On The Road(s) To Greatness ⏱️
Lap 263: Sponsored by Generations
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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
Road Races Are Uncontrollable—And That’s What Makes Them Great 🌪️
Another week, another major road race ending with confusion due to a lead vehicle mishap. This wasn’t déjà vu. It was the Los Angeles Marathon.
It’s exceedingly rare that a story from a non-major marathon gets so much mainstream media attention that it ends up on Barstool Sports not once, but twice. And yet, the finish of last weekend’s LA Marathon generated multiple news cycles worth of headlines and viral videos, first for Nathan Martin’s incredible come-from-behind victory—a true photo finish—and then for the revelation that the man he reeled in, Kenyan Michael Kamau, had the final steps of his race derailed by yet another instance of motorcycle-induced confusion.
Martin has gotten his share of flowers and then some for his 2:11:18 victory over Kamau, even ending up taking a trip down the Jennifer Hudson Dance Hallway to celebrate. Martin is a 36-year-old full-time teacher and track coach who finished seventh at the 2024 Olympic Trials and eighth at the 2021 NYC Marathon, and it’s about damn time that more people started to learn his name.
But Kamau, who’d never raced a marathon in the U.S. (his last seven marathon finishes were all in China), was arguably robbed by a confusing combination of unclear directions, a fan running ahead of him with a flag, and the motorcycles pulling off at the end of the course. It’s hard to know for sure, but given the fact that Kamau’s momentum was clearly stopped and the margin of Martin’s victory was just 0.18 seconds, it’s fair to wonder if that late-race confusion cost Kamau $15,000 in prize money.
It didn’t stop—or start—there. The big race in LA was actually ginning up controversy before a single runner had even started, with the pre-race announcement that runners who made it 18 miles would be given finisher’s medals regardless of whether they made it to the end. This was a well-intentioned, but perhaps poorly-messaged, effort on the part of race organizers to get ahead of potential warm temperatures and the medical issues such conditions can cause, encouraging folks to play it safe rather than get themselves in serious danger. Race day did end up seeing temperatures climb to the mid-80s, unseasonably warm for even southern California, but of course, that didn’t stop a lot of wannabe influencers offering bad-faith and tired interpretations about “participation trophy culture.”
There’s something about road races that really gets the torches and pitchforks out. If it’s not a fresh round of marathon-qualifying discourse, it’s a fresh round of USATF-induced mania. Last weekend’s Gate River Run was once again the national 15k championship… kinda. From 1994 to 2024, the 9+ miler out of Jacksonville, Florida, served as the USATF 15K Championship, but then in 2025 the national governing body decided to drop the distance from its slate of national championships. (Of course, we still have three different championships of 20K, 21.1K, and 25K throughout the year.) Gate River is now relegated to the Professional Road Running Organization circuit, a real thing that we’d totally heard of before last week, but still offers extra prize money to top Americans—this year, Fiona O’Keeffe and Reid Buchanan, who finished second and fifth, respectively, overall. Apologies if all this is making your head hurt.
With the dust still settling on the Atlanta half marathon fiasco, it seems like the theme of the post-U.S. Indoor, pre-World Indoor stretch of the season has been road racing snafus season. For track fans, it can be tempting to peek out from the safety of the climate-controlled 200-meter oval with perfectly-calibrated banks coated in trampoline-like rubber where you just watched Keely Hodgkinson chase a pacer and a Wavelight around for a few minutes and think… what the hell is going on out there?
You wouldn’t be wrong to feel that way, but that’s kinda the point. Road races aren’t clinical physiology experiments masquerading as time trials. They’re a four-way battle between the competitors, the course, the elements, and unforeseen human error, with every moment offering a new unpredictable challenge. Everything from an untied shoe to an untimely downpour can impact the outcome, and that’s a feature, not a bug. Winning a marathon requires so much more than being the fittest. You’ve gotta be the toughest mentally, the craftiest tactician, a master of timing, and the best water bottle-grabber. You’ve gotta pick the shorts with the right-shaped pockets for your preferred gel, and log your sauna hours well before the 10-day forecast comes out. And even after all that, you still might randomly shit your pants or get tripped up by a spectator.
The romance of the roads isn’t just a marketing tactic; it’s a necessity. Before the LA Marathon had even started, we knew that we wouldn’t see a world record. Sabastian Sawe wasn’t on the start list, the course has 900+ feet of elevation gain, and there were no pacers. That doesn’t make the whole race pointless, however. A marathon in Los Angeles has different characteristics and dynamics from a 15K in Jacksonville or a half marathon in Lisbon, which in turn makes them all uniquely interesting.
A sprint finish and a viral video led to a whole bunch of casuals becoming Nathan Martin fans. And yet, none of those viewers saw the three-way sprint finish at the Tokyo Marathon just one week earlier, featuring bigger international names running eight minutes faster at a World Marathon Major. And that’s okay! Different strokes for different folks. The endless variety and worldwide reach of road races are what make them appealing in a totally different way than indoor track. The chaos that comes with them can be perplexing, frustrating, or even maddeningly unfair, but it also gives them an intrigue and an excitement that can never quite be captured inside eight lanes or four walls.
World Indoors Should Be More Like NCAA Indoors 🌍
For a year without a World Championship, there sure are a lot of world championships on the schedule for 2026.
There was a World Cross Country Championship. There’s about to be a World Indoor Championship. We’ve got the World Road Running Championships coming up this summer. And let’s not overlook World Relays, the Commonwealth Games, or the European Championships!
Oh, and you can’t forget the World Ultimate Championships! We’re not quite sold on the name but love the concept for one simple reason: the best athletes in the world will be on the track together.
“Is that really a novel concept?” you ask. “What about the Olympics? The athletes who line up there are the best of the best!”
Tell that to the fourth best steeplechaser in Kenya. Or how about an even more extreme example: In 2016, the United States women swept the Olympic podium in the 100m hurdles. The next four fastest athletes in the world that year were also American. They just never got their shot due to the Olympics’ hard cap on three athletes per event per country.
The World Ultimate qualification format rewards athletes for being the fastest globally, not being the top-three fastest in their country. And with more and more athletes switching national allegiances to chase greater opportunities, it feels less and less like per-country event caps is a meaningful constraint.
Sure, the Olympics, its brand of sport-based patriotism, and its ten days of competition create one hell of a spectacle. But without prelims or repechage rounds, the three-night format of the World Ultimate Championships is simpler and far more digestible. We can also watch comfortably with the knowledge that we are truly seeing the top athletes across every a selection of events. A championship that can truly tout the best of the best and none of the rest.
The universality of represented nations is an important and core part of the Olympics, and this is not an argument to change that. But outside of that particular four-year cycle, the sport still exists as a professional enterprise, and professional sports do not generally have quotas.
World Athletics’s goal should be to create the best product possible by having the best athletes competing against one another. The world rankings system will grind World Ultimate fields down to 16 entrants, and though the rankings system has its issues, conceptually this should create a narrative and foster investment in the “regular season” that wasn’t previously there.
The World Championships—or World “Long Track” Championships, as we call them around here—attempt to strike a balance between Olympic-style inclusion and ruthless meritocracy by virtue of inviting reigning champs and a smattering of other wild-card entrants to the line. Because of that, winning a World Championships in a non-marathon event is arguably harder than winning Olympic gold.
By comparison, let’s take a slightly-exasperated look at the World Indoor/Short Track Championships, set for March 20th–22nd. The qualifying window opened in November, which, unless you are Josh Hoey, is not a real consideration for starting your competitive campaign. Instead, in practice, there were about six weeks in which top athletes chased the entry standards and in most cases, those athletes took two attempts at securing their times. That ultimately makes leveraging world rankings borderline impossible.
The qualifying times are generally quite achievable for any serious contender. For example, the target time of 4:06.00 for the women’s 1500m was surpassed by 111 women during the entirety of 2025, and 172 men ran under the 1:45.90 mark for the 800m. But the conundrum is that the large majority of those physically capable of doing so, choose to skip the World Indoor Championships… despite it being an “off-year!”
The reality is that indoor track is not a priority for many corners of the world, even when there’s little else to look forward to. So why are we not making room for those who are enthusiastic about indoors, especially when it means also raising the level of competition?
Nico Young has the sixth-fastest 3000m time in the world this indoor season (he’s ranked fifth in the mile), but will be watching World Indoors from home because he’s from a country loaded with talent that also values the indoor season. Meanwhile, Kenya made no attempt to fill out their team. The incentives are out of whack and rather than ensuring a potential gold medalist lines up, World Athletics will go deep down the depth chart to find someone with no shot at contributing to an exciting race.
The World Indoor Championships would benefit from following the lead of the NCAA and allow doping select entrants strictly off a descending order list, regardless of how many 3000m runners are from Oregon. There’s financial value in having a diversity of countries represented at major championships, and that’s okay because there can still be methods for allocated entries in the same way they’re done outdoors. Just don’t get upset at Nico when he switches allegiance to Bahrain because he’d like to vie for a medal at the World Championships.
Hot Take: The fastest runners in the world should be at Worlds.
While We’re At It, Let’s Get Rid Of Standard-Chasing. ⛔
Last weekend at the University of Pennsylvania’s Ott Center, as part of an all-comers meet hosted by local club Philadelphia Runner TC, three athletes qualified for the World Indoor Championships.
You’d be excused if you thought qualification was determined the weekend before on Staten Island as part of the U.S. Indoor Championship, and you’d be right… mostly. In the 800m, Sean Dolan took second and in the 1500m, former Washington Huskies Nathan Green and Luke Houser went 1–2 to upset a field of global medalists. At the time of these stellar performances, however, none of those three gentlemen were in possession of the requisite qualifying time to compete at World Indoors.
And so Dolan—whose dad is the head track coach at UPenn—and the Washington fellas had to go standard-chasing: 1:45.90 being the time to hit in Dolan’s case, and 3:36.00 for Green and Houser. All three guys got under those marks with room to spare, one day before the qualifying window closed on March 8. Which makes sense: based simply on the quality of the athletes they beat to secure theoretical bids to Worlds, they were clearly fit. But watching Dolan, Houser, and Green pull it off was still plenty exciting.
In 2002, Marshall Mathers asked, “If you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?” And these guys didn’t lose themselves in the moment; they executed.
Now time to be a bit of a Grinch: HOWEVER… This never should have happened. While standard-chasing can create brief moments of high drama and cool stories for underdog-type athletes, as a practice it’s pretty Bad for the Sport.
What good are national championships—particularly U.S. Championships, where in nearly every event there are no shortage of athletes who are truly competitive on the global stage—if those who finish in the top two have to compete again the following weekend to shore up their spot? It’s confusing for fans. It diminishes the impact of the podium moment for athletes. And it forces athletes stuck in qualification purgatory to unnecessarily compete again—risking injury and fatigue—on a tight turnaround before a global championship.
To be clear, this isn’t the fault of anybody named Sean Dolan, Luke Houser, or Nathan Green. They’re merely rational actors within an irrational framework. This is both a USATF and World Athletics issue, and each could make a policy change to address it.
In an ideal world, World Athletics would grant federations more leeway when selecting teams. In the case of the men’s 1500m in the United States, there are 11 athletes who ran under 3:36.00 indoors this season, even when you remove the three that did so at Penn this past weekend. Placing in the top two spots at that particular national championship should more than indicate preparedness to fight for a medal in Kujawy Pomorze, Poland, in a couple of weeks. Call it qualification via the transitive property and let Green and Houser into the field. A universal rule of “if your country has two qualifiers, you get two spots” would go a long way to clearing up the chaos.
But take a look around. We don’t live in an ideal world. And this isn’t a move we expect World Athletics to make anytime soon. You could make the case it plays favorites with larger federations, and it would for sure weaken the impact of the world rankings, which WA keeps trying to make happen.
The next-best of all the bad options would be to push for USATF to tighten things up and implement a strict “no standard-chasing” policy. Yes, unfortunately that would make it so that there are fewer athletes in each event with a chance at qualification, and even more unfortunately, in theory the qualifier(s) could come from finishers outside of the top two. But the positives outweigh those negatives.
Those cuspy types without the standard would have greater incentive to make races honest at U.S. Indoors, hoping to improve their world ranking as much as possible there. But more realistically you’d get anybody who feels they have a shot at making Team USA taking the indoor regular season more seriously. If you’re planning to run World Indoors, you can’t sneak into USAs—you’ve gotta put a real mark or two down first.
Indoor track has a hard enough time breaking through on the global stage. The very least we can do is make qualifying straightforward, incentivize regular-season racing, and have a clearly-defined trajectory for the season. Standard-chasing muddies the waters in all areas, and so it’s got to go.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Despite all the World Indoors talk in the newsletter this week, it’s still ten days away. This weekend is both the NCAA Indoor Championships and New Balance Nationals. NCAAs is kicking off on Friday, March 13 in Fayetteville, AK, and the high school championship will be held from March 12-15 at the TRACK at New Balance. The CITIUS MAG team will have live coverage for both events, so be sure to follow along on social media for updates.
– It’s basically become Lap Count policy at this point: if you break a world record you previously held, you don’t get a think piece, you get a bullet point and a handshake. Nicely done, Jacob Kiplimo on your 57:20 half marathon WR at the Lisbon Half.
– At the very compact Berlin ISTAF meet, Jeremiah Azu won the 60m in a PB of 6.47; Nadine Visser set a Dutch national 60mH record (7.78); and Jessica Schilder matched her own Dutch shot put record, 20.69m.
– 2024 NYC Marathon champ Sheila Chepkirui took the title (2:21:54) at the Nagoya Women’s Marathon, just two seconds up on Japan’s Sayaka Sato.
– The bar keeps getting higher – literally. Pole vaulters Emmanouil Karalis and Sondre Guttormsen both cleared 6.06m, and Molly Caudery and Tina Šutej both sailed over 4.70m. Karalis and Caudrey were your champs at the Perche Elite pole vault meet.
– The Athletics Integrity Unit has upheld its two-year ban for Fred Kerley, keeping him out of legitimate competition through August 2027 and vacating his results from December 6th, 2024 through August 12th, 2025.
– According to reporting from LetsRun’s Jonathan Gault, Festus Lagat—who had been provisionally suspended by Kenya’s anti-doping agency for whereabouts failures—has successfully appealed that decision with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). It remains to be seen whether or not that means he will be able to compete at World Indoor.
– Athletics Kenya has banned member athletes from participating in the Scholarbook International trials, an event held by the German-based, recruiting and scholarship platform popular among some of the top NCAA programs. The cited reason for the ban is non-compliance with AK’s anti-doping regulations.
– Congrats to Femke Bol—now Femke Bol-Broeders —on getting married!
– And additional congratulations to Emma Bates, who has announced she is pregnant!
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Not including Nike Indoor Nationals this weekend at the The Armory, because??????
Could you say that again please .