runners are able to consistently win on the grass.
That makes Australia’s performance in the mixed 4x2km relay all the more impressive. Since the relay was added to the program, Kenya has taken three of four golds on offer and non-African teams have finished no higher than bronze. On paper, the Aussies had the most impressive team by resume, with Olympic medalist Jessica Hull, Commonwealth Games champ Olli Hoare, 3:56 woman Linden Hall, and 3:51 miler Jack Antsey tapped for the job.
Track PBs don’t necessarily translate to success when hurdling artificial alligators in Tally, but Hull was able to decisively drop French 1500m record holder Agathe Guillemot on the anchor. Just as importantly, Hull got the baton with a comfortable 11 second cushion on the defending champs from Kenya, increased that gap to 19 seconds, while Kenya fell off the pace and podium entirely.
Cross country is famously unpredictable, but in the end, one thing did seem to play out according to form: the fastest, most experienced runners came home with the hardware. One of the best strategies to bulwark against uncertainty is to be really, really good—both individually and as a team. And one of the ways to show you’re really, really good is to build a medal shelf that shows you can get the job done on any surface. By that standard, World XC both attracts and creates the sport’s all-time greats.
Why You Should Remember The Name Marta Alemayo 📈
While the most headline-grabby moments of World XC came from the senior races and their internationally recognizable star power, the women’s U20 race may be one we’ll remember the longest. Why is that, you might ask?
Well, the race was won by 17-year-old Marta Alemayo of Ethiopia, who, despite being essentially a high school senior, defended her title with a dominant 18:52 run over 6km. She beat a 9:20 steeplechaser, her teammate Wosane Asefa, by 26 seconds. And to reiterate this was her second World XC junior title!
Those familiar with the lore of the “Kinny Curse” “Foot Locker Curse” “Eastbay-Foot Locker Curse” Brooks Curse will be the first to tell you that cross country results from teenagers do not necessarily translate to collegiate or professional success. But here’s the thing: the history of World U20 champions on the grass tells a very different story.
With her win in Tallahassee, Alemayo became just the fifth runner to win back-to-back junior races at World XC, and joined elite company in the process. The other four: Viola Kibiwot (2001-2002), Genzebe Dibaba (2008-2009), Faith Kipyegon (2011-2013), and Letensbet Gidey (2015-2017). Of that group, Kibiwot is the outlier—and even then, her best career finishes on the senior level were a more-than-respectable pair of fourth places in the 5000m at Worlds in 2013 and 2015.
Historically speaking, if you win two U20 golds in cross-country, there’s a 75% chance that you’ll set at least one world record and win one global title! That’s the ceiling! The floor is “only” landing one spot off the podium multiple times!
It’s not just the double champs, either. Past one-time winners of this very race include Vivian Cheruiyot (six World/Olympic track titles), Tirunesh Dibaba (eight World/Olympic track titles), and of course, Beatrice Chebet, the current world record holder at 5000m and 10,000m. Only three of the 12 women crowned this century don’t have a global medal on the track, and one of those three—Senayet Getachew, who took third in the senior race this time around—is herself still only 20 years old and has plenty of time to pick one up.
Alemayo is no one-trick pony. She can hack it on the track, too. Lost in the fervor of last summer’s Gout Gout/Cooper Lutkenhaus mania was the fact that Alemayo set world U18 bests over 3000 meters, 5000 meters, and 3000 meters indoors. She’s yet to place higher than sixth at a Diamond League or represent Ethiopia at a senior championship, but she’s got PBs of 14:34.46 and 8:32.20. At the London DL, she finished four places and five seconds ahead of Great Britain’s Innes Fitzgerald, who’s also something of a wunderkind at 19 years… old but is two years and two days older than Alemayo. It’s a shame that Fitzgerald, who won the U20 race at Euro XC, didn’t make the trip across the point to measure herself up against the best of her cohort.
So why isn’t Marta Alemayo picking up Gatorade sponsorships and drawing comparisons to Usain Bolt? For starters, she hasn’t actually won anything of note on the senior level. And simply getting the chance to try might be tough: she was only the 13th fastest Ethiopian over 5000m in 2025, and four of the six fastest were born in either 2005 or 2006. And it’s not like the women in front of her are aging out. If she’s not yet making World teams or winning Diamond Leagues, it’s extraordinarily hard to break through to international stardom without going the route of the NCAA system.
In some ways, however, that’s the whole point of having a U20 race at World XC: it gives the stars of tomorrow the chance to gain recognition and respect before tomorrow actually arrives. So when Marta Alemayo is a force to be reckoned with in Beijing in 2027 or Los Angeles in 2028, you can be ahead of the curve in following her career.
You heard it here first, all thanks to Tallahassee.
Could Houston Fix World Athletics’ Road Problem? 🚀
It’s become an annual tradition. Amidst the last gasps of cross country and the first indoor races, sandwiched squarely between the final major marathons of one year and the first of the next, every distance runner with a free weekend and a dream heads to Houston.
The Houston Half Marathon (sorry, Houston Full Marathon, you get outshone every time) has always been a good place to run fast, but in the past five or so years, its large fields and ability to produce record-setting performances has taken the event to another level.
Last year, Conner Mantz and Weini Kelati broke the men’s and women’s American records in the race, and this year, two new faces came very close: Alex Maier ran 59:23, and Taylor Roe ran 66:20, both fourth-place finishes good for #2 on the U.S. all-time list.
Six of the top seven women on said list set their PBs at Houston, and so did five of the top nine on the men’s side.
Put it this way: before last weekend, just five American men in history had run sub-60 in the half; on Sunday, four did it in one race. With the exception of Ryan Hall’s 59:43 from 2007 and Molly Huddle’s 67:25 from 2018, both American records at the time, all those performances have been run in the last four years.
It’s not just an American thing, either. Habtom Samuel took a break from the NCAA circuit, where he ran 13:05 in the 5000m for New Mexico just last month, to claim the win in 59:01, an incredible debut for the 22-year-old Eritrean. A few ticks behind him, Rory Linkletter became the first Canadian to break the one-hour barrier. And the women’s race was won by Ethiopian Fantaye Balayneh in 64:49, the fastest half marathon run by a woman on U.S. soil. Everyone wants to run Houston—even 39-year-old Galen Rupp, who finished 27th in 62:01.
High demand is a precious resource in any sector, and road running is no different. Winning the Houston Half will net you less prize money than finishing second at World XC, and yet plenty of international talent still opted for a non-championship, non-major road race in a distance that doesn’t offer any sort of automatic qualifier. That’s all too rare in professional running in 2026… so how do we use it to our advantage?
Remember the World Road Running Championships? It used to be called the World Half Championships, and it used to be annual. Now it’s biennial, includes multiple distances, and the San Diego edition got canceled last year. There’s still one slated for 2026, scheduled for Copenhagen in September. If you didn’t know that, that’s probably because this particular championship gets even less attention than World Indoor or World XC—and that’s saying something.
If we’re going to rebrand and retool these nominally championship races every few years in hopes of finding a format that sticks, why not try to harness the benefits of races where the half marathon has already found a niche? The current iteration of the College Football Playoffs is only a decade old, but it’s proven way more exciting to have a bracket-style qualification system than simply picking contenders by secret committee. It wouldn’t be hard to create a similar system using popular, existing half marathons like Houston, New York City, Valencia, and the Great North Run in the UK.
Suppose that in order to qualify for the World Half Champs, you have to finish top 10 at one of those races, and then those 40 athletes go head to head for the gold. Given that the world’s top half runners already want to race one or more of these each year, it wouldn’t be hard to attract talent, and it could even have the converse effect of enticing a Houston runner to actually go to Copenhagen.
You could limit participation to three athletes per country per race to ensure that there isn’t too much double dipping, while still allowing for the best road runners to face off. A field featuring up to 12 Kenyans and Ethiopians would look more like a World Marathon Major than a 10,000m final, but that’s okay: it’s a different kind of race! And a cross country team’s worth of Americans could help draw some more eyeballs to an event that’s largely overlooked in the U.S. Maybe you cycle in rotating qualifying races each year while keeping two or three stalwarts in the mix. Maybe you offer wild-card entries to anyone with a global title on the track or grass to entice the Jakob Ingebrigtsens and Beatrice Chebets of the world to double-dip. The possibilities are endless!
Ultimately, we know two things to be true: people don’t care that much about World Road Running Champs, but they do care about Houston. Instead of finding that confusing, or frustrating, let’s use that to our collective advantage and see if we can get the half marathon happenin’ all year ‘round.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Coming off of a DNF at the 2025 New York City marathon, Molly Seidel made a triumphant return to racing, this time on the trails in the Texas Hill Country—she won the Bandera 50k outright in 4:09:36. She’ll double the distance next month at the Black Canyon 100k.
– If you’re gonna skip out on World XC, you better have a good reason. Well… basically everyone who raced the Valencia 10k did: they ran really fast. In victory, Andreas Almgren lowered his own European record to 26:45, and Brenda Jepchirchir’s 29:25 win moved her to number four all-time worldwide.
– Is it February yet?? The hype for this year’s Millrose Games keeps building, as the announcement of the full two-mile field brings together pretty much every big name on the indoor circuit, including Josh Kerr, Grant Fisher, Cole Hocker, Jake Wightman, and Graham Blanks.
– Albert Korir, who won the 2021 New York City Marathon and placed third at the most recent iteration of the race, has been provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit after testing positive for a banned substance. Any time an athlete of his caliber gets popped, it’s a sad day for the sport. But it’s also a sad day for those of us who appreciate athletes who have a sort of perplexing shtick on social media.
– We’re about two and a half years out from the 2028 Olympics, and the picture around the U.S. Marathon Trials is beginning to become clearer. As of now, we know that St. Louis, Missouri, and Phoenix, Arizona, are on the short list—and are likely the entire short list—of cities that have submitted a bid to host the 2028 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. CITIUS MAG spoke with Phil Dumontet, who co-authored Phoenix’s bid, to learn more about what race day might look like should Arizona’s capital city be selected to host.
– Wherever the race is ultimately held, Dot McMahan will be there on the starting line for her incredible sixth U.S. Marathon Trials. The 49-year-old ran 2:36:24 in Houston to qualify.
A quick note: Our apologies for the mix-up. A 2026 World Cross Country preview intended for The CITIUS MAG Newsletter was mistakenly sent to The Lap Count list last week. If that caught you by surprise or added an extra email to your inbox, sorry for any confusion.
Interested in reaching 20,000+ dedicated runners and track and field fans? Advertise with us here.